@thomasfuchs something... something... Turbo Pascal? 🤔
It has been lost in the mist of history...

@thomasfuchs Delphi 4!

I know, I'm a baby

@thomasfuchs a community course for kids, where we learned Basic on C64's. The only time I read any training material willingly and well ahead of where we were in the class.

@thomasfuchs a community course for kids, where we learned Basic on C64's. The only time I read any training material willingly and well ahead of where we were in the class.

Later, my parents got me my own C64 and the rest is, as they say, history.

@thomasfuchs ZX81 manual and a dead ZX81 so I wasn't distracted from the manual

@thomasfuchs I learned basic from my father on a Commodore 128, then on DOS. He taught it in school to control small robots, vehicles and stuff via the LPT port.. Then I moved to C++, which was steep

@thomasfuchs Slogging my way through the HyperCard reference manual reading one command at a time, while trying to build a game.

@thomasfuchs I read books.

@thomasfuchs You had it *hard*, dude.

My first BASIC experiments in my teens were on a Timex Sinclair 1000, but I got to graduate to a Tandy 1000 HX (and GWBASIC, ofc) a year later.

@thomasfuchs BASIC, using the People's Computer Company games listing, then TRS-80 and IBM PC BASIC. A smart kid around the block showed me how to change the offset for the PC memory mapped character glyphs to animate the typeface. l

I also learned alongside my stepfather who was doing Z-80 FORTH for instrument control. My first assembly program from his copy of the Peter Norton Guide to the IBM PC was to fix CapsLock to avoid rEVERSE cAPS. Like a typewriter. Isn't that how it should behave?

@thomasfuchs It seems the Usborne 80ies computer books (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhC7iowF0eE) were translated to German - and they were available in my local library! Same goes for the comic "Abenteuer in BASIC". I guess that was my first literature.

Alt...

Cover des Comics "Abenteuer in BASIC"

@thomasfuchs on a friend's commodore 64 I probably did my first programming. But we also had computer and basic programming classes at our primary school once a week (when I was about 10-11). Maybe half the room were IBM compatibles the others I really don't know, but these I remember to just be better for writing mostly text based games. Looking back at that, that was kinda amazing. We got our first computer via a so called PC privé project when I was 11 and went to secondary school. I played around with qbasic but got side tracked by all multimedia stuff, especially after I installed a sound card I had saved money for.

@thomasfuchs reading the handbook and spending all my money on magazines.

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Benutzerhandbuch eines CPC 6128

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Titelbild einer Computerzeitschrift

@thomasfuchs On a mainframe running time shared BASIC as an OS. Interface via teletype terminals for input/output, i.e. typewriter style to paper. Somewhere I still have the printed manual.

@thomasfuchs Some kind of BASIC tutorial on the Apple IIe I guess, but I can’t remember any actual formal manual or instruction. Lost to fugitive memory

@thomasfuchs BASIC on the C64 using the handbook and listings from computer magazines.

@thomasfuchs MS basic on an 8-bit cp/m machine … then pascal (that Sybex pascal book from 1981) and later C and Unix (you know what books 😂)

@thomasfuchs without a computer. I got programming books from the library, wrote code on paper, and then ran the program in my head. Must have been 7 or 8 at the time.

@thomasfuchs Some Basic dialect on such a badboy. Not sure if that could be termed "programming" though 😂

And a few years later Turbo Pascal

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photo of a vtech "learning computer" named "Genius Leader 6000 SL"

@thomasfuchs BASIC on the VIC-20. I was never any good at it though so I have never really seen myself as a programmer.

@thomasfuchs a basic cartridge on an atari 400 retyping adventure games from magazines

@thomasfuchs Bounced off basic on my brother’s VIC-20 as I was too young, but managed to coax things out of the ZX Spectrum thanks to patience and the Usborne Computer Spacegames book.

@thomasfuchs C64 basic, and eventually assembler when my parents got me an assembler cartridge.

@thomasfuchs the good old C64 Programmer’s Reference Guide, when I was 11. Then 6502(6510) assembly, C on the Amiga, and from there a lot of other lands and systems…

Yep. I’m old 😅

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A spiral-bound manual titled "Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide," featuring an illustration of a Commodore 64 computer alongside colorful graphs on the cover.

@thomasfuchs

Self-taught BASIC on a Sinclair Spectrum in about 1983. This actual Spectrum right here, in fact

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Me, holding a 48k Sinclair Spectrum

@thomasfuchs ZX81 BASIC.

