this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
156 points (94.3% liked)

Programming

17651 readers
410 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

For non-video people like me: The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore

The real headline behind it: IBM plans to update COBOL with Watson to Java.

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

This is delicious. I hope they hurry up, and I hope they do it in a really large really public context.

I've had this conversation, but today's generation of AI won't:

"No, I can't just do a one for one translation. Some of the core operating principles of the language are different, and the original intent needs to be well understood to make the appropriate translation choice. If I just translate it one to one, with no understanding of the business context. you're going to suffer from years off debugging subtle but impactful bugs."

Get on with it IBM. Let's light this dumpster fire so we can all bask together in it's glow (and smell).

There may be a day coming in the next 100-1000 years when a learning algorithm is a suitable replacement for an expert engineer, but that day has not arrived (and the early evidence of that impending arrival hasn't arrived, either. I haven't seen evidence of AGI experiments with even toddler reasoning levels, so far. Toddler level reasoning wil come before AGI with infrastructure deployment skills, which itself is probably coming before AGI with expert business logic diagnostic skills. This could all be 20 years or 1000 years away. But we will probably see LLMs running deeply insightful life changing management workshops sometime roughly next week, since a trained parrot could do that. If we have an AGI that can meaningfully reason with small numbers in the next 20 years, we will be making great progress and on track for the rest to arrive - someday. If not, then we're probably waiting on a missing computational breakthrough.)