9 Apr
2025
9 Apr
'25
1:19 a.m.
Nay-saying is always easy. I'd rather hear from
smart people who
can tell me whether or how a tool is useful now, as well as how it
might enhance projects in the future.
Why couldn't a present or future AI help you translate from one BASIC
dialect to another, if that's what you want to do? If you want a tool
to do that, how could you help make it possible? How can AI tools
help with disassembly? How might they help you search and understand
and get answers from all the files in your digital packratting?
For the record, my first paying programming job in '81 was translating
between dialects of BASIC.
- John
It possibly could! Try it with ChatGPT and see if it works.
For an example of how bad ass the AI stuff is.... A friend and I are
supposed to supply a bunch of restored pinball and arcades to a bar
restaurant arcade type thing. Vendors are asking around $10,000 for a
change machine that can take credit card payment and dispense tokens.
The people putting the place together asked if machines can be had used. I
tell them, for dollar bills easy but not the modern credit card ones. Can
I make one, they ask. I start digging around looking for info on those
terminals and how transaction setups work for them to judge if it would be
easy to add a subsystem to an older change machine to accept card payments
and dispense tokens. Developer only portals that require signups, fake
sites trying to harvest data and sell you their services, sigh. Google
used to be better.
Hit up ChatGPT. A few specifically asked questions and it craps out
example code for telling the exact terminal I asked about the amount you
wish to charge and picking up status. Very cool, and more than I was
looking for. Confirms that the card info staying on the PCI compliant CC
terminal and never crossing to my system should meet PCI compliance. Asked
it more questions about payment gateways, processors, and is it possible
to share those accounts between popular touchscreen point of sale
terminals. The thing answered a lot and gave a lot of specific examples of
various brands of equipment and if you can share the accounts. All in like
5 minutes. I could get it to crank out the code for the end user UI as
well as code for arduino to manage communications to the 90s era change
machine easily. It just reduced a bunch of web searches to 5 minutes with
very specific examples. Some risk it could be wrong, but nothing major.
It's wild, give it a try. ChatGPT is free. Throw it some odd stuff, and
give it quite a bit of detail in your question. I just asked it to write
me code for IMSAI 8080 to bounce LED back and forth and it is cranking it
out with comments in the code. It tells me about the front panel switches,
but if I have a monitor rom it's easier. Asked me if I want instructions
on toggling it in or data for a rom monitor even.
At VCF East someone griped that these GPT things are providing data that
is stolen from other people. Be it the artwork or the code or whatever. I
kind of fail to see the difference in training it on a large data set
versus some kid learning to play piano by playing the Thexder theme or
Arbands books for brass or whatever. We all build on what have learned
from other people's examples.
It's neat.
--
: Ethan O'Toole