" It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot Linux out of real mode. For this, it calls out to GCC (the x86_32 and x86_64 compilers are its own).

It does not have its own assembler and linker; these are the very last bits that Claude started automating and are still somewhat buggy. The demo video was produced with a GCC assembler and linker.

The compiler successfully builds many projects, but not all. It's not yet a drop-in replacement for a real compiler. The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.

The Rust code quality is reasonable, but is nowhere near the quality of what an expert Rust programmer might produce. "

For faffing about with a multi agent system that seems like a pretty successful experiment to me.

Source: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

Edit: Like I think people don't realize not even 7 months ago it wasn't writing this at all.

Anthropic said the experiment failed to produce a workable C compiler:

- I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

- The compiler successfully builds many projects, but not all. It's not yet a drop-in replacement for a real compiler.

(source: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler)

Software that cannot be evolved is dead software. That in some PR communications they misrepresented their own engineer's report is beside the point.

> It compiled multiple projects successfully albeit less optimized.

150,000x slower (https://github.com/harshavmb/compare-claude-compiler) is not "less optimised". It's unworkable.

> Like I think people don't realize not even 7 months ago it wasn't writing this at all.

There's no doubt that producing a C compiler that isn't workable and is effectively bricked as it cannot be evolved but still compiles some programs is great progress, but it's still a long way off of auonomously building production software. Can today's LLM do amazing things and offer tremendous help in software development? Absolutely. Can they write production software without careful and close human supervision? Not yet. That's not disparagement, just an observation of where we are today.

Does anyone know how the 158000x slowdown happened? That's quite ridiculous.

> Each individual iteration: ~4x slower (register spilling)

> Cache pressure: ~2-3x additional penalty (instructions don't fit in L1/L2 cache)

> Combined over a billion iterations: 158,000x total slowdown

I think that "2-3x additional penalty" refers to this:

> The 2.78x code bloat means more instruction cache misses, which compounds the register spilling penalty.

Also, the analysis refers elsewhere to other factors that weren't included in this part.

You can call that a success (as it did something impresssive even though it failed to produce a workable C compiler) but my point in bringing this up was to show that today's models are not yet able to produce production software without close supervision, even when uncharacteristically good specs and hand-written tests exist.

> It's 2026 and the idea that even with detailed-enough requirements you can one-shot even a workable (let alone perfect) solution also needs to die.

and brought up the failed anthropic experiment as proof of that. Yes, you are talking past each other, but that is not pron's fault. It is your fault.

I don't think they tried to do that though.

> today's models are not yet able to produce production software without close supervision, even when uncharacteristically good specs and hand-written tests exist.

That's a good point anyway

Their compiler fails to compile (well, at least link) some C programs altogether, and in other cases it produces code that is 150,000x slower than a real C compiler with optimisations turned off (interestingly, the model trained on the real compiler's source code). That's not "not competitive" but "cannot be used in the real world". But even more importantly, the compiler cannot be fixed or evolved. It's bricked (at least as far as today's models' capabilities go). For any kind of software, not being able to improve or fix anything or add any new feature means it's effectively dead.

You could not use it in production even if no other C compiler existed.

- John Carmack embedded a C compiler and interpreter/runtime into Quake back in the mid 1990s as a scripting language! It was that efficient that it could be used in a real time 3D shooter. That's a solo effort as a minor component of a much larger piece of software.

- I've seen university CS courses hand out "implement a C compiler" as a homework / project exercise for students. It's not particularly difficult.

Sure, a modern C compiler like GCC has to handle inline assembly, various extensions, pragmas, intrinsics, etc... but like you said, all of those are thoroughly documented and have open source implementations to reference.

Similarly, the Rust compiler is implemented in Rust and could be used as an idiomatic reference for a generic compiler framework with input handling, parsing, intermediate representations, and so forth.

The overall impression given was inaccurate and the implicit claim of a fully working end-to-end generated compiler was inaccurate. The headlines were incomplete in a way that was intentionally misleading. It was an interesting experiment and somewhat impressive but the claims were overblown. It happens.

