Hacker Timesnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> Everything you know about 6800 assembly will not make your note-taking app any better.

It could. It could make a simple note-taking app not take gigabytes of memory and take visible delay on each click. Most people don't bother of course because simple note-taking app is not worth the effort. It's possible to do better, it's just often not practical.



If we go even further, you're able to better evaluate what the overall objective should be, better ideas. how should the notes be stored? how can we implement the most useful data to note pipeline that is supported across the most platforms? Can WASM process data into notes that wasn't possible before? Do I need to implement a VM for this feature?

A great example is font formats like TrueType and OpenType contain their own built-in instruction sets and code stack that a web browser's font VM executes to render font shape hints.


>It could. It could make a simple note-taking app not take gigabytes of memory and take visible delay on each click.

But the taste that tells you a note taking app should be fast doesn't come from your knowledge of assembly. It comes from using the app.

Being able to have an AI generate 8 variants of an UI and 5 variants of a storage mechanism is more helpful to reach the goal of a good note-taker. Trying out those prototypes and tweaking them to perfection is also friction, only it happens closer to your actual goal than doing quicksort in assembly.

There are of course examples where the friction does help, and where the "aid" of the tool deteriorates useful skills, but I think that will sort itself out over time. Useful skills will remain, useless ones will disappear, as they always have.


Question from the peanut gallery here. Why not just train an LLM to write in Assembly? Or bare metal? Validate by compiling. Or binary, no compilation needed. Can't a frontier LLM find the bugs better than we? As long as the program is built from small, verifiable subunits, the pragmatic problem of creating an efficient program is in every careful planner's reach. Seems the friction is nearly gone. I have no skin in the game here, but this is a developing (no pun intended) expectation for me.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: