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ajross commented on U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession   forbes.com/sites/mikestun... · Posted by u/alephnerd
theropost · 15 hours ago
I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term. That spending is the jobs. If you tighten spending to cut waste or rebalance the books, growth slows and jobs shrink, but that’s kind of the tradeoff when you’re trying to fix long-term issues.

Over the last few decades, neither party has really cared about deficits anyway. Everyone’s been spending, just at different speeds. The real question isn’t “who creates more jobs,” it’s whether the spending is efficient, sustainable, and actually creates long-term value. Eventually the bills come due, interest costs rise, and priorities shift from growth to just keeping the lights on.

So yeah, Democrats tend to show stronger job numbers, but spending more will almost always do that. Whether it’s good spending is a separate debate. Budget discipline isn’t partisan, it’s just basic economics.

ajross · 15 hours ago
Democratic administrations see less spending growth, though. Definitely not more. Look it up.

You're confusing rhetoric with policy.

ajross commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler   anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
lionkor · a day ago
I wrote a couple hobby compilers. The only difficulty with C is the ambiguous syntax.

Now compare the article's setup with a single senior engineer who uses an agent or two at the same time.

ajross · 21 hours ago
> I wrote a couple hobby compilers.

So did most of us, join the club. What you can't do is write such a compiler for $20k if you want to put food on the table, or do it in two weeks (what it costs to buy your time currently until AI eats your job). And let's be honest: it's not going to build something of the complexity of Linux either. Hobby compilers run hobby code. Giant decades-old source trees test edge cases like no one's business.

ajross commented on Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped   educationnext.org/hard-le... · Posted by u/grantpitt
ajross · 2 days ago
OMG. It's the !?%!@# pandemic. All education statistics measuring across 2020 are horrifyingly polluted. Kids who stayed at home for a year are behind relative to the same cohorts before or since, AND YET WE KEEP FLOGGING THESE NUMBERS as if they're signal and not noise.

I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.

ajross commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler   anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
segh · 2 days ago
This is an experiment to see the current limit of AI capabilities. The end result isn't useful, but the fact is established that in Feb 2026, you can spend $20k on AI to get a inefficient but working C complier.
ajross · 2 days ago
> inefficient but working

FWIW, an inefficient but working product is pretty much the definition of a startup MVP. People are getting hung up on the fact that it doesn't beat gcc and clang, and generalizing to the idea that such a thing can't possibly be useful.

But clearly it can, and is. This builds and boots Linux. A putative MVP might launch someone's dreams. For $20k!

The reflexive ludditism is kinda scary actually. We're beyond the "will it work" phase and the disruption is happening in front of us. I was a luddite 10 months ago. I was wrong.

ajross commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler   anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
vuciuc · 2 days ago
> you can have it at pretty-clearly-near-shippable quality in two weeks for $20k.

if you spend months writing a tight spec, tests and have a better version of the compiler around to use when everything else fails.

ajross · 2 days ago
> if you spend months writing a tight spec, tests and have a better version of the compiler around to use when everything else fails.

Doesn't matter because your competitors will have beaten you to market. That's just a simple Darwinian point, no AI magic needed.

No one doubts that things will be different in the coming Claudepocalypse, and new ideas about quality and process will need to happen to manage it. But sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that our stone tools are still better is just a path to early retirement at this point.

ajross commented on Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files   martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/nomdep
ajross · 2 days ago
Responding to the headline and not the article substance: no, the SaaS crash is a crash because valuations are speculative and have been very high. Security price motion is only very loosely coupled to fundamentals in the short term, and this moment in history is both highly volatile and unanimously held to be overpriced. Ergo, crash.

That doesn't speak to the fundamentals, with which I only sort of agree. There are SaaS products that just grease inter-human interactions that would be hard to manage otherwise, and these are dead in the water. There are others that manage data human beings will always need to be able to understand, even if the AI is doing the work[1], which are much safer.