Try it yourself.

I've been using claude to make a project over the last few weeks. Its written ~70k LOC to solve a complex problem. I've found that it can get surprisingly far in a 1-shot, but about 90% of the work I've had it do (measured in time and tokens) is cleaning up the junk it outputs in its first pass. I'm finding my claude sessions have a rhythm like this:

1. Plan and implement some new feature.

2. Perform a code review of what you just did. Fix obvious problems. Flag bugs, issues, poor factoring, messy abstractions, etc. Make a prioritised list of things to fix (then fix them).

3. (Later) fixes:

- Write tests for the code you wrote and fix the bugs you find.

- Run the code through memory leak checks, and fix bugs.

- Do a performance analysis using benchmarks and profiling tools, and make any high priority performance improvements.

- Read the whole program, looking for ways in which the code you've just written could fit in better with the rest of the program. Fix any issues.

- In directory X is the full documentation for the library you're using. Reread it then review the code you wrote. Are there better ways we could make use of the library?

And so on.

Claude's 1-shot output is often usable, but its consistently chock full of problems. Bugs. Memory leaks. Bad factoring. Too many globals. Poor use of surrounding code. And so on. Its able to fix many of these problems itself if you prompt it right. (Though even then the code is often still pretty bad in many ways that seem obvious to me).

At the moment I think I'm spending tokens at about a 1:9 ratio of feature work to polish. Maybe its 1-shot output is good enough quality for you. To me its unacceptable. Maybe a few models down the line. But its not there yet.

https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1

> Apparently compiling hello world exactly as the README says to is an unfair expectation of the software.

As an example, I did an exploratory attempt to add custom software over some genuinely awful windows software for a scientific imaging station with a proprietary industrial camera. Five days later Claude and I had figured out how to USB-pcap sample images and it's operationalized and smoothly running for months now. 100% of the code written by Claude, it's all clean (reviewed it myself) pretty much all I did was unstuck it at a few places, "hey based on the file sizes it looks like the images are being sent as a 16-bit format")

For day to day work, I'll often identify a bug, "hey, when I shift click on this graphical component, it's not doing the right thing". I go tell Claude to write a RED (failing) integration test, then make it pass.

Zero lines of code manually written. Only occasionally do I have to intervene and rearchitect. Usually thus involves me writing about ten lines of scaffold code, explaining the architectural concept, and telling it to just go

Assembler and linker are not part of a compiler. They are separate tools. They are also generally much simpler.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7412a4.htm

So the question is how many users engage in intimate conversations at all.

Nope that number is strictly about ChatGPT

"ChatGPT is where people start with AI, with more than 900M weekly active users, and we now have more than 50 million consumer subscribers."

People who go there and chat with gpt for search are definitely normal users. Just because you don't like the numbers doesn't mean you get to torture them.

That's the problem with AI safety. Not in voluntary usage, but in involuntary usage, where someone with power over you will use it against you, it does something incredibly stupid and you have no recourse, no appeal, no awareness of what you did wrong - or if you even did anything wrong.

And it's not just employment. Governments, vendors, retailers, landlords, utilities are, or will all be using it in situations that will dramatically impact your life.

What else can you blame on “scary AI?”

>>Not in voluntary usage, but in involuntary usage, where someone with power over you will use it against you, it does something incredibly stupid and you have no recourse, no appeal, no awareness of what you did wrong - or if you even did anything wrong.

Yeah….that’s every society ever

If your society doesn't have that, it's on a fast track slide down into a dystopian shithole. Stop it. Do something about it. Don't just shrug your shoulders and act like this is inevitable, or like the shareholders making 1% more money this year justifies this slide.

Now it's just 'the computer says so, shrug'.

Over in the DoD, the computer says you must die, so I guess you die. Sometimes it says that about a building full of schoolchildren, but hey, nobody's at fault, the computer said so.

