Comment by MomsAVoxell
4 days ago
It occurred to me recently that with AI/ML, we can basically keep any and all software going, no matter if its original authors retire it .. its getting to the point where an AI can reliably parse the bytes and apply whatever ABI is defined for the platform, and then .. add features, fix bugs, and so on.
Are we witnessing the end of the age of source code? In many ways, the signs are on the horizon that we are.
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://web.archive.org/web/20231114211656/http://www.gareth...>
(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)
I too maintain a small fleet of virtualized copies of the silent machines which now still sit on the shelf, unpowered, nevertheless .. there if they are needed.
Vernor Vinge’s works have indeed had a huge impact on the way we think about things, and his immense insight is still extraordinary with every read.