No they are not equal. There are a lot of hairy details usually around byte layout/endianness that are defined (sometime implementation defined) that are UB or TBDB in rust. Also rust doesn’t have int overflow UB.
Often that’s just implementation defined behavior which is perfectly safe. You should just put some compilation guards to error out if someone tries to port your code.
C wasn't meant to fully replace low-level languages like Assembly. Context switching still isn't possible in C (nor in Zig).
And most C library calls are actually Unix system calls. Malloc() is an operating system call and not a library call. Yes, they made it a library call later on to facilitate usage in other operating systems but it was originally an integral part of the Unix OS.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my behalf, but I am still not convinced that LLMs are on a path to SciFi levels of apocalyptic malicious super intelligence. Rather LLMs at some level are just all of the humanity’s information rendered accessible in an unprecedented way.
In general trying to regulate information access is a losing battle that invites tyranny. So the goal should be minimal restrictions.
At the end of the day, the threats posed by capable AI tools have to be physical. I think the key threats are the following:
- Internet connected infrastructure being crippled
- Creation of WMDs
- Economic collapse (precipitous devaluation of knowledge work and IP).
I personally think the glory days of the wild west, mostly unregulated internet were already over before LLMs; and we need to take a step back to make something structurally secure. This (expensive) change would stop the irresponsible/malicious actor running a tireless hacking agent in a loop threat model. Even a rogue SciFi tier AI would have a much harder time escaping/propagating with a structurally secure internet.
Enabling WMD creation is scaring, but I don’t think it’s really that big of an issue. Anyone with a sophisticated enough supply chain to create AI data centers is leaps and bounds more advanced than what is required to enrich uranium or synthesize bio weapons. The problem is allowing access to untrusted parties. I think it’s fair enough that individual actors shouldn’t have unregulated access to all of human information (private frontier AI companies included).
The last problem is probably the trickiest, but again could probably be solved by regulation. IP protection is already tricky and I don’t think we should try to get more protectionist.
We really need to figure out how to preserve fulfilling careers (if AI does ever get cost effective enough). I don’t think, say accounting, is inherently more fulfilling than building a house. The problem is concentration of wealth and labor dynamics.
Of course all of this gets way harder if it proves that truly dangerous capabilities can be present in models that can be run on consumer hardware.
I don’t think it’s necessarily tyrannical to have a tier of hardware that’s labeled some equivalent of “weapons grade” and requires strict licensing. Restricted computers is a change from the norm. But I can go buy a shotgun with ease and not an F35 jet.
We’d just need to be careful that we can still have lightly to unregulated computing to a certain point and that access to the capable AIs isn’t restricted to just in groups.
Completely unrealistic. We could already be working toward such goals without super intelligent AI. I don’t see any reason to assume that ASI created through an evolutionary process would have a different outcome.
If ASI ended up being align-able and not an evolutionary process, why would we assume folks who already are currently in power would change their behavior?
I couldn’t help but notice the parent commenter’s post history. Account from literally before this was called HN, one comment 6 years later, then 13 years later this comment.
I discovered this recently as I tested an old idea I had to allow a dynamic language to use a C++-like vtable instead of an inline cache (like Objective-C or JavaScript does). It turns out modern CPUs predict an inline cache hit/miss result much better than always incurring the cost of the fetch in a vtable lookup.
You can implement it with templates and people do things like this often. In modern C++, it's even pretty easy to make this type of trick support `constexpr`.
Going back to the technical implementation part, depending on the C++ version, and being able to understand the target at compile time, no need to do it manually and hacky.
There is enough support in constexpr, consteval, concepts, and now compile time reflection, to do it automatically, assuming the dispatch target can be resolved at compile time.
I know it’s a joke, but it does make me wonder if LLMs would even be good at assessing if an idea is “novel”.
I only have a rudimentary understanding of how neural networks work, but I wonder if rather than “understanding” what “novel” really means to humans, an LLM would be most likely to agree that something was novel based on having seen that specifically referred to as novel in its training data.
So that if you give it an example of something that already exists, but which was very recently invented at the point in time when the LLM was trained, and you ask “is this a novel idea?” that because it had several sources in its training data describing that idea as novel, it would say “yes that’s a novel idea”. Whereas what we really meant was to ask it if someone else had already thought of this thing prior to us right now in this later moment.
And then on the other hand, even if something was “novel” at the point in time when the LLM was trained, perhaps we would fare better to ask it “has anyone thought of this?” rather than asking if the idea is “novel”? And that even though it considers the idea novel in a way it would also be able to say that yes this has already been thought of.
I took Claude Code with the prompt copied from GP, and threw it at a repo that's just a collection of ad-hoc narrow-purpose single-page HTML tools, all of them vibecoded on the fly. It found four things "it would show the patent attorney" and three more under liberal interpretation of "novel".
Notable inventions include:
1. Taking well-known math for trilateration, but putting it inside a phone app and making it ergonomic to use. I vibed it so I can survey a plot quickly using a hand laser ranger and a foldable phone for data entry; apparently, the novelty is in combining the live display of how the measurements resolve to a 2D structure, with error residual, and a list of additional measurements to make, priority-sorted by how much error can be removed by making it. Apparently it's "closing the loop from adjustment back to "what should I physically measure next."" (and yes, it in fact does that, and works well).
2. A shader doing "resolution-independent procedural texturing of a hyperbolic ground plane". Basically the result of me asking "I want something like Hyperbolica to play with on my phone, now now now", followed by "cool but it got ugly tessellation artifacts far from origin". I'm not qualified to judge whether this is in any way not obvious, but Claude is framing this as "specific technical solution to a specific floating-point problem, which is exactly the flavor of thing that survives §101 scrutiny best".
3. There's one I'm afraid to even describe because it has to do with UX of VLMs and that could make it novel enough somebody will patent it. But to hell with it: basically, take an image annotator (draw colored rectangles on an image), allow user to label the rectangles in the interface, and then save, alongside the image, a file mapping colors to labels. This was my idea to avoid having to write stuff like "that red thing is XYZ" and "the purple rectangles are VWX". Pretty obvious UX streamlining that's one of many that apparently no major AI provider thought of yet...
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1. is a shared invention - me pushing for ergonomics, LLM figuring out the "game loop". 2. was Claude Fable all on its own - I just told it it's ugly and looks like the kind of nonsense you get at the poles of a globe made of triangle strips, and it came up with the shader. 3. was my idea from the start.
Question to patent people: are things like this really patentable? I hope not...
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