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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

#201

Post by risyachka »

designerarvid wrote: post #108
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 differ…

The analogy is AI music produced without effort in seconds, not recorded music.

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

#202

Post by estebarb »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #149
ratorx wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your goals were fame, then yes. But you can still pursue excellence even if there is an alternative “easy” path. The equivalent is something like hand tool woodworking - it’s still a thing despite the advent of machines, but more of a niche. You can still aim to become excellent, but maybe you won’t be famous.

> but maybe you won’t be famous. Or employable. Which sucks if you're over 50.

That also sucks if you are not anywhere close to retire or having a beffy bank account and depend on regular monthly payments.

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

#203

Post by qingcharles »

bananaboy wrote: post #165
qingcharles wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How well does that run on real hardware (or PCem/86box)?

I'm using DOSbox to test it right now, but it works perfectly under the emu. I'd love to try it on a real 5160 or similar.

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

#204

Post by f1shy »

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.

You can say that with manual reveal of photographs, LP collections, a text written with a typewriter.

Is not the end of the world. Is a change.

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

#206

Post by orthogonal_cube »

imtomt wrote: post #7
chrisweekly wrote: post #4

That fake O'Reilly book cover is pure gold.

That book is exactly what inspired me to make this in the first place, haha. The subtitle of the book gave me the acronym I named it.

I frequently reference this exact meme to people whenever someone complains about complicated or difficult-to-write code. Now that’s you’ve made this project I suppose we have zero room to complain anymore!

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

#207

Post by hombre_fatal »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #198
tkiolp4 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won’t be able to enjoy your free time playing with computers if anthropic et al make you jobless. The “you” doesn’t necessarily refer to you. Im addressing 90% of the developers out there. We love playing around technology… but I doubt we will be thinking the same once we become unemployable. But here we are, having fun with the tools of companies that want to finish us. How ironic

This is silly. While I work in IT today, that wasn’t always true. I am certain I spent more free time playing with computers when my work did not involve computers at all. While I enjoy working with computers at a variety of different levels, when I do it all day, I don’t typically wanna do it when I get home. If Anthropic means there are no more IT jobs, software jobs, etc. etc. etc. (which I think is highly unlikel…

Also consider the great fortune of dicking around with computers ever being so lucrative in the first place even if the gravy train eventually stops. We were lucky. Most hobbies aren’t anything like that.

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

#208

Post by specwiseai »

The comment about LLMs writing this is interesting but I think it misses the point. Someone still had to know what to build and why. The assembly knowledge needed to even prompt an LLM correctly for something like this is not trivial. The craft shifted, it did not disappear.

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

#210

Post by fragmede »

wkjagt wrote: post #148
imtomt wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "strlen" will always iterate through a string searching for a NULL byte whether it's in C, Rust, Assembly Not all languages use NULL terminated strings. I think Rust actually stores the string length alongside a pointer to the start of the string data. You can do the same in C, but you'd have to do it manually using a struct. In assembly you could do the same thing since you get to decide basically everything. http…

Pascal stores the length of the string next to the string, but the other thing of note is with the advent of Unicode, strlen is strlen, but often not actually the number you need/want.
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