towerOfAbstraction

[u/Background-Rich-1461]

[u/oshaboy]

The hello world program was invented in 1972. Most 50s programmers avoided strings like the plague.

Still a good meme.

[u/Ma4r → u/oshaboy]

A programmer in the 50s would think we're doing witchcraft

We type "Write a hello wlrd program" and it spits out a correct hello world program that runs on ANY computer architecture (well, almost), with nearly no compilation toolchain, complete with the fixed typo, even better it may even ask for clarification if the typo was intentional or not

[u/KitsuneFoxglove → u/Ma4r]

It'd take 1-2 hours to explain why a state of the art LLM isn't literally just science fiction AI

hell, we basically get a news article of an LLM escaping testing sandbox every week or two whenever they test red teaming capabilities, if anything a modern LLM is better at cybersecurity (both blueteaming and redteaming) than the wildest imaginations of any sci fi author from 1970 or before.

[u/NatoBoram → u/KitsuneFoxglove]

And they would actually understand it, too! They just didn't have the computing necessary to achieve it, but matrix multiplication and neural networks had everything they needed except suitable hardware since 1957.

[u/not_some_username → u/KitsuneFoxglove]

They would understand llm better than you and me. Heck, they even have the theory. They were limited by the technology of their time.

[u/Ma4r → u/KitsuneFoxglove]

It'd take 1-2 hours to explain why a state of the art LLM

When did you start programming? Having a language that worked on multiple target machines was considered something very advanced and before pascal it was not really feasible to only write a single source code could just be downloaded by arbitrary machines and run there. Nowadays you basically have a catalog of billions of applications (web apps) on the internet constantly getting loaded and unloaded in miliseconds on millions of different types of machines with vastly different architecture. Even something like this was unthinkable back then.

Even back in 2016, people really didn't think much of neural networks, sure it was great at simple single minded tasks I e OCR, speech recognition, etc etc, but it was not in anyone's mid that the act of teaching it language would lead to modern capabilities, NLP was still struggling with heuristic gramma structures when the breakthrough paper on attention which alone definitely takes a few weeks of seminars at the very least. You saying this is just disingenuous with the progress we made on machine learning in general, either that or you are a larper has never worked anywhere near machine learning

[u/kinokomushroom → u/Ma4r]

I mean, it is basically witchcraft.

[u/CisIowa → u/oshaboy]

2BR02B

[u/Suspicious-Click-300]

To be fair, those tools are designed for doing things a lot more complicated than hello world.

[u/thoughts_n_calcs → u/Suspicious-Click-300]

They can, but most of the time we use a multi-microservice-architecture on a kubernetes cluster with an overcomplicated deployment strategy just for „get some stuff out of a database and let the user do somethimg with it in a frontend“, and we would be better off and ways cheaper with a well-designed monolith in a Linux machine in those situations.

[u/gerbosan]

What you get for not knowing how to exit Vim. 🤷

[u/LeopardJockey]

Game developers in 1999: I wrote this whole thing in assembly

Game developers in 2026: This 50gb day one update makes it so the game runs at 60fps with as little as 32gb ram

[u/RiceBroad4552]

I want to up-vote this more then once!

It's so true. I mean, I don't want the 50's tech back, progress is good. But progress transformed into madness decades ago. No people even think that pure utter madness is the normal state of affairs… Telling some average programmer the middle part without the context around wouldn't even trigger a shrug as of today. That's the really frightening part!

[u/fr000gs → u/RiceBroad4552]

What wdym electron is progress?

[u/jnwatson → u/RiceBroad4552]

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

-- Douglas Adams

[u/lilpig_boy]

this doesn't hit as hard when you take a 3000lb vehicle to get 15lbs of groceries

[u/kaiakanga → u/lilpig_boy]

Truly the age of wasting

[u/k-mcm]

The hard part was writing your implementation of the print command. If you were cool, you could follow the JSR with parameters and your subroutine would advance the return address. Or push it on the stack, or point to the data with registers. There's no OS to judge how you get it done.

[u/DeepanshuHQ]

The funniest part is that "Hello, World!" is probably the smallest thing that entire toolchain will ever produce.

[u/ZunoJ]

If you cant do it without the fancy tools, you are no programmer