And it's going to get it's tentacles into every space in between. Landlord turns your application down, the computer says you are a social credit risk. Your grocery bans and trespasses you, the computer thinks you're a ne'er-do-well.

If you think none of that will happen, why not prevent it by law before it happens? Where are the hard limits of what this monster is and isn't allowed to do? How are we better off when we don't set them?

We supercharge the worst thing about computers, and you shrug and go 'eh, whatever.'

Why? Is human dignity worthless to you? Do you have no expectation of accountability from anyone with power over you or me?

I'm not really moved by your type of argument, because hiring is just a broken process in general and I'm responding to the article so.

We're all recalibrating.

I do really think this is just a quick period in time before most people realize that the slop posting doesn't help them personally get anything and most give up and we go back to roughly the ratio of cool things with real value to see but like on a bigger scale because AI helps you do more as one person.

I think people who want to push a certain narrative might just set up a quick bot and tell that bot to start posting on Reddit or whatever and just let it run. Why not? Little effort on their part and they might actually have influence. The same reason why spammers apparently think sending me 10 text messages per day about a loan I've been approved for. It probably does work 0.0001% of the time, but that's okay if it's all automated.

Especially say here on HN with Show HN and such the forcing factors are "i get no votes or community recognition"

But I don't entirely disagree with you I think things won't totally go back I think it will settle way more than now though especially where things are a little more niche.

Now replace some / all of those humans with... A machine whose function also needs insurance approval.

It's gonna end badly.

I still think healthcare needs to be reformed, and I hope that insurance will someday be a thing of a past, but I've hung up my chain saw for now.

Things were ruined slowly. They unfortunately will need to be fixed very slowly too.

You have to engage with the specific historical events/factors that led to the direction and the pace in order to change either. Broad statements like "society is big so change has to be slow" are just as unwarranted as "slow change results in decline".

There's a correct answer to "how quickly can change in a new direction be achieved". It will probably only become known after the fact. It will certainly not be model-able as a function with variables for "progressive or not" and "speed of change".

I grant that whether that winds up being fast or slow even if the attempt is intended to be fast is out of my or anyone's hands for the most part as the system dampens that barring total collapse and chaos :P

  > They unfortunately will need to be fixed very slowly too.

And I graciously waited and allowed them to do things that will take decades if not more to repair before deciding they were irredeemable. I had hoped a middle ground and bipartisan ship would be reached, but it's clear to me it won't be. We do not inhabit the same universe at this point, the disdain is mutual.

You’re acting like I’ve always thought about them like this or like I haven't spent years observing and thinking about this to come to my conclusion. You'd do well to listen to your own words about theory of mind. I was raised conservative I voted for Romney. I'm a fan of many of the political platforms they run on now (minus originalism, removing bodily rights, religion), but in practice they do not walk their own talk. The wars, the spending, abandoning neo-liberalism except in word the blatant corruption and disdain for the positions they hold and how they appear on the world stage.

No, I’ve watched their actions for 15 years and moved ever closer to the position that I have nothing in common with them even being ideologically close to a version of their party from 20-30 years ago and they do so blatantly want to destroy the middle class, health, and wealth for anyone outside a small oligarchic class.

I'm pissed because they wear a lot of my ideology as cheap dress to fuck someone.

My preferences, while possibly futile, are least an attempt to not just accomplish short term goals but to fix the broken dynamics of the system. That is, in my opinion, far more important than literally any particular policy goal. Policy progress is pointless in a broken system, so fix the system first.

It's possible that my view of focusing on fixing the system, restoring institutions, erecting new guide-rails in places we have observed that the old ones don't work, etc. won't work. But at least it has a chance of producing a good outcome. A good outcome literally can't come from the kind of political behavior you describe. You want your side to seize as much power as it possibly can when it wins, enact as much "good" as it possibly can in however long it can maintain it's grip before the political tides inevitably swing and you lose power again. You don't seem to realize that this is what we have been doing for at least several cycles now. And what we have seen is that the next administration just tears up the progress, does the same thing except in the opposite direction and even harder, and does what they view as "the good thing" and which your side views as nothing but unmitigated evil (the same way they viewed you and yours when you were in power), and so the both sides have accomplished nothing but pushing the pendulum a little bit further, giving it a little more momentum, and shredding up the social fabric a little bit more.

