Programming thread

[Troon Petty and the 41ers]

So is Claude Code any good or should I just save 20 bucks?

My work got us access to it. It's okay for "stitch these two APIs together" type drudgery coding. Only okay, though; it'll make mistakes like screwing up response field names, which it really shouldn't unless the docs for whatever you're working with are terrible. IMO, it's less that it's good and more that search engines are becoming worse every single minute of every single day.

I am thankful that LinkedIn is full of Indians (and people who are spiritually Indian) who use ChatGPT to talk to each other, though. I was looking at it too much during my last job hunt, it became a (useless) habit after I got a job, and seeing all the people who mindlessly feed "write me a bitchy post complaining about all the chuds who aren't using uv for their Python repos" and somehow get engagement made it easier to quit.

 

[Historical Strelkov]

IMO, it's less that it's good and more that search engines are becoming worse every single minute of every single day.

I'm not a programmer, but i am a "power user" (bro hates reading terminal lol hes gay, hes retarded, etc.)
I do not understand the hype with LLMs outside of the language model and the sifting of information.
I tried to "create an app" for my phone that would do speech to text in a specific format, and no LLM could just take my requests and then generate a program. It never worked, and whenever it asked me to do something myself, it seemed like the least efficient, and outdated way of doing it.
All I kept thinking was "All I need is a way to message someone I know is a good programmer, with a request for how much it would cost me to develop this program".
I would rather just hire someone to do something, but as a layman, I don't even know where to begin.
And this ultimately is why I don't believe in any of this AI hype. I would still just rather hire a smart guy who knew code to do something.

 

[Dr. Charles Forbin]

I tried to "create an app" for my phone that would do speech to text in a specific format, and no LLM could just take my requests and then generate a program. It never worked, and whenever it asked me to do something myself, it seemed like the least efficient, and outdated way of doing it.

LLMs can't "reason" or "create" new material, it's all regurgitated from somewhere. It's why so many people (jeets) get infatuated with it, all they ever think to do is remake Generic Website in Current Thing JS framework so they can put it on their resume, and with so many examples of that exact thing the LLM can do a glorified copy/paste of it for them

Your idea is a more niche one which leaves the AI bumbling about like a retard. As it stands the one thing LLMs are OK at is acting as a search engine, but that's because search engines have been ruthlessly raped for years now. I still prefer (and recommend) spending a few frustrating minutes making a good enough search query that filters out all the tranny and jeet results to find the gemmy post on some autist's blog from a decade ago

 

[canalCrab]

as somone who has used it, the only thing AI is "useful" for is writing code comments/generic text/git messages, autofilling static data like enums, or generating extremely basic code like for loops. Any other use will either lead to uncompilable code or logic errors that will take time to track down.

A few days at work I tried using an LLM for a small refactoring. It fucking turned a program exit into a simple return, leading to a fucked database.

And of course that change is non-obvious enough to get easily overlooked.

Each and every time I think of giving LLM's a try they reinforce my opinion that it aint worth it as anything more than a rubber ducky, at the very best.

 

[Rango Dango]

we have this saying in the ZUNcode community (centers around modding/decompilation of touhou games) that ZUN (the guy who made touhou) is a musician first, an artist second and a programmer third
and i think this snippet of code shows that really well


another funny is that the latest game (touhou 20, released last year) had to be shipped without optimizations because there was some kinda bug he apparently couldnt fix

 

[canalCrab]

we have this saying in the ZUNcode community (centers around modding/decompilation of touhou games) that ZUN (the guy who made touhou) is a musician first, an artist second and a programmer third
and i think this snippet of code shows that really well
View attachment 8430816

another funny is that the latest game (touhou 20, released last year) had to be shipped without optimizations because there was some kinda bug he apparently couldnt fix

If it's a null pointer, set it to null, then pass a null into the initialize function? That indeed looks like code from someone who is a programmer third.

 

[longer-study]

I've built very complex platforms and even Android apps via vibecoding and as long as you keep an eye on the git diffs you won't have any issues. It usually gets it on the first try. Of course it makes retarded decisions here and there but again, you're watching the git diffs, and a simple "don't do it that way" sets it back on the right course. Don't know how you all are fucking it up so hard.

 

[General Zoider]

we have this saying in the ZUNcode community (centers around modding/decompilation of touhou games) that ZUN (the guy who made touhou) is a musician first, an artist second and a programmer third
and i think this snippet of code shows that really well
View attachment 8430816

another funny is that the latest game (touhou 20, released last year) had to be shipped without optimizations because there was some kinda bug he apparently couldnt fix

i hope thats decompiled code from something like ida and not the actual code.

 

[Belisarius Cawl]

as somone who has used it, the only thing AI is "useful" for is writing code comments/generic text/git messages, autofilling static data like enums, or generating extremely basic code like for loops. Any other use will either lead to uncompilable code or logic errors that will take time to track down.

