He also called them mûmakil in elvish. In my mind, when the Hobbits call them oliphaunts it is because a long time ago someone talked about elephants, and over the years the correct pronunciation was lost.

AI is a field of research in computer science, and LLM are definitely part of that field. In that sense, LLM are AI. On the other hand, you’re right that there is definitely no real intelligence in an LLM.

It would also be very hard to compete with products that are this mature. Linux, Windows, and macOS have been under development for a long time, with a lot of people. If you create a new OS, people will inevitably compare your new immature product with those mature products. If you had the same resources and time, then maybe your new OS would beat them, but you don’t. So at launch you will have less optimizations, features, security audits, compatibility, etc., and few people would actually consider using your OS.

LLM don’t have logic, they are just statistical language models.

That is true, but from a human perspective it can still seem non-deterministic! The behaviour of the program as a whole will be deterministic, if all inputs are always the same, in the same order, and without multithreading. On the other hand, a specific function call that is executed multiple times with the same input may occasionally give a different result.

Most programs also have input that changes between executions. Hence you may get the same input record, but at a different place in the execution. Thus you can get a different result for the same record as well.

That exact version will end up making “true” false any time it appears on a line number that is divisible by 10.

During the compilation, “true” would be replaced by that statement and within the statement, “__LINE__” would be replaced by the line number of the current line. So at runtime, you end up witb the line number modulo 10 (%10). In C, something is true if its value is not 0. So for e.g., lines 4, 17, 116, 39, it ends up being true. For line numbers that can be divided by 10, the result is zero, and thus false.

In reality the compiler would optimise that modulo operation away and pre-calculate the result during compilation.

The original version constantly behaves differently at runtime, this version would always give the same result… Unless you change any line and recompile.

The original version is also super likely to be actually true. This version would be false very often. You could reduce the likelihood by increasing the 10, but you can’t make it too high or it will never be triggered.

One downside compared to the original version is that the value of “true” can be 10 different things (anything between 0 and 9), so you would get a lot more weird behaviour since “1 == true” would not always be true.

A slightly more consistent version would be

((__LINE__ % 10) > 0)

You want to translate COBOL to another language? That exists as a commercial product! The complexity is not the syntax though, it is the environment and subsystems surrounding the code. A lot of COBOL is designed for mainframe systems, and emulating a mainframe is complex.

You also end up with code that is still written as if it were COBOL. The syntax for COBOL is the easy part and that is all you can easily replace. Afterwards you’re still stuck with the way of working and mindset, both of which are quite peculiar.

The company I work for recently looked at all of this, and we decided not to translate our code.

One of the arguments that gets used is that the employees should look neutral. For example, if you want to get your gender changed you might not be comfortable with someone who is visibly associated with a religion that disproves of gender changes.

It’s not racism of you believe those people were born into a lower caste because of their actions in a previous life. It is their punishment and thus you should treat them like shit!

Wow, is it exactly double?! Nature is amazing! This kind of little details really proves that there is an almighty creator!

/s

Fully agree! The premise of a hidden magical society is really fun, but Rowling did a crap job of building a coherent world with what she had.

Indeed! I read all of the GoT books, and they are just not good. There does not appear to be any logic to the world. The dude just keeps adding elements, never explaining how they fit in the world. Just cheap tricks and twists that are based on nothing.

I enjoy good fantasy, and magic is a part of that. But a good fantasy world usually only has a few sources of magic, and somehow they are connected to create a world that’s coherent and follows its own rules. Bad books just keep randomly adding new incoherent elements whenever the author gets stuck and refuse to explain anything:

• Dragons
• Bunches of different and unconnected gods
• Weird shadow assassin creature created by two people having sex, and some kind of intervention from one of the random gods
• White walkers
• Weird trees up north
• Bran’s magical magic of magicness
• The entire plot with assassin’s that change face
• …

It all honestly reminds me of a book that was written and self-published by a friend of a friend. It was self-published because they couldn’t find a publisher that was interested… And every two damn pages they added a new random type of magic. Martin is just better at dressing it up and selling his crap, but I think Martin and that friend of a friend have similar world building skills.

I manage a team of about 30 people in IT. Your job is not valued enough, and I know the importance of what you do. Thank you for your work!

You’re absolutely right! USB storage devices are blocked and we don’t have the right to execute arbitrary executables anyway. It is a pretty secure environment.

For me it’s Chrome for work, because we’re not allowed to install anything on our machines :(

With my professional experience in COBOL, I can honestly say I’m not surprised at all!

This is great! My phone doesn’t get updates very often, but this feature is already available and was turned on by default. (Moto G31)