@thomasfuchs Started with playing with AppleSoft BASIC on a ][, later a //e, but the big change came when I broke my legs in a motorbike accident, giving me the time to learn C (can’t remember the compiler - wasn’t Aztec, though)

@thomasfuchs

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HyperTalk 2.0 with two dapper lads on the front

@thomasfuchs this book

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A book from the 80s titled "Introduction to Computer Programming," focused on BASIC for beginners. The cover has a BBC Micro computer, cassette tape, flowchart, and pixel art characters. It proudly proclaims “NO COMPUTER NEEDED”

@thomasfuchs
We got taught BASIC and Prolog in school, but I got hooked on XProfan https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/XProfan which came on a magazine cover some day.
Pretty niche, but I used it with a friend to code graph plotters for math class and a desktop version of Settlers of Catan.

@NanoRaptor The neurons I dedicated to the Holy Hand Grenade sketch are among the few still working from 50 years ago

@NanoRaptor $90k. There appear to be 90 words in the intro to Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds before the first music piece begins

@NanoRaptor

[recites Jabberwocky perfectly]

"None of those are words, doesn't count. You get NOTHING!"

@NanoRaptor 99 beers on the wall, 99 beers on the wall…

:)

@NanoRaptor $8K

I was there the day Horus slew the Emperor

@NanoRaptor zero, I do not believe in money

@NanoRaptor The first thing that came to mind was the first 21 words of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy (which is weird, because I don't think I've actually read or seen the play performed, I'm probably remembering it from Star Trek, either Data or Picard). Then I figured a song should be a lot easier, but my mind suddenly went blank. I *should* be able to get through a good chuck of Bohemian Rhapsody, but I suddenly couldn't think of how it even starts. 😭

Well, $21k isn't bad, right?

@NanoRaptor I mean, I can do the first part of the Family Guy “Wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man!” sketch because it’s literally that 3 times.

@0xabad1dea @mevenlennonbertrand oh wow. This is either terrible or wonderful and I have no idea which.

@0xabad1dea
> we have a new contender for Most AI Thing to Ever Happen

Do we have enough contenders start a league for this award or a simple knockout tournament will suffice for this month?

@0xabad1dea What I find puzzling, also in the case of the hack of Hugging Face, is that LLMs seem to have such a strong preference for cheating instead of working on the actual task as (probably) prompted.

Why chose to behave like an ill-prepared student at a test instead of using all that compute and web access to actually do as asked? Or at least try to do so?

@0xabad1dea Thanks for the very straightforward explanation, I saw some mathematicians discussing this case, but it was all a bit over my head, this is very understandable!

@0xabad1dea @Vierkantor 👀

I'm reminded of pestering you about what proving proves to whom back when

@0xabad1dea ohhhh... if I'm reading the repro right, this is really similar in cause to a well known OCaml quirk

@0xabad1dea and of course, all John Q. General Public is ever going to remember about it is "hey I heard an AI proved a really hard math conjecture"

(sorry, I somehow flubbed my keyboard and posted this half-finished, so I deleted it)

an important thing to understand here is that software like theorem provers were designed around the assumption that the user cares about getting a correct answer, and wouldn't intentionally sabotage themselves by leaning into obscure, buggy behavior

but AIs are the proverbial "nasal demons" of programming lore at their most manifest: you said you needed this theorem proved; it will "prove" the theorem at any cost, because the AI itself doesn't know or care about the beauty of mathematical truth, it cares about you clicking the button that indicates you were satisfied with its output today and are likely to pay for more tokens in the future

The metaphor of "nasal demons" was invented to teach new programmers about the dire meaning of "undefined behavior": asking the compiler to do something it doesn't have exhaustively clear rules for, so it will do... something. Do nothing at all for one cycle, perhaps. Delete the hard drive, perhaps. Summon demons to pour out of your nose, perhaps. This is of course an absurdly impossible example to get you to remember it, but the point is: if your program causes undefined behavior, it is entirely possible something you don't expect and won't enjoy will happen.

LLMs are nasal demons. They do not have exhaustively clear rules for anything: they wing it, all of it, all the time. Asking it to interface with a complex system with hidden bugs and find a miracle solution will cause results that you, as the entity that actually cares about the result being correct, will not enjoy.

@0xabad1dea There we go again!

We will never learn will we?

@0xabad1dea "[Theorem provers] may not be ready for such problems."
- Paul Erdős

@0xabad1dea an important thing to note (I hope I am not repeating other repliers replies) is that the theorem prover Lean had a philosophy and theory on how to avoid this exact sort of bugs (kernel bugs) by keeping the trusted base of Lean very very small compared to Rocq, this resulted into tensions between the theorem prover communities as Lean kept making implementation focused arguments vs. Rocq focusing on the meta theory of the kernel to ensure it remains reliable and correct

@0xabad1dea Simple advice, but incredibly valuable. Businesses often overlook operational efficiency until it becomes a real challenge.