The only context in which I use AI for coding is quickly finding out "how do I do X in Y?" where Y is a software tool with which I already have a certain degree of familiarity

 

[Rango Dango]

i hope thats decompiled code from something like ida and not the actual code.

its the decompiled code from ghidra yeah, but its most likely real

in touhou 6 (the first touhou game that dropped on pc) theres a double free somewhere in the codebase, ive tried looking for it and i cant find it
it somehow doesnt make the game crash though
ETA: found it

---

another funny thing is that he made custom languages for graphics/animations (anm) enemy patterns (ecl) and stage data (stg)
so pretty much the whole game is thousands of little vms interpreting the bytecode of those languages

 

[General Zoider]

it somehow doesnt make the game crash though

it probably doesnt make the game crash because he probably made use of his own free function setup combined with pure luck.

another funny thing is that he made custom languages for graphics/animations (anm) enemy patterns (ecl) and stage data (stg)
so pretty much the whole game is thousands of little vms interpreting the bytecode of those languages

I doubt those are treated like vms. I dont think any programmer is that insane, its probably more likely that the data is treated like "config" data and read in a way like yaml. If any execution does happen its probably handled once and the calculation is stored in memory.

 

[Belisarius Cawl]

I doubt those are treated like vms. I dont think any programmer is that insane, its probably more likely that the data is treated like "config" data and read in a way like yaml. If any execution does happen its probably handled once and the calculation is stored in memory.

"VMs" is a real stretch but I'm reminded of how, in Erlang and other languages that run on BEAM, thousands or even millions of concurrent processes are completely tenable

 

[Rango Dango]

I doubt those are treated like vms. I dont think any programmer is that insane, its probably more likely that the data is treated like "config" data and read in a way like yaml. If any execution does happen its probably handled once and the calculation is stored in memory.

it is an actual vm (at least for anm)
heres a header file for anm vm - https://github.com/GensokyoClub/th06/blob/master/src/AnmVm.hpp
and implementation of interpreters main loop - https://github.com/GensokyoClub/th06/blob/master/src/AnmManager.cpp#L1022

---

while youre at it check out the amazing main menu code - https://github.com/GensokyoClub/th06/blob/master/src/MainMenu.cpp

 

[General Zoider]

it is an actual vm (at least for anm)
heres a header file for anm vm - https://github.com/GensokyoClub/th06/blob/master/src/AnmVm.hpp
and implementation of interpreters main loop - https://github.com/GensokyoClub/th06/blob/master/src/AnmManager.cpp#L1022

---

while youre at it check out the amazing main menu code - https://github.com/GensokyoClub/th06/blob/master/src/MainMenu.cpp

ah .... why did they make it so complex, also that menu code is terrifying.

code like

vmRef = &this->vm[97];

really needs to be changed from array references to hard coded members... if possible.

"VMs" is real stretch but I'm reminded of how, in Erlang

I was going to bring up that I dont think they knew of the concepts behind Erlang back in 2002 but in the code you can clearly see higher level concepts including callback chains, so I will drop any sort of consideration on what they knew back then. Plus it seems they also didnt use threads and somehow did everything by interlacing the vms possibly using time slicing.

 

[Rango Dango]

really needs to be changed from array references to hard coded members... if possible.

theres a chance it couldve been written differently (for example the ZunBool enum was actually winapi's BOOL in the original code)
their goal is to match the binary exactly not to make the code look good

the clean code is in the portable branch, it also ported the game from dx8 to sdl2

 

[Belisarius Cawl]

Just found this gem:

The opening act is a dialogue with the Jewish Stewart Cheifet, one "Ben Stone", followed by Kraftwerk and other neat things. Sorry if this doesn't fully fit the rubric of "programming" but there is no dedicated thread for the video in question.

 

[General Zoider]

it also ported the game from dx8 to sdl2

thank fuck, because while dx8 emulators are pretty performant they can add visual bugs and overhead depending on how they were coded.

 

[Rango Dango]

thank fuck, because while dx8 emulators are pretty performant they can add visual bugs and overhead depending on how they were coded.

yeah touhou 6-9 all have input delays on wine
its worse when you use the vsync patch

+ now wine is using """experimental WOW64""" so the performance TANKS when you use 32 bit software on 64 bit systems

 

[General Zoider]

yeah touhou 6-9 all have input delays on wine

if those are the original binaries, and you are using "pure" wine, then you are running into the event handler overhead that I believe was fixed in proton.

 

[Rango Dango]

if those are the original binaries, and you are using "pure" wine, then you are running into the event handler overhead that I believe was fixed in proton.

i have no clue
found the table though

then pass a null into the initialize function?

btw ghidra doesnt support c++ oop
the initialize function doesnt take any parameters so the null pointer is the this argument
i think its an optimization from msvc since it assigns a NULL pointer before that
the original code mightve looked like this

AnmVm* vm = new AnmVm;
if(vm == NULL) {
    vm = NULL;
    vm.initialize();
}