I second your recommendation. I watched it last night, and loved it. It was beautiful to see the level of competence and devotion of the tiny group running the spacecraft.
I love Transport and it absolutely evokes Britishness for me whenever I see it. The "Highway Gothic" [1] font used on US Interstate highways (and apparently also in Australia and Canada) is also pretty good I think and similarly evokes the open road in my mind.
I think you'd have to start with 55+ years old and go upward to find an age range where more than 10% of programmers routinely wrote assembler code in their careers.
To find the same for machine code you'd need to start at 65 or older.
Really not the same. Assembly / machine code is entirely deterministic - they are a notation for your thoughts. LLM produced content is more a smorgasbord of other people's thoughts, and cannot help you with clarity, conviction, etc etc.
They meant to say that swithing from assembly to high-level programming is not the same as switching from high-level programming to LLMs, because the latter loses you the guarantee that the computer will do what you told it to.
Sure, it's less common that people are writing full-fledged applications in nothing but assembly.
However, I would strongly disagree that people are no longer writing/using assembly. I was writing a bit of assembly the other day, for example.
Come on over to the game emulation, reverse engineering, exploitation writing, CTF, malware analysis, etc. hobby spaces. Knowledge of assembly is absolutely mandatory to do essentially anything useful.
My point is that the coding LLMs are another point on the reliability / ease of use spectrum. We already mostly moved to another point with HLL compilers from machine language. This is another leap where the transform is unreliable but it's very easy to use (and it could preserve output edits, to some indeterminate extent).
change that 10% to 0.5% and I would agree. i am 62, worked in low level coding and hw interfacing. 'routinely' not even; i would say on occasion, needed to look at a bit, or even more rare, had to write a bit (like a small module)
Curious, what do you normally use? I had to write a few timing sensitive MC drivers and the only way I knew how onto do that reliably was using assembly. But granted, it wasn't _often_, just more than I expected (especially for someone who doesn't normally do that low level stuff, this was for an art project)
sure. timing sensitive stuff. < 50 lines. jump back to C as soon as the critical stuff is over.
'performance stuff'. i try to solve it in C for a bunch of reasons; others readability is one. almost never need to do more than a short macro of assembly embedded in C.
the actual most use of have for assembly is "what is happening here.." and need to ask the debugger for the assembly for some deeper understanding.
Some years, did these things 5 times, so maybe 20 hours. Other years, never.
As far as "sit down and write some assembly to solve problem X", the answer is never. (except when X is right in the middle of the above items)
The other reason is that the capsule can splashdown far away from the ship. In this case it was close (3km or so). It can possibly fall much farther away. In which case boats would be much slower. Add in the possibility of rough seas & bad weather the helos make sense. And just to keep things simple I think they just use them no matter what. Prevent errors. Also gives a chance to rehearse and debug the full recovery process in case it’s actually really needed the next time.
Still waiting to see comparison to A1’s used heat shield. Obviously it worked at least just well enough. They have a new formulation apparently for use with subsequent missions. New might be better but obviously it has not been tested in a real re-entry scenario so also kinda concerning for the next flight.
100%. Easy to criticize this but you have to remember these are the people that planned and executed a successful moon mission. Pretty sure they know what they are doing and have thought about things in more that just a passing way.
Definitely not the 70's. I think the most recent age that might have counted as hopeful was really between the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) through the beginning of the GWOT (9/11/2001). So basically the 90's.
The seventies were a more representative time for technological hopes, during a time when it was not yet clear which are the right technological choices. The nineties were a time of rapid technological progress, but most of it was perfectly predictable, without surprises. The only thing that was surprising during the nineties was how important the Internet became in practice, even if the evolution of its underlying technology was not surprising.
The time correctly delimited by you was the time of the greatest false political hopes, when everybody around the World believed that we got rid of the communist blood-sucking parasites and now the World would become that which had been described for decades in the propaganda of the Voice of America, where the political elites are held accountable for their actions, so if they are bad they are replaced through democratic elections, and the bad commercial companies are eliminated by competition in the free market.
Instead of this happening, already a couple of years before 9/11 a wave of destructuring many important historical companies happened, followed by a huge wave of mergers and acquisitions that has continued until today and which has eliminated competition from most markets, so that they are now dominated by quasi monopolies. Then the democratic elections have brought to power worse and worse human beings, all of whom have been much worse than some citizens that would have been randomly selected for those positions.
Nowadays, the economies of USA and of the other "Western" countries, and also their political institutions, resemble much more those of the socialist countries that they mocked during the seventies, than those of USA and W. Europe of that time.
So all the hopes of the nineties were naive and none of them was realized.
Yes, and the four RS-25 main engines on the SLS rocket (Space Launch System) are literally SSME's harvested from the shuttles (Space Shuttle Main Engine). Of course that means they are re-usable. So sad to see them plummet to the ocean floor. Perversely Rocketdyne is building cheaper non-reusable versions of the RS-25 for future missions.
Still, it's probably true that Claude Code (etc) will be more successful working on clean, well-structured code, just like human coders are. So short-term, maybe not such a big deal, but long-term I think it's still an unresolved issue.
I imagine it is way more affordable in terms of tokens to implement a feature in a well organized code base, rather than a hacky mess of a codebase that is the result of 30 band-aid fixes stacked on top of each other.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
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