If memory doesn't fail me, we kind of went through this phase back in the early 2010s when a lot of companies rewrote their php/ruby web applications and delayed jobs in go, blogging about experiencing speedups and lowering server costs.
Early 2000s, compiler authors basically had to guess how types resolved and implement what made most sense. One week did not pass without filing a new kind of internal compiler error to gcc (well, I was lazy so I kept filing to debian). The specs improved immensely in the past 20 years. So much so that you can actually implement the entire grammar from the spec and the order of type resolution is well known. You could cut corners by ignoring every "compiler hint" and optional optimization that is left for the implementation to get things going, then go back and finish those.
Using the language itself isn't the challenge for LLMs, they do that with a very high success rate. I haven't seen an LLM make syntax errors for several months. Calling the right functions with correct parameters is the challenge your hypothetical AI lab will have to solve (or half ass it and show great benchmark results).
LLMs emulate language by following intricate links between tokens. This is not meant to emulate memory or imagination, just transforming a list of tokens into another list of tokens, generating language. And language is a huge part of the intelligence puzzle so it looks smart to people despite being quite mechanical.
A next step could be to create a mind, with a piece that works similar to the paretial lobe to give it a sense of self or temporal existence.
> it looks smart to people despite being quite mechanical
Note that brains themselves are also "quite mechanical", as is any physical system or piece of software. "Looks smart", in the limit, reduces to "is smart".
Brains themselves have a lot more mechanisms to cause emergent behavior what with all the adaptive organic layers so I can't really compare the two 1-1.
Since I read about the guy who was surprised that anything other than SPAs exist (the full page reload magic incident), I realized there are way younger people in the field with no context or knowledge of CS history whatsoever, so some of them not knowing about Lazarus or Delphi sounds totally plausible.
I think it's not elitist at all to say that people with no CS education (whether academic, self taught, or acquired over time) should probably not be considered when writing documentation or release notes.
If you generate AI slop web dev code (and the chances are incredibly high if you haven't heard of Lisp or Delphi) you probably won't need Lazarus or care that native apps even exist.
I'm all for teaching and explaining, and I know a small percentage of new CS people are curious and interested, but... release notes aren't the place for helping them.
That said, an explanation of what Lazarus is is genuinely needed, because people who have written Delphi for years might not have heard it (thanks, Embarcadero). So your have a point beyond your main point there.
I know Delphi, yet I didn't know Lazarus until now. I'm sure there are others like me.
I can understand not wanting to explain Delphi, but come on, not everyone knows the name of every IDE for every language. It doesn't hurt to add one sentence explaining that. If I hadn't seen the comment above, I wouldn't be able to consider Lazarus in the future if I ever use Delphi again.
Given vc++ you would look for an open source version and land on gcc or clang, right? Or given windows you would check out what alternatives there are and learn a bit about linux, openbsd, and so on. At least that was my assumption. I think it is reasonable.
I mean sure, I can probably find Lazarus if searching for a Delphi IDE. But please explain: what's the advantage? They save a couple of bytes in storage for the forum post, and besides that, what do you get apart from a sense of elitism due to those outside of the ecosystem not getting much from the announcement post? I don't see anything besides gatekeeping.
Fewer people will know the project in the context it's meant to be used. That seems strictly negative. What's the positive?
I thought the upside was pretty obvious, but perhaps there is such an age and culture gap that it has to be said out loud: I'm all for people exercising (and thus, strengthening) their research and patience skills. And complaining about how not every post on HN is a pretty landing page pitching a product is a spit in the face of that. Some communities don't attract people like this and rightly so. I grew up in a RTFM & RTFS culture (and it was awesome!), so perhaps we might never reconcile our differences.
Hmm yes, I will have to trust my well developed strengths to find deliberately hidden information. Well communicated, that is exactly what I wrote and meant. You know, with this exchange of ideas we probably inspired a lot of ten year olds about: searching the other things like that thing you just saw, and clicking more than once.
Which is an excellent point for conversations, but in the context of the release notes in the website of the project, I understand that this xkcd principle does not apply.
If one goes to the release notes for Lazarus, they either sought those release notes out, and hence already know what it is. Or they were linked to it in a specific context, such as Hacker News, which the expectation of curiously clicking around to understand the project is natural.
Sometimes I click on HN submissions out of idle curiosity, not because I seek those out, or because I know what the link refers to.
It doesn't mean that I will actively try and navigate out of a forum completely separated [1] from the actual product site just to see what it is.
[1] It's the bane of nearly all projects, both commercial and open-source: blogs, release notes, discussions, forums and often even documentation don't have a single link back to the product page
> Delphi and Lazarus have been around for decades. It's like asking what lisp is.
No.
Everyone thinks their pet project is obvious and self-explanatory.
This is NEVER EVER a safe assumption. Remember that our entire industry is a mysterious black box to the outside world.
I worked for A Prominent North American Linux Vendor for a while. I was hired to work on the docs for one of their projects.
I'm an industry veteran with at that time over 25 years of broad cross-platform tech experience from CP/M to Linux to mainframes.
It took me a month of hard digging to get an extremely vague overall concept of what the product was and did.
Most of the company had no idea -- it's not Linux-related in any way -- and many of them regard the entire product platform as an evil to be expunged.
This is typical for that vendor. Aside from their Linux distro, ask for a tweet-length summary of any of their portfolio, expressed in general terms not specific to that product or vague marketing-ware, and nobody in the company can give it.
Nonetheless they are a multi-billion-dollar vendor.
we need a universal rule: deathbed doesn't count. Your life's work and philosophy should not depend on a single time point. It is how you live that matters.
Yes, protestantism is a sect, with a history of conflict with catholicism. Catholics have a huge body of literature and claim stories about tens of thousands of saints and holy/blessed people (you could get lost in those stories for years and never see the end of it, quite beautiful.) whereas the default protestant position is to be skeptical due to the self serving nature of the catholic church.
Pope Leo is obviously not going to represent any american interests, just like the earlier popes not representing german and argentinian interests as that would be blatant and absurd.
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