It is an amazing time for programmers

If you approach an expert, you need to be clear in your communication, know the subject you are talking about and in general be aware that experts find trivialities aggravating and are not obliged to suffer your ignorance.

I doubt he’ll get more than a handful.

That’s actually what I asked Mike Pall to do regarding JIT. He was reluctany and probably thinks too little of his teaching ability.. but that book would be awesome for future generations of compiler folks to read!

Back to Bellard, maybe a good first approach is to ping one of his co-authors like the person he made QuickJS with.

From that pov, eliminating everything other than pure text (like on HN) is actually a positive. Here we just need to agree to abide by some common rules for the pursuit of curiosity/knowledge and not mere socializing. Don't post everything that comes to your mind, slowdown and think before you post, know your audience, be succinct and to-the-point but with links to further details/study etc.

As an example, 19th century scientists wrote to each other sharing/discussing/refining their ideas/theories. See Explore 19th Century Scientific Correspondence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389055 for the actual and interesting correspondences.

IMO, the following quote very well expresses the power of mediocrity and how it can drag us all down;

“Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. ... The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”

― Trevanian, Shibumi

This is what we need to guard against i.e. "not become mediocre" (and add to the inanity on the Internet) in our own communications/behaviour on HN and elsewhere. We need to focus on the s/n ratio always in our communications.

Yes, but this also has a silver lining: nobody will need to do the rote, toily, plumbingeque, but still economically valuable work that most software engineers spent most of their time on, which means they will be freed up to solve drastically more novel and/or higher level problems.

The obvious issues with this are 1) not everybody is a Carmack or a Bellard; 2) not everybody may want to be, either; and 3) you most likely won't get to be them by outsourcing all your coding to an LLM (meaning we would need to rethink upskilling.)

The short term will be painful, but in the long term, Economics theory suggests we would experience a golden age of productivity and progress once we build the pipeline of novel / higher-level problems to solve and upskill the hobbyists and erstwhile plumbers to tackle them.