[1] Like bug trackers. We all love to hate Jira, but even if you have an army of Claudes doing your coding and testing for you someone somewhere needs to know what still needs to be fixed before shipment.

ajross commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler   anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
pcloadlett3r · 2 days ago
> it's probably good enough to use, yea.

Not for general purpose use, only for demo.

> that reasonably working software of equivalent complexity is within reach for $20k to solve

But if this can't come close to replacing GCC and can't be modified without introducing bugs then it hasn't proven this yet. I learned some new hacks from the paper and that's great and all but from my experiencing of trying to harness even 4 claude sessions in parallel on a complex task it just goes off the rails in terms of coherence. I'll try the new techniques but my intuition is that its not really as good as you are selling it.

ajross · 2 days ago
> Not for general purpose use, only for demo.

What does that mean, though? I mean, it's already meeting a very high quality bar by booting at all and passing those tests. No, it doesn't beat existing solutions on all the checkboxes, but that's not what the demo is about.

The point being demonstrated is that if you need a "custom compiler" or something similar for your own new, greenfield requirement, you can have it at pretty-clearly-near-shippable quality in two weeks for $20k.

And if people can't smell the disruption there, I don't know what to say.

ajross commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler   anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
lionkor · 2 days ago
Yes a human can hack together a compiler in two weeks.

If you can't, you should turn off the AI and learn for yourself for a while.

Writing a compiler is not a flex; it's a couple very well understood problems, most of which can be solved using existing libraries.

Parsing is solved with yacc, bison, or sitting down and writing a recursive descent parser (works for most well designed languages you can think of).

Then take your AST and translate it to an IR, and then feed that into anything that generates code. You could use crainlift or whatever it's called, you could roll your own.

ajross · 2 days ago
> Parsing is solved with yacc, bison, or sitting down and writing a recursive descent parser (works for most well designed languages you can think of).

No human being writes a recursive descent parser for "Linux Kernel C" in two weeks, though. And AFAIK there's no downloadable BNF for that you can hand to an automatic generator either, you have to write it and test it and refine it. And you can't do it in two weeks.

Yes yes, we all know how to write a compiler because we took a class on it. That's like "Elite CS Nerd Basic Admission". We still can't actually do it at the cost being demonstrated, and you know it.

ajross commented on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler   anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/modeless
pcloadlett3r · 2 days ago
Is there really value being presented here? Is this codebase a stable enough base to continue developing this compiler or does it warrant a total rewrite? Honest question, it seems like the author mentioned it being at its limits. This mirrors my own experience with Opus in that it isn't that great at defining abstractions in one-shot at least. Maybe with enough loops it could converge but I haven't seen definite proof of that in current generation with these ambitious clickbaity projects.
ajross · 2 days ago
If it generates a booting kernel and passes the test suite at 99% it's probably good enough to use, yeah.

The point isn't to replace GCC per se, it's to demonstrate that reasonably working software of equivalent complexity is within reach for $20k to solve whatever problem it is you do have.

ajross commented on Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch   scd31.com/posts/building-... · Posted by u/evakhoury
duskwuff · 3 days ago
I don't know if it's quite at the volume you're looking for, but ZuluSCSI [1] uses RP2350 (and, earlier, RP2040) for SCSI <-> SD.

[1]: https://zuluscsi.com/

ajross · 2 days ago
Yeah, that's sort of the market that's picked it up: "I need to connect to old junk". And it would seem like a great fit, except that (as you point out) volumes are tiny and the benefit of a $1 chip vs. a $10 FPGA is high only at scale.

I just checked, and that board is $70. Here's a significantly more capable device with an ESP32 and a iCE40 FPGA which could do the same things and more for $100:

https://groupgets.com/products/ice-v-wireless

I have one and it works great, though not many people picked it up. It's actually available for $50 now, it looks like they're liquidating what they bought.

Point being: is PIO really enabling new solutions in this market? No. At best it's providing a ~30% reduction in retail price for some oddball niche applications. Is that worth the cost of spinning the masks for the chip? IMHO, no.

u/ajross

KarmaCake day34624March 11, 2008View Original