Fudge, obviously I meant to reply to the OP. Your post clearly has some basis in being informed on the subject.

I am obviously not an expert but... we know what happens when you remove a species from the food chain.

In other words: "I don't know what happens, but we (I) know what happens ... "

Like, honestly, dude.

Chances that you do this: zero

It's certainly possible to translate COBOL source into another computer language of your choice, although I'm not sure LLMs are the best tool for that job. An LLM might be able to give you more readable post-translation source code, but traditional machine translation would give you post-translation source code that works correctly, which is probably more important.

"I've seen the pictures" says another American who figures using the internet amounts to actually living life, going places, being less of a moron.

Seasoned C programmers create memory bugs all the time. I mean, the idea that "experience" leads to perfect code is bananas. There's a reason why static analysis is used in any serious environment. Rust just makes that part of the language without an annoying about of tooling/pipeline cruft.

The problem is he had never put much thought into how to actually manage memory in a reasonable way in C. This is why C code is bad, because C programmers never ask themselves, "How do I not leak memory?"

Honestly this reads like you've never worked with real programmers.

"Insightful" because this place is full of old people who really overestimate their abilities to know what is good.

The world is moving on, buddy. C is "fine" in so far as how amazing you are at writing code that doesn't have memory access issues. I'm not shitting on C. But Rust isn't crap - it's really very good and there's a reason why the active generation of big stakeholders (Linux kernel devs, MS, and way way beyond) are chuffed about the value it brings.

Ah, that's an interesting detail (one I agree with) - thank you for pointing that out.

If you need to force people to promote / accept your culture, you should be asking why people prefer other cultures and address those issues instead.

Need is too strong a word. Want is the word. And mostly its there to force content publishers to protect a culture - given the balance of size of American popular culture, American content providers, etc .. I think it's naive to think it comes down to "a free market would accurately represent the desires of a specific domestic market in which it operates"

Media/culture is not some giant buffet where people walk in and just take (and pay for) the plate they want.

Another way to phrase that would be, "This is why C code is bad, because C programmers are expected to understand the rules about how to not leak memory, but there is no mechanism to enforce that requirement".

... and to their credit, eventually some of them do figure it out, and after that they (mostly) write good C code that doesn't leak. However, that doesn't change the fact that at any given moment there are millions of unseasoned C programmers out there who haven't reached that point yet, and who are nevertheless writing leaky code which gets put into production and causes trouble; and new C programmers appear every day. It's the Eternal September problem, applied to memory management.

So either (a) we ban C programmers from pushing to production until they've had at least 5 years of experience, or (b) we find some means to flag their errors at build-time, or (c) we live with the status quo messiness indefinitely. Linux is going with Rust as their mechanism for implementing plan (b).

If you have access to a God-tier LLM that you can rely on to find every bug, I think that could work.

However, I don't think anyone in the Linux community is ready to trust LLMs to that extent just yet. Not only are they quite fallible, they are also non-deterministic -- so if you ask your favorite LLM to find the bugs in the code, and it doesn't find any, and then you feed it the exact same prompt again, it might find some on its second attempt. So how do you know when to stop re-asking?

LLMs are currently constituted are very useful for finding bugs, but not so useful for guaranteeing that no bugs remain.

You know what improves code quality? Process improvements.

You know what doesn't improve code quality? Telling people that they suck. It's pointless and immature.

They might get a better responsie by requesting $4.99/month to remove the Meta AI slop from their Facebook interface.

Perhaps, but I suspect Starlink (etc) already fills most of that use-case, and for the rest, they'll want that compute to be physically located inside the drones themselves, because otherwise the drones will be susceptible to jamming or spoofing.

There will be jobs that AI can't do. How many? Enough to keep 5-10 billion humans employed? What makes you so sure there will be?

Clearly AI has progressed considerably over the last 5-10 years. It's anyone's guess how much further it will progress -- maybe it'll plateau right where it is now, or maybe it will keep becoming more powerful as better algorithms are discovered. I'm not qualified to predict that, and neither are you, but the AI people certainly seem bullish about it.

Sorry, I thought you would understand that I meant that the resources that money represents appear, once you've solved the automation problems that currently make mass-production difficult. That's why you can buy a pocket computer today for $300 that would have your cost you billions of dollars twenty years ago, if you could have obtained it at all.

I bet you'd have more interesting conversations if you made a good-faith effort to understand what the other person was saying, rather than just jumping straight to the part where you get to throw insults at them and tell them how dumb they are. Doesn't that get boring?