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Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

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Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#101

Post by Thanemate »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #82
nzhsbdb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The result is unimpressive either way -- it's the journey that is exciting for these kinds of projects

I understand for some people its the display of human wizardy that matters. For me it's about making the computer do awesome things - I do not care how I get there I just want it to do whatever I can conjure in my head.

As much as I enjoy the novelty of asking anime pictures from chatGPT I do not, for a single moment, consider myself a doer of anime pictures.

And a fair aside, the result will be "good enough" approximation of what I conjured in my head, but never the thing itself. For me to do the exact thing I conjured in my head it will require to pick up the mouse and draw the rest of the owl. I don't know if that's more telling of my imagination being demanding or my standards.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#102

Post by locknitpicker »

rdevilla wrote: post #67

Ten years ago, I would have kowtowed to someone elite enough to build something like this. Today, I just think, "how long would LLMs have taken to write this?" I mourn the death of a human artform.

> Ten years ago, I would have kowtowed to someone elite enough to build something like this.

I'm afraid it's an elite skill in the sense that juggling is also an elite skill. It's impressive for the first few seconds you gaze into it, but once the novelty factor wears off you understand that it's wasted effort that leads to a project that suffers from a massive maintainability problem, is limited in which platforms it can run, and brings no advantage whatsoever. It's an gimmick that has no practice use.

This is the software development equivalent of an amateur guitarist posting shredding videos on YouTube.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#103

Post by sureglymop »

imtomt wrote: post #99
tgma wrote: post #92

If you actually start writing big stuff in assembly, esp a macro-assembler, you'd quickly realize it is more verbose, but not fundamentally that different from higher level programming. You basically need to get a hang of how to build abstractions with procedures and macros and you'd be good to go. Reading assembly effectively is often much harder than writing it.

Yeah, that's what I realized during this, too. You need to be much more explicit, but the way any given function works isn't fundamentally different. "strlen" will always iterate through a string searching for a NULL byte whether it's in C, Rust, Assembly, or whatever other language. I think it can feel almost more straightforward than other languages, since you're laying out exactly what the CPU needs to do, in what…

Agreed. And super cool project. After seeing Matt Godbolts Advent of Compiler Optimisations in December I decided to do AoC in assembly. Was the most fun I had in years even though I didn't finish all days!

And super educational. Since then I've been pondering which problems require dropping down to the assembly level. E.g. implementing a JIT compiler, a coroutine runtime, etc.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#104

Post by locknitpicker »

estebarb wrote: post #85
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far more exciting than sad. Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing it because it would have been impossible for you in any practical way. Look to the positive instead of lamenting something that never would have happened. It's unbelievably exciting that you can now program a computer virtually without the limitation of your ability to hand code it.

It has always been possible to do it. LLMs are not a particular enabler for that. The difference is that now it is worthless: there is no learning, no person caring about the result, nothing aspirational for the public to look towards... we used to enjoy those challenges, used to be proud of solving complex problems... now? Yeah, whatever, execute execute commit push, let another LLM "review" and call it a day.

> The difference is that now it is worthless

Writing whole software projects in assembly has been worthless and pointless for a couple of decades now. Even the projects who can put together a solid case will limit assembly to very specific components executed only in specific bits of a hot path. Perhaps the most performance-sensitive code we have today is high frequency trading and that field is dominated by C++.

Also, virtually all mainstream compiler suites have flags that output assembly,and that feature is largely ignored and unused.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#105

Post by noduerme »

dwedge wrote: post #72
noduerme wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a dismissive comment. Now that anyone can have an LLM write code for them, the only people who have value to bring to a project are the ones who can improve upon the LLM's output. That is, the ones who have a deep enough understanding of the logic and language. And the only people who will ever be in that position are the ones who take the time and effort, out of sheer curiosity, to learn how things work. Whatev…

Artisanal code has a future. Maybe not a high paid one but maybe we go back to roots. if you enjoy programming and were never focused on output or on pipelines, LLM doesn't offer the same ezperience

Sometime around when wordpress came out, or at least 2005 or so, I started positioning myself as a bespoke web designer, then app developer. Whereas anyone could get a site done, I turned myself to doing things that hadn't been done before, for which standard solutions wouldn't fit. I turned away 80% of jobs and raised my rate from $25 to $100, then to $300/hr. To me, pricing and only doing bespoke work was a defensive measure against falling into a career hole I didn't want to end up in. But mostly it was just that I didn't want to repeat myself or waste my time doing something that a client could already buy off the shelf.

Artisanal code, or bespoke code, has always been the best paid and most satisfying work. If we no longer have a new generation of curious people who enjoy solving hard problems, it's only going to become more valuable.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#106

Post by pixelesque »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #91
georgemcbay wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... Nobody actually needs a web server built in assembly language, it serves no practical purpose. And I say that as someone who learned to program 6502 assembly language in 1983 and has sporadically used assembly of various architectures since. The absurdity of building it would have been the curiosity draw pre-LLMs, but when it exis…

> Can't wait until we learn to harness it to supercharge the most important and valuable thing we do as a human society in modern times: stuff increasingly intrusive ads in front of everyone at all times. Wasn’t it used for that before anything else? Google invented transformers and had LLMs internally before chatgpt got released. Presumably they were using them for ads, because their public demos were insane things…

> Wasn’t it used for that before anything else? Google invented transformers and had LLMs internally before chatgpt got released.

According to friends who worked at Google (no direct knowledge myself, so don't know exactly how true it is), they mostly sat on the tech. Google News had internal prototypes of using them to expand/contract/summarise and/or add details/context to news articles and translate them to different languages, but it was never fully productised.

Then after ChatGPT got popular, sudden panic to start using them in products company-wide.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#107

Post by matteohorvath »

It's a beautiful project, well crafted. To reflect to the other comments, projects like this are more like a Minecraft map for me. There are giant and amazing maps, small survival maps, local hosted for my friends and myself, and commercial focused high scale servers. Building a house, or designing a new road in the server became extremely easy with AI, put the value created in the world depends on the original purpose of the server and whether creating more houses and roads actually makes sense. I think it's a super thing that commercial server can build out faster and be bigger with more houses and roads on it, but The love an art project creates in the world is incomparable.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#108

Post by designerarvid »

rdevilla wrote: post #67

Ten years ago, I would have kowtowed to someone elite enough to build something like this. Today, I just think, "how long would LLMs have taken to write this?" I mourn the death of a human artform.

I think that the analogy of recorded music best captures your feeling. Not the exact technological and economic transformation that is happening, but the feeling.

Some 120 years ago recordings music was a living phenomena produced in the moment. Musicians worked at restaurants and coffee shops everywhere, being useful without being super stars.

Music didn’t disappear with recordings, but the works is certainly different.

Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

#109

Post by OutOfHere »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #19
OutOfHere wrote: post #18

An agentic LLM should be pretty good at Arm64 assembly generation, but maintainability of large code could become an issue. Why would it not run on Linux?

The first paragraph of the README says this was hand written so I’m not sure why you’re bringing up LLMs

Because it's absurd for most people to write too much Assembly by hand.
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