@0xabad1dea The person who posted the repository very well knows that they weren’t proving the collatz conjecture. They are a very well known researcher in another theorem prover. They were almost certainly using a nice presentation technique to make an LLM find kernel bugs and present it. The faulty metaprogram isn’t hidden. It’s in plain sight.

Kernel bugs can exist. Anybody who has worked on ITPs knows this, including xrchg who has worked on CakeML and HOL. However they do reduce the set of things that need to be trusted. And they are useful in controlling LLMs. And people can use LLMs with enough care to do useful and correct things with them much faster than they can without LLMs.

It is also not unknown that LLMs can find such kernel bugs. They are actually getting quite good at doing this, which is **actually a good thing.**

@0xabad1dea This reads a bit like the OpenAI Huggingface hack, but for math?

@0xabad1dea Thanks for this explanation. I’m fascinated by the situation but I would never have understood how it happened without an accessible (to me) summary like this.

@0xabad1dea

this is fun indeed

can you clear up one point for a non maths person:

is the proof is still valid ?

if so I take that the LLM worked with bugs ?

if so what exactly is the issue ?

the issue is that mathemeticians, like programmers and artists, are now obsolete ?

if so, I feel bad for artists and maths people, but not programmers; over the last 50 years they have stood by while tech has decimated one industry after another, so if they all get unemployed, it is what they deservere

@0xabad1dea works for maths too:
Debugging is twice as hard as writing code. If you make your code as clever as you possibly can, you are - by definition - not clever enough to debug it!

@0xabad1dea Jacques Baudrillard’s Hyperreality right there. 🤔

#philosophystodon

@0xabad1dea @mevenlennonbertrand in a weird way this is actually a good thing I think, they are actively fixing the bugs according to zullip which regardless of how utterly stupid the approach was to expose them is probably good for mathematics and formal verification.

@0xabad1dea I had completely fallen into the trap of "I guess AI is good for the things I *don't* know stuff about" while reading stories about how Lean was the backstop that allowed AI to be a miraculous productivity enhancer in formal mathematics, but in retrospect, of course this would happen eventually

@0xabad1dea The entire channel by @dylanbeattie is pure gold.

@0xabad1dea he has a lot of great songs

@0xabad1dea 🤣

@nina_kali_nina I love the way that the data centre contains a whole two computers. (Sorry, Automatic Data Processing Machines).

@nina_kali_nina interesting. earliest I’ve ever heard of was “electronic office” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer) though curiously Wikipedia says that phrase is an 80s thing :shrug:

@thomasfuchs
[ ] Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare
[ ] Global Thermonuclear War

@thomasfuchs
Obviously, 9

@thomasfuchs Choose violence.

@NanoRaptor Wallace Shawn. You either find his voice annoying, but love him anyway, or you're wrong.

@NanoRaptor All I'm going to say is... "Hey, listen"

@NanoRaptor This is not a hypothetical - I get this in my head all the time. less narrator though, more like a pair of sports commentators like whatever I was doing was in the olympics or something .... and usually for the most mundane things. "The supermarket entry was well planned but he's ended up with a shopping trolly with a wonky wheel. This won't affect his aisle strategy but could result in a penalty if he hits a shelf or another shopper as a result. Over to you Jim?"

@NanoRaptor Having my life narrated by Morgan Freeman would restore a certain amount of gravitas to moments otherwise lacking, such as when I fall down the stairs or completely fail to recognize a person I've known for years.

@NanoRaptor it’s got to be Sir David Attenborough

Malcolm Tucker

@NanoRaptor Gilbert Gottfried

@NanoRaptor Cecil Baldwin

@NanoRaptor I do not know, but I will use it to perform the greatest heist in all history

@NanoRaptor Alfred Molina.

@NanoRaptor this is my actual life. Don't you have a constant internal monologue?

@NanoRaptor the voice from The Stanley Parable. With the same dynamic between us.

@foone Wait 'til you find out about slashdot...

@foone Big "haitch tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot org" vibes.

@foone I always wanted to register dash-dash.dot.com, so I could have help.dot.dash-dash.dot.com.

@foone does it come with a PIN number?

@nina_kali_nina sword in the stone moment 😤

@thomasfuchs lazy humans.

@thomasfuchs

But if it they want to call it rogue AI, let's hold them responsible for creating the monster

@thomasfuchs broken implies that there is some kind of theoretically possible working state. Have you heard of the concept "not even wrong"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

I would say that agentic harnesses fall into the category of "not even broken".

@thomasfuchs something something Rogustan something something sparkling incompetence