What are we going to do about software for critical infrastructure in the coming decade?

Feels inevitable that code for aviation will slowly rot from the same forces at play but with lethal results.

It will be written much the same as now, but using AI to improve quality through code inspection etc.

Just because nearly all software is going to be written by AI, does not mean critical infrastructure will be.

At some point people are going to start asking why software that doesn't need to be right should exist in the first place

I’m not sure I follow, but I don’t hear anyone asking those questions of the bad software we already have today.

Cabin in the woods.

Curious if you could try to explain it. It’s my goal to sit down with it and attempt to understand it intuitively.

Karpathy says if you want to truly understand something then you also have to attempt to teach it to someone else ha

Yes, that’s true! That could be my next step… though I have to admit, writing this in a HN comment feels like a bit of a challenge.

>> That deep, focused, creative problem-solving where hours disappear and you emerge with something you built and understand.

Yea but for how long? Go back and read any code you wrote a year ago and realize it could have been AI that wrote it.

Ha funny I had a similar idea I was calling ‘GameFlock’ but game date is much better.

To the creators I think there is something here worth continuing to push and try to find traction. As a game developer this is just a matchmaking algorithm with a week to month long wait time :)

My plan was to try to prime the pump with a few popular games and reaching out to existing communities to make them aware and possibly help organize the software/tools to help onboard new players.

For example Ultima Online has Outlands. Tribes2 has a popular discord that arranges matches. I imagine WoW classic and I know C&C Generals have active communities on Discord and I think they’d be willing to work with you to help prime the pump.

Then once you’ve got that critical mass of usage hope that players will participate in other games outside their main passion to make other game dates a success.

I believe the future of programming will be specs so I’m curious to ask you as someone who operates this way already, are there any public specs you could point to worth learning from that you revere? I’m thinking the same way past generations were referred to John Carmack’s Quake code next generations will celebrate great specs.

What’s the main use case for you or feature with the greatest promise?

It's only been a few days and I am still exploring, but my household has two adults and three kids all with very busy, individual schedules, and one of the nicest features was setting up a morning text message to everyone with reminders for the day. It checks school schedules, test reminders, sports events, doctor's appts (I am in PT), and adds personal context assuming it has access to it (it usually does). I understand much of this probably could have been done for a while, but this seems like the nicest packaged up assistant that I have tried.

I bought a Mac mini m4 last year to compile UE5 for iOS/iPad. It’s just been sitting around while I do my main dev work on Windows. Been wondering how I might put it to greater use and recently saw the hype around Mac Mini + Clawdbot. It would be fun to think that the Mac Mini unlocks some sweet spot of performance but I’m seeing responses from the Clawdbot developers showing how you can run Clawdbot on AWS’ free tier so guess the mini is not necessary / just a fantasy.

What do you estimate the cost would be to have each tile hand drawn by an artist?

I don't think there are enough artists in the world to achieve this in a reasonable amount of time (1-5 years) and you're probably looking at a $10M cost?

Part of me wonders if you put a kickstarter together if you could raise the funds to have it hand drawn but no way the very artists you hire wouldn't be tempted to use AI themselves.

The pragmatic side of me wonders if there is any way to shape this inevitable future now so we might see a better outcome 20 years.

You can work on building LLMs that use less compute and run locally as well. There are some pretty good open models. They probably be made even more computationally efficient.

Unplug

In all seriousness. Windows is invaded by copilot, OpenAI introducing ads, Google providing Siri for Apple, it’s all just a collusion to keep you buying. Disconnect. From TV, Media, Ads, Social Networks, Predatory subscriptions, all of it. The only way to show these companies that we are not on board with this is to not participate.

Reddit generates its revenue with schadenfreude, YouTube and AAA games with GenAI (see: Ghibli in Call of Duty, and fast growing AI channels like Nick Invests or Bernard with “Why it Sucks to be X”).

On my shelf from the corner of my eye I see “Understanding the Linux Kernel”. It’s outdated, but it comes from a time of peer review and subject matter experts. I don’t need to double guess if the author is hallucinating or if they’re subconsciously trying to sell me something.

Maybe it’s time we return to books for entertainment and knowledge share.

Vinyl and Paperbacks…

2026 is the year of the audio cassette!