I'm not so naive as to believe that it is possible for just one side to say "no we won't do that, we will unilaterally disarm". But I am of the belief that, if one wants to pretend that one is "on the side of good", that the only rational action is to, when granted power, to spend as much political capital as is possible to slow down the pendulum, tear back power from the bloated executive and the federal branch more broadly. Stop trying to enact your political project and instead make your political project nothing other than the restoration of the norms and principles of the constitution.

This is not something that has been tried and failed. it's the opposite of the past 50 years of federal political dynamics. What has been tried is your plan of "fuck the other side, they are evil, just do what our base wants and ignore consensus and norms".

It doesn't work, it won't work, and it can't work. It's destroying the country.

From my perspective, you are no better than the side you hate. You may want different policy goals, but both you and your polar opposites are collaborating on a shared project: the destruction of the country.

Edit: And coming back to this later I need to be clear the left also needs to be swept out. I think our institutions in general need to be reworked. Not replaced entirely, but it's clear they don't survive contact with people who would abuse them for their own ends nearly as well as we had hoped.

We should have stacked the courts ourselves, brandished executive orders etc, had some spine.

Edit: I think I need to make clear my thinking that the right has selectively destroyed institutions and levied them in other areas where it makes sense for their agenda. It's not been wanton. So when I say leverage the playbook it's not a one sided act of destruction.

You are yet another person upset that Democrats cannot overcome the purposeful design of our government that you need a lot of power to build, and little power to destroy.

People who want to fix things need dramatically more power than people who want to stymie and break things. Democrats only rarely get that power, and usually only by one or two votes from people who strictly do not care about fixing things. You want this country to fix things? You need to vote significantly more for a party who will push to fix things.

The minority party in congress has no power by design.

All of you talking about the right destroying things are wrong they’re just building things and enshrining things you wont like.

The latter might notice the former having an easier time, but "hey, it works for them" is the wrong takeaway. Commit to the hard work of building resilient institutions; don't join in the destruction because it's easier.

There's also an element of "Never (...), they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."

- Some executive orders are always flipped as soon as the opposition takes office, but some unilateral changes are much harder for a cyclical/pendulum-swing opposition season to reverse than they are to emplace. We don't know which are which yet. The return-to-office mandate for Federal workers is probably one that'll have a lasting effect--even if un-done in the future, the average prospective Federal worker will consider the job as something that has a significant likelihood of requiring in-person work if the political winds change and that EO is restored.

- Some things really do get permanently addressed within an electoral season, if you have the guts to shotgun through enacting a solution to them. The withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Afghanistan under Biden is a good example of this. So is the "Fork"/RIF/firing wave of Federal employees under Trump. I'm not saying those are both good things, but they aren't "reversible" in the sense that, say, the Global Gag Rule was endlessly reversible.

- Success follows success, as well. Part of the reason that momentum holds such a sacred place in electoral planning is the same reason that Trump's "flood the zone" strategy was effective (again--not good, but undeniably effective): capitalizing on/marketing early unilateral wins of any size results in the public and Congress being more likely to support larger, more durable changes. This is complicated by many factors (media landscape, districting, money), but is broadly true.

When the wrong targets get destroyed, everyone suffers. When parasitic forces are destroyed, the system functions better. It's the difference between defense and friendly fire.

What’s going to be different now than in 2010?

You mean the one based on Mitt Romney's approach?

There is an intermediary between customers and seller and it's allowed to take percentage of the sale. No such entity will ever work in the interest of the consumer. It has every incentive to inflate prices. Intermediary is needed but it should be financed by buyers with flat fee (possibly for additional incentives that reinforce the desired behavior). The tragedy here is that initially it was. But it was deemed too expensive for the buyers and got privatized which made it vastly more expensive in the long run.

