The example is kind of pedantic, but I think a linter might be able to catch it.

Also GNU, since it's not-a-unix.

Seems pretty silly in hindsight and probably was back then as well. If communist committees could write like Lem, the world would be a much richer place today.

What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible.

On a lighter note, his electronic bard from The Cyberiad is pretty spot on, quite similar to the LLMs we have now.

What blew me away from the Cyberiad was how funny it was.

I know the title is meant to be a play on The Iliad but the stories remind me more of Don Quixote.

When I was reading it, it seemed a lot of bits reappeared as Futurama jokes but then got to the story with the robot named Calculon and that made it obvious.

I used to know the Russian translation by heart (and all of Ijon Tichy)

I loved how is was mentioned in passing (as I recall it, 30 years later), that Ijon Tichy was followed by an entourage of Tichiologists.

It's interesting what you can build now without looking under the hood. But if he wants to continue using the app, he's about to find out that there's more to software that just coding a prototype.

Nice. Looks like a hacking game user interface.

thx <3 it's definitely inspired by many such things :) check out the early alpha here: https://molly-da7e3.web.app/

He's the Immortal Dutchman.

Using natural language to specify and build an application is not unlike having a game design document before you actually start prototyping your game. But once you have implemented the bulk of what you wanted, the implementation becomes the reference and you usually end up throwing away the GDD since it's now out of sync with the actual game.

Insisting that for every change one should go read the GDD, implement the feature and then sync back the GDD is cumbersome and doesn't work well in practice. I've never seen that happen.

But if there ever comes a time when some AI/LLM can code the next version of Linux or Windows from scratch based on some series of prompts, then all bets are off. Right now it's clearly not there yet, if ever.

It looks like were're going to have AIs helping us play Minecraft soon. It seems like they did have to nudge it in the right direction though so it could discover how to mine diamonds.

And then there is the fact that voice isn't the dominant mode of expression for all people. Some are predominantly visual thinkers, some are analytic and slow to decide, while some prefer to use their hands and so on.

I guess there's just no substitute for someone actually doing the work of figuring out the most appropriate HMI for a given task or situation, be it voice controls, touch screens, physical buttons or something else.