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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

#111

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.

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.

I do believe this is just a next step in languages. We've come this far trying to make code NLP, now we have the closest thing to a translator in our generation. It's an exciting time, just don't pay attention to talking heads.

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#113
post #97

Well done. Been working on a similar smaller project for RISC-V. This is excellent

That's so cool! I would love to see it if you're sharing it anywhere.

It's a HTML browser for Pi Pico2, CLI, meant to support my in-house project running on a mesh of Pico2's. I really wanted to use RISC-V and it needed a webhook that serves a page on PIO wake. We are at the browser is written about 60%. The server is now already handled ;P I found this awesome project someone posted on HN. When I complete my project the browser will be released alongside. You can very likely reproduce it with less than a handful of prompts. One thing I really do believe, ideas are going to be the next open-source. LLM's can make ideas into things.

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

#114
post #68

I am attempting to write a software renderer in WebAssembly because, for some reason, I feel the need to go against the direction this vibe coded world is going, and I want to feel challenged again. I don't know if I will ever finish it, it is crazy, and by no means useful. But gosh it feels so good. Congratulations to the OP for the accomplishment.

I did exactly the same and it was so much fun. It wasn't about bringing anything novel to the table, it was just a fun challenge for myself. I finished and now I'm writing a game using it, although now the challenge has gone I am not making much progress on that. But never mind, I had fun! I wouldn't have had that fun or satisfaction if I had vibe coded it instead.

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

#115

Hmmmm. One of my first assembly projects was a CGI Script 100% in x86 assembly. A full web server is certainly more impressive! Though I'd recommend to beginners to look up CGI and mod_cgi in Apache first lol

Woah! I honestly feel more intimidated writing a CGI script in assembly than I was writing a server, lol. CGI support has been on my mind for a couple weeks, but I haven't really dug into it yet. I'd love to see yours if it's hosted anywhere! Could be a great reference when I do.

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

#116
post #68

I am attempting to write a software renderer in WebAssembly because, for some reason, I feel the need to go against the direction this vibe coded world is going, and I want to feel challenged again. I don't know if I will ever finish it, it is crazy, and by no means useful. But gosh it feels so good. Congratulations to the OP for the accomplishment.

As in 3D software renderer? I cut my teeth on those throughout my teens and the start of my professional career, in x86 and C. I wanted to see how an LLM would do writing one in pure 8088 assembler for CGA and it one-shot a nice demo (I fed it the vectors for the Elite ship in the prompt): https://imgur.com/a/Dy5rUku

Yes, exactly, a 3D software renderer. But the goal is to do (almost) everything from scratch and by hand. No LLMs, no std library, no compilers. Just a few imported math functions (such as sin and cos). Not the same as bare metal programming but close

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

#117

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.

Yep, another humane thing going to get killed, because people are naive, gullible and basically idiots handing out their expertise on a platter to faceless corpo entities.

What's next, human human contact abstracted away by brain stimulation?

And the transhumanist arsewipes gonna have a field day.

Never too late to ignite the nukes...

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

#118
post #68

I am attempting to write a software renderer in WebAssembly because, for some reason, I feel the need to go against the direction this vibe coded world is going, and I want to feel challenged again. I don't know if I will ever finish it, it is crazy, and by no means useful. But gosh it feels so good. Congratulations to the OP for the accomplishment.

Please post your progress! That sounds cool as hell

Thank you! I will keep working on it and post something here

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

#119
post #81

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.

Human artform is still alive and well as evidenced by this post. Yes, an LLM can write it, it’ll probably work. Yet, it’ll remain meaningless slop while this is not.

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

#120

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 i…

What an odd take. It is often titled "software craftsmanship". Is the craftsman not allowed to practice? Not everything needs an immediate real-world application. Not everything needs to be enterprise-grade, bulletproof, web-scale or whatever. It needs to work for the creator, and sometimes not even that.

In the same way we appreciate Japanese wood joinery, why not not just appreciate this? Someone might even learn a trick or two reading it.

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