Insurance is also wrong. Insurance is gambling and gambling needs restrictions. You are allowed to take people's money without providing any service most of the time, so you shouldn't be allowed to refuse legal service for that privilege.

You didn't say the doctor disputed you had a fever. You said the doctor told you the fever wasn't concern until 100.4. Which I'm guessing is your fault for misinterpreting. If you google around, it's very easy to see the fever thresholds.

Here, I'll even paste a summary for you, and I can keep going if you like:

Key Temperature Thresholds

- 100.4°F : The standard definition of a fever.

- 103°F : Contact a healthcare provider

- 104°F : Seek medical attention, particularly if it does not come down with - treatment.

- 105°F : Emergency; seek immediate care.

In one of your own links (clevelandclinic.org), here's an excerpt for you:

When should a fever be treated by a healthcare provider? In adults, fevers less than 103 degrees F (39.4 degrees C) typically aren’t dangerous and aren’t a cause for concern. If your fever rises above that level, make a call to your healthcare provider for treatment.

I actually did say that the doctor disputed I had a fever

A fever is 38c, great. What the parents said was that you may have misheard because a fever isn't serious until 104. Which is line's up with the language you used.

> and they said it's not a concern until...

Parent is not suggesting that a fever isn't at 100F, they're suggesting that it's not "a concern" until 104F, a number strangely similar to 100.4 that you claim you heard, presumably, while you had a fever.

- You aren’t considered to have a fever until you get to 100.4. Anything less than that isn’t considered a fever, let alone a concerning one

- A fever isn’t considered concerning (ie dangerous) until it reaches about 104. Anything between 100.4 and 104 is just a regular fever and isn’t considered concerning.

It doesn't have opinions, research, direction of its own. Is this a path of codifying the worst elements of human society as we've known it, permanently?

Is that supposed to be a problem? How does it connect to the story in your comment?

The question seems to be warranted to me, since being underweight can stop you from menstruating. So if you find someone thin and her last period was off in the distant past, you can conclude that there's a problem and something should be done about it; if it was a couple of weeks ago, you can conclude that she's fine.

(It could also just be something that is automatically assessed as a potential indicator of all kinds of different things. Notably pregnancy. For me, it bothered me that whenever you have an appointment at Kaiser for any reason, part of their checkin procedure is asking you how tall you are. I'd answer, but eventually I started pointing out to them that I wasn't ever measuring my height and they were just getting the same answer from my memory over and over again. [By contrast, they also take your weight every time, but they do that by putting you on a scale and reading it off.] The fact that my height wasn't being remeasured didn't bother them; I'm not sure what that question is for.)

Particularly given the alarming stories of people being prosecuted for having miscarriages, it feels ridiculous.

If anything I hope more automated diagnostics and triage could help women and POC get better care, but only if there’s safeguards against prejudice. There’s studies showing different rates of pain management across races and sexes, for example. A broken bone is a broken bone, regardless of sex or race.

It's the same reason why the doctor will take your temperature, instead of accepting your word that you took your own temperature and it is normal.

https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/primary-care-checkli...

Doesn't this suggest that they don't care what the answer is?

You are asking how it connects, and it absolutely doesn't. But they keep asking and won't accept "it's regular" as an answer.

She's in her 20s and is seeing her primary for routine things, not because of her weight -- that part of the story was about how they chastised my wife for giving her whole milk but said absolutely nothing to me about it later on.

However, your argument focuses on the routine intake instead of any listening part. The fact that the doctor measures height, weight, temperature, and blood pressure on intake and then asks about LMP doesn’t surprise me… that’s the part of the script where you just provide the data before you bring up concerns.

Not to say the doctor was not a jerk, just that your argument doesn’t do much for me.

The weight thing was not the key aspect of my original comment. They chastised my wife for continuing to give my daughter whole milk while being underweight, but did not make similar comments to me. That was the point.

For women, their pains and problems are far too often whisked away by hand waving and "it's hormones and periods" and serious issues are often overlooked. Very little has changed in that area over the last twenty years.

