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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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Linus: "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs" Linux Kernel: https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8TtG_80Kzs... The idea that software has gotten so complex that a machine can evaluate code paths better than a human, seems to bristle the fur of many. Some people didn't think we would see the day where that comparative human limitation was laid bare in simpler tasks than they expected. I believe older develo…
> The idea that software has gotten so complex that a machine can evaluate code paths better than a human, seems to bristle the fur of many Lol! What about fuzzers, linters, typecheckers and formal tooling? There’s plenty of machine code evaluators that people do use because it’s better than relying on human skills. The issue is the actual report and the lack of information.
Pretty sure Chrome has been using all of those forever, along with some of the best security researchers in the world, yet AI (which is what GP really means by “machine” here) is finding way more bugs. I think GP’s point is that AI makes some people uncomfortable because it operates more like a human than a special purpose tool.
As for lack of information, I’m curious what you’d be interested in seeing. More information about the kinds of bugs it found perhaps?
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What is bikeshedding supposed to mean here?
LLM increase the range of things bikesheddable, so some folks will try to have a LLM design a nuclear reactor and manage the coffee budget in addition to the traditional bikeshed design complications. Whether this is an improvement or more engines of what passes for civilization catching on fire, well…
To me this merely signals how broken C++ development really is. Most if not all of the bugs being uncovered are memory related and therefore intimately tied to the mental memory model of C and C++, namely manual memory management. It's fine for a C or C++ program encompassing a couple hundred lines but beyond that it's a liability. C and C++ are simply not fit for purpose when large scale software projects are concer…
This isn't really a fair take. Keep in mind that C/C++ has been the backbone of the most important software in the world since the 1970s. At that time we didn't have virtually unlimited compute and memory at our fingertips the way we do now. It was a huge improvement to have a high level language which still could be optimized nearly as well as assembly.
Its staying power is due to the fact that we really haven't had many good alternatives until maybe the last few years. Things are not going to get ported and rewritten overnight, especially when they largely just work like Linux & PostgreSQL. We'd nuke a huge amount of institutional knowledge and inertia to change those up.
And C/C++ are still key in the embedded space where we still have devices constrained on compute and memory. That's not going to go away anytime soon.
This criticism feel like someone complaining about why anyone still uses horses on the day the Model T was announced. Change takes time.
I assume this was thanks to Project Glasswing + Mythos Preview?
To me this merely signals how broken C++ development really is. Most if not all of the bugs being uncovered are memory related and therefore intimately tied to the mental memory model of C and C++, namely manual memory management. It's fine for a C or C++ program encompassing a couple hundred lines but beyond that it's a liability. C and C++ are simply not fit for purpose when large scale software projects are concer…
> All of these need to be ported to Rust or another memory-safe language ASAP to prevent mayhem.
Seems like hyperbole... It might be ideal if we could snap our fingers and suddenly have rust ports, but I feel like you're discounting the effort that goes into doing that properly.
Which brings me to an interesting point. We have a web engine written in Rust. It's Servo. If the Rust port is so important to do as soon as possible to avoid mayhem, why aren't companies picking up Servo and using that?
I've recently been using AI a lot for performance optimisation during a particularly busy period at work. I would say it was almost completely useless at the high-level direction - it would point out suspicious parts of SQL queries for example but on back to back testing these almost never resulted in any performance change. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that it made making the actual changes I identified much e…
AI can uncover certain issues and resolve certain problems but it also has its blind spots. I've been using Claude to create a software architecture diagram. It came up with a lot of useful functionality that we had neglected to show but upon further examination a lot of steps didn't make any sense. It added a box to do validation on some data then it put another box downstream to do validation again on the exact sam…
To me this merely signals how broken C++ development really is. Most if not all of the bugs being uncovered are memory related and therefore intimately tied to the mental memory model of C and C++, namely manual memory management. It's fine for a C or C++ program encompassing a couple hundred lines but beyond that it's a liability. C and C++ are simply not fit for purpose when large scale software projects are concer…
The entire compute world was built on top of C and C++. Saying they're not fit for purpose doesn't seem correct. I think what you're really saying is they're not an optimal choice from a safety perspective. > All of these need to be ported to Rust or another memory-safe language ASAP to prevent mayhem. Seems like hyperbole... It might be ideal if we could snap our fingers and suddenly have rust ports, but I feel like…
It worked well enough, maybe "fit for purpose" is a stronger word
Not that I don't believe its possible to fix a lot of bugs, I also wonder what the actual dynamic was. Were the people in team working much more than usual as well? Given its Google, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an "internal push" to fix more bugs over next X sprints so that they can publish this blog and some manager can show impact and AI adaption to his superior.
Google's entire modus operandi has been "automate everything" for decades. They've been doing this with fuzzers, with project zero and so on. Adding LLMs on top is a very obvious next step. And LLMs improving and finding more bugs also follows. Then improve the harness and the dev tools, to better use the LLMs. And then everything together end-to-end to find-triage-fix-confirm. Your LLMs are as good as the loop they…
This is a tacit admission it was Mythos, not Gemini, despite alluding to experiments with Gemini earlier on: > Added support for model interoperability to leverage the unique strengths of both open-weights and proprietary models