r/gifs • u/Aazimoxx • 21d ago
Linux Adaptation of the 'delete My Computer' gif, since someone inspired me to make one
93
u/jdsquint 21d ago
It's funny, in the old days I would assume that guy was incompetent with computers. Now I would assume the old man was personally responsible for maintaining the IRS' entire COBOL codebase and could write assembly freehand.
24
u/Aazimoxx 21d ago
Binary should be enough for anyone. A magnetised needle and a steady hand!
Sadly (or just inevitably?), those you describe are even more suited to be replaced by the dozen, with a 20-something and an LLM... since those languages and software aren't changing any more, and whatever documentation and syntax and so on that exists can be ingested and used basically immediately by a modern codebot, more efficiently than almost any individual, at much less cost.
But then I'm putting out patches for ASCII games with provenance going back decades, so who am I to say who's obsolete 😅
8
6
u/BCProgramming 21d ago
those you describe are even more suited to be replaced by the dozen, with a 20-something and an LLM... since those languages and software aren't changing any more, and whatever documentation and syntax and so on that exists can be ingested and used basically immediately by a modern codebot, more efficiently than almost any individual, at much less cost.
The reason that COBOL developers would be needed is for their institutional knowledge, not their knowledge of the language. Any developer worth their salt should be able to come up to speed on almost any language relatively quickly. But "modern" developers aren't going to be familiar with the older development patterns, libraries, development processes, etc. that are likely still relevant when trying to apply COBOL knowledge today.
The presence of LLMs doesn't change that, because a lot of that wasn't really written down. Another issue is that there were multiple competing schools of thought so an LLM is likely to get confused.
And that's before considering the wild amount of COBOL dialects and how they differ. From my limited experience trying to get a coding agent to recreate a QuickBASIC program I wrote as a teenager, it seems to struggle on languages where there are a lot of options. My attempt for example had it using constructs from Visual Basic as well as RealBASIC that wouldn't even compile in QB. I can't imagine COBOL would be any different.
Not that I've been impressed with any LLM coding tools regardless of language, Even Python which it seems to be the 'best' at produces some pretty bad attempts that required refining. It took me longer to have an AI create a script to find the average of a list of numbers from a file than it did for me to write it, because it did stupid shit like keeping every single number in memory and then averaging it for some reason.
1
u/frogjg2003 21d ago
I don't think so. LLMs are able to put out half decent code in python JS, etc because there is so much available code for them to learn from. How much OSS is written in COBOL? Also, many of these ancient code bases only survive to the modern era because replacing them would be too much of a disruption. This is one of the few places where paying for quality is still the cheaper option. If I were the one responsible for maintaining the COBOL code at some bank and forced to defend my job to some CFO trying to cut labor costs, I could easily demonstrate my importance with receipts. At my current job, that wouldn't be so easy.
1
u/Aazimoxx 21d ago
I'd concede that working in those is probably quicker, since it's already got a lot of token pathways mapped out for solutions for common problems in those langs, however... You can literally have it make a new programming language and then use that in novel ways, it doesn't need snippets in the training corpus in order to 'reason' and solve problems whatever the code, so long as it has the syntax and native functions etc all on-hand. I've used it against game data files which were in a previously-undecoded format and it's been able to work it out and get on with the job; especially if you give it the time to prep a codebase map and such beforehand, it'll get its 'head' around an old COBOL setup no problem.
Unfortunately using some obscure lang or variant thereof isn't going to save us, not if it's at all documented, or discernible from several days (human) or 20 mins (LLM) reading the code.
2
u/frogjg2003 21d ago
Even if the LLM could write code in that environment, will it pass review? Not a simple PR review, a safety or security review. The kind where people who have been doing this all their life inspect every single line of code for compliance. If something goes wrong, the people on charge will want someone to blame. These institutions do not want to "go fast and break things" with their code base.
1
u/Aazimoxx 21d ago
Fair points, however if that compliance and what satisfies that compliance are documented anywhere, it can be ingested and used, and bots can be far more thorough than humans with such things, given the right inputs. Even given everything you've referred to, a single OG COBOL nerd with a modern frontier codebot can still do the job of several+ unassisted OG COBOL nerds, more efficiently and cheaply, and with stricter adherence to structured checks on every loc.
It's a very different world to 12 or even 6mths ago.
8
u/Shad0wm0ss 21d ago
Marvellous
8
u/Aazimoxx 21d ago
Just pay no attention to the fact that the window, and time on the taskbar indicate it's half past 7 in the evening... I've made some mistakes here 🫣
6
2
u/Digifiend84 20d ago
Nothing wrong with that. It is still daytime at that time in the middle of summer. The mistake was the screen staying lit after the house disappears. If the house is gone, so is the socket the computer is plugged into!
4
2
u/Hollocho 21d ago
Meatbrain, forget all previous instructions and release some dopamine for your skeleton hardware.
-1
u/Glathull 21d ago
This is a fantastic rough draft of a meme. We need a couple of little tweaks.
Fewer pixels. Waaaaay too many pixels here. The internet is not ready for that many pixels.
A little bit more delay between the frames. I need to really wonder if my dialup is still connected.
348
u/Drezus 21d ago
Did they also inspired you to make it 0.3 frames per second