scj

Hammurabi Building Law 230: If a house falls due to improper construction, and kills the son of the owner, the son of that builder shall be put to death.

Given my dad designed and built homes, I'm very much against this rule.

I've seen an old-school device that simply auto-dials various telephone numbers when a temperature alarm goes off or the power goes out. It doesn't accept incoming calls.

It means someone has to physically go in... So a classic security vs. convenience trade-off.

Wouldn't the three rules of Meeseeks robotics make certain tasks impossible?

For example, an occupied self-driving car better be closer to its destination than a large fire / volcano / etc.

I'm cool with cleanup costs up front...

Can Alberta apply it to oil and gas companies too?

Don't blame me, I voted for Jia Tan!

To be fair, there isn't a good method of measuring software development productivity in general.

Maybe they should ask an AI to create one!

The older I get, the more I feel that #3 should be "make it work well". Where the definition of "well" can be situationally interpreted.

> "because C is such a small and simple language (and one which, as you suggested, often feels like a bunch of syntactic sugar over PDP-7 assembly)."

I didn't describe such qualities of C in my previous post. At all.

And to be clear, I didn't mean "devs who learned how to program in the 1990s". I meant "devs who were active in the 1990s", which would have mostly been devs who came up in the 1970s and 1980s (where learning BASIC, then assembly was common).

I also made no claim about first languages in my previous statement. I only said there was a likely progression from assembly to C or C++ (for a C++ dev).

My point was, the talent pool in the 1990s would be able to handle the downsides of C++, and the upsides would have been a bonus. Whereas modern devs aren't used to the downsides, thus C++ is a step back for them.

What I should have added is that for devs in the 1990s, there would have been very few large legacy C++ codebases.

I'd phrase it differently, C++ was a set of power-to-performance trade-offs that were optimal in the 1990s.

Time has moved on.

More importantly, a typical 1990s C++ dev was likely someone who learned assembly, then C or C++. Meaning they already knew how to control hardware / memory allocation, and C++ was just a new set of abstraction tools. It was a step forward for them.

To modern devs, C++ is a step backwards. And a tough one at that.

Using an ASI to subjugate humans in any capacity is a terrible idea.

without sharing tech to make the ASI, you'd hope humanity could work together to determine how to align an AI for our common benefit.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

Not 100% apt, but close enough.

A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like?

My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly.

That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.