Two Stop Bits | @mmphosis @masswork - not really surprised that the LLM doesnt know Applesoft or...

bmonkey325 4 days ago | parent

@mmphosis @masswork - not really surprised that the LLM doesnt know Applesoft or Atari BASIC. Even if all the print material produced in the pre-internet era was machine readable, it would be dwarfed by the amount of visual basic and VB.NET material that was put on the internet in blog posts, tutorials github. Even the old print material wouldn't always be precise. "Here is this months game - written in BASIC"....only because it as InCider or Analog or Antic would you know by meta inference that it was the specific BASIC.

As a preservationist, it now gives me a motive to start putting retro code up on github to reinforce the nitty details of what we lost in the fire with Commodore, Apple II and Atari 8-bit machines....

masswerk 4 days ago
On the other hand, there are probably about as many references to BASIC not being just BASIC, but rather referring to a variety of dialects, as there are digitized listings. Moreover, about every of those listings is accompanied by a reference to the specific dialect it applies to. If there was a world model, it should be clear that these are not the same identical reference and those rather refer to a complex set of is-a / has-a relations. The actual outcome illustrates a serious limitation of LLMs with regard to real-world tasks.
(It also seems to hint at a general issue with intersecting partitions and, I guess, the same would apply to JS in the era of the "browser wars", say, something that runs on both Netscape 4.0x and the various incarnations of IE4.x, to make it easy.)
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