I wonder how many units of their training courses are spent on this and how much is spent on the cultural reinforcement of it.

    * https://www.health.harvard.edu/pain/the-dangerous-dismissal-of-womens-pain 
    * https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10937548/

Most art in stores is just filling space on a wall to bring things together visually. I don't know that anyone cares about it communicating anything other than "the space looks less empty and more appealing for the customer". I don't think the average store owner is thinking any harder than that on it. I guess my point being we're mostly subjected to it based on the perspective we will like it and its cheap.

I think my point is, that the expectation of the people placing the thing for us to view/listen to and our own can be mismatched. I've always viewed the shitty pop in department stores as an imposition on my ears and I've never spared a thought for most wall art in a random cafe, but I imagine the owners are hoping to get something out of it from us. Whether thats satisfaction or manipulating us to spend idk.

As someone experienced with a privileged elite educational background, I can guarantee that intellectuals love the highbrow and lowbrow, the authentic and the kitsch; rather, it is a sign that someone is not acculturated if they have the stereotypical impression of the intelligentsia, which makes the OC's comment ironic, they are telling on themselves.

They're supposed to be elite. They went to the best schools, many of them have PhDs, they are getting paid insane amounts of money.

And while I don't think someone's media tastes ought to preclude them from making important decisions, I also disagree with your point at large. I don't think the world should be shaped by snobs. The world is already being shaped by snobs in other sense of the word, and I don't see any indication that it's any better than the alternative.

If the end result of this is "certain classes of white collar workers are 10-25% more productive" (which is the best results I can extrapolate from what I've seen so far) then it's really hard to imagine how OpenAI can return a profit to their investors.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc#Killer_app is pretty much the normal narrative on Visicalc and its importance to the Personal Computer.

If we take this as face value, and say that the absolute best case scenario is there are literally no other uses for AI but helping programmers program faster, given 4.4 million software devs, with an average cost to the company of $200,000 (working off the US here, including benefits/levels/whatever should be close), those 4.4 million devs with 20% productivity would save roughly 176 billion dollars a year.

Some companies will cut jobs, some will expand features, but that's the gist. And it's hard not to see the magnitude of improvement that's come in just 3 years, though if that leads to a 'moat' is yet to be seen.

I don't think that's necessarily out of line with struggling to return a profit to investors though: an individual company is only ever going to capture a tiny fraction of the productivity improvements it enables its customer base to make[1], its own cost base is unusually high for tech, and investors are seeking a 10x+ return on an $852B valuation for a company that isn't even the market leader in that segment (which isn't the only segment, but it's the optimum B2B one). You can have a great business with a great value proposition and a sustainable moat and still not generate the desired returns on investment at a $852B valuation.

[1]and that's productivity improvements over the best-known free models, not productivity improvements over reading StackOverflow

Thinking... Thinking... Tim Berners-Lee proposing HTTP in 1989 is kinda like the original Attention is All You Need paper, I guess? Netscape 1.0 release in December 1994 is ChatGPT 1.0? And then Amazon.com opened up to the public in July 1995 and then IPO'd in May 1997 (after raising less than 10 million dollars in two funding rounds). But once again we have the business side of these previous cycles moving much faster than this one.

This is really the first meteoric rise in tech I've seen / am experiencing first hand.

Amazon is perhaps a counter-example to your point, though, to be fair. It seems to me they did a lot of spaghetti throwing while making accounting losses for a good number of years. Granted, they did it on OpenAI's dining budget.

They actually didn't. They knew what they were doing. Bezos had a proper background in Finance, unlike Altman.

It seems fairly consistently miserable in any of the common high traffic subs and you have to get down to really niche communities to see what I consider reasonable behavior that matches the behavior of people I know in real life.

Even the premise of deciding who's right and who's wrong is miserable. Most problems are like those daisy-chains of padlocks you see on gates in remote areas[0]: there are multiple factors that caused the problem, and removing any factor would remove the problem too.

[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/72793939@N00/51117212748