Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Xenotime :trans_fedi: (xeno@hexokina.se)'s status on Friday, 13-Feb-2026 07:11:53 JST Xenotime :trans_fedi:

   hot take: Claude Code being able to spit out a (very shitty) C compiler is not that impressive at all.
   
   Did they exclude all C compilers from it's training set? No?
   
   So you compressed a bunch of a existing code, including C compilers, into a multibillion parameter vector, and then were able to recover enough to construct (through trial-and-error) a functional-ish C compiler.
   
   And it cost $20.000, just for the recovery part, in credits priced by a company that is burning cash at an insane rate
   
   Not to mention that really a C compiler is not that complicated a thing to make, it's just a whole lot of mappings between constructs in C and assembly. Building a good C compiler is very hard of course. (They did NOT do this)
   
   But sure, go ahead and write a dumb blog post with a vague and ominous ending about how scary this is we basically made jarvis or whatever.

   • prettygood likes this.
   • Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Kenny (weizenspreu@chaos.social)'s status on Friday, 13-Feb-2026 07:12:49 JST Kenny

     in reply to

     @xeno So much this!

     If a shitty database with lossy compression is mind-blowing for some then how will they react when they learn they can just download a fully-functional C compiler from a website.

   • Embed this notice
     William D. Jones (cr1901@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 13-Feb-2026 07:13:24 JST William D. Jones

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @xeno @dalias When I say "the world needs more crappy C compilers to exist", this... is not what I had in mind :'D.