I imagine you would want to test "idiomatic" code for these comparisons. It doesn't make much sense to compile with C++ and write everything in C.

Another interesting one is the ZPAQ compression program[1]. It is one of the top performers on the large text compression benchmark[2] and uses the bytecode to specify how to model the data.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZPAQ

[2]: https://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

I hope the brakes in my car don't need developers

I think you underestimate the complexity of modern braking systems.

ABS doesn't just appear organically.

Does HN randomly charge you money for using these phrases?

I made a program with some inline assembly and tried O3 with clang once. Because the assembly was in a loop, the compiler probably didn't have enough information on the actual code and decided to fully unroll all 16 iterations, making performance drop by 25% because the cache locality was completely destroyed. What I'm trying to say, is that loop unrolling is definitely not a guarantee for faster code in exchange for binary size

Large blocks of inline assembly also destroy -O3. The compiler treats the asm statement as being essentially empty and makes decisions around it. Most inline asm is 1 instruction, so this is usually safe.

> I don't know about survival bias. LLMs are well suited to this task of taking in this cloud of soft data like a description of symptoms and spitting out a potential diagnosis.

And it will do so confidently and incorrectly. A single description of symptoms from a patient is very unlikely to be enough. This is why doctors are there to ask follow-up questions and do examinations. Symptoms alone can describe a dozen different illnesses.

A lot of them are better in many areas. JPEG is just good enough (tm)

I read a while back that bzip2 is named that way because the original bzip used arithmetic coding. The person who made bzip then made bzip2 to use Huffman coding due to patent problems with arithmetic coding.

bzip3 is very different from bzip2. It is not even made by the same person and is not nearly as ubiquitous.

> I know this position is wrong, but it feels hard to spend my time on something that someone else might not have spent the time to create

I don't think that position is wrong. I felt similarly when tutoring a high-school student recently. They didn't do any work themselves, they were forced by their parent to come to me two days before a test. I offered to help, but when I realized that the student didn't care enough to study by themselves, I basically lost all motivation to help them.

It feels the same with AI-generated content. If the "creator" didn't care to spend time on it, why should I spend mine?