<antirez>

I used AI with success 5 minutes ago.

Just five minutes ago, I was writing a piece of software and relied on AI for assistance. Yet, here I am, starting this blog post by telling you that artificial intelligence, so far, has proven somewhat useless. How can I make such a statement if AI was just so helpful a moment ago? Actually, there's no contradiction here if we clarify exactly what we mean.

Here’s the thing: at this very moment, artificial intelligence can support me significantly. If I'm struggling with complicated code or need to understand an advanced scientific paper on math, I can turn to AI for clarity. It can help me generate an image for a project, make a translation, clean my YouTube transcript. Clearly, it’s practical and beneficial in these everyday tasks.

By multiple accounts, the web is losing pieces: every year a fraction of old web pages disappear, lost forever. We should regard the Internet Archive as one of the most valuable pieces of modern history; instead, many companies and entities make the chances of the Archive to survive, and accumulate what otherwise will be lost, harder and harder. I understand that the Archive headquarters are located in what used to be a church: well, there is no better way to think of it than as a sacred place.

It’s not new, but it’s accelerating. People that used to say that LLMs were a fundamentally flawed way to reach any useful reasoning and, in general, to develop any useful tool with some degree of generality, are starting to shuffle the deck, in the hope to look less wrong. They say: “the progresses we are seeing are due to the fact that models like OpenAI o1 or DeepSeek R1 are not just LLMs”. This is false, and it is important to show their mystification as soon as possible.

First, DeepSeek R1 (don’t want to talk about o1 / o3, since it’s a private thing we don’t have access to, but it’s very likely the same) is a pure decoder only autoregressive model. It’s the same next token prediction that was so strongly criticized. There isn’t, in any place of the model, any explicit symbolic reasoning or representation.

We are destroying software by no longer taking complexity into account when adding features or optimizing some dimension.

We are destroying software with complex build systems.

We are destroying software with an absurd chain of dependencies, making everything bloated and fragile.

We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.

We are destroying software by no longer caring about backward APIs compatibility.

I’m not the kind of person that develops a strong attachment to their own work. When I decided to leave Redis, about 1620 days ago (~ 4.44 years), I never looked at the source code, commit messages, or anything related to Redis again. From time to time, when I needed Redis, I just downloaded it and compiled it. I just typed “make” and I was very happy to see that, after many years, building Redis was still so simple.

My detachment was not the result of me hating my past work. While in the long run my creative work was less and less important and the “handling the project” activities became more and more substantial — a shift that many programmers are able to do, but that’s not my bread and butter — well, I still enjoyed doing Redis stuff when I left. However, I don’t share the vision that most people at my age (I’m 47 now) have: that they are still young. I wanted to do new stuff, especially writing. I wanted to stay more with my family and help my relatives. I definitely needed a break.

The Raspberry Pico is suddenly becoming my preferred chip for embedded development. It is well made, durable hardware, with a ton of features that appear designed with smartness and passion (the state machines driving the GPIOs are a killer feature!). Its main weakness, the lack of connectivity, is now resolved by the W variant. The data sheet is excellent and documents every aspect of the chip. Moreover, it is well supported by MicroPython (which I’m using a lot), and the C SDK environment is decent, even if full of useless complexities like today fashion demands: a cmake build system that in turn generates a Makefile, files to define this and that (used libraries, debug outputs, …), and in general a huge overkill for the goal of compiling tiny programs for tiny devices. No, it’s worse than that: all this complexity to generate programs for a FIXED hardware with a fixed set of features (if not for the W / non-W variant). Enough with the rant about how much today software sucks, but it must be remembered.

From a theoretical standpoint, the best reply provided by an LLM is obtained by always picking the token associated with the highest probability. This approach makes the LLM output deterministic, which is not a good property for a number of applications. For this reason, in order to balance LLMs creativity while preserving adherence to the context, different sampling algorithms have been proposed in recent years.

Today one of the most used ones, more or less the default, is called top-p: it is a form of nucleus sampling where top-scoring tokens are collected up to a total probability sum of “p”, then random weighted sampling is performed.

My usual process for writing blog posts is more or less in two steps:

1. Think about what I want to say for weeks or months. No, I don’t spend weeks focusing on a blog post, the process is exactly reversed: I write blog posts about things that are so important to me to be in my mind for weeks.

2. Then, once enough ideas collapsed together in a decent form, I write the blog post in 30 minutes, often without caring much about the form, and I hit “publish”. This process usually works writing the titles of the sections as I initially just got the big picture of what I want to say, and then filling the empty paragraphs with text.

I'll start by saying that this article is not meant to be a retrospective on LLMs. It's clear that 2023 was a special year for artificial intelligence: to reiterate that seems rather pointless. Instead, this post aims to be a testimony from an individual programmer. Since the advent of ChatGPT, and later by using LLMs that operate locally, I have made extensive use of this new technology. The goal is to accelerate my ability to write code, but that's not the only purpose. There's also the intent to not waste mental energy on aspects of programming that are not worth the effort. Countless hours spent searching for documentation on peculiar, intellectually uninteresting aspects; the efforts to learn an overly complicated API, often without good reason; writing immediately usable programs that I would discard after a few hours. These are all things I do not want to do, especially now, with Google having become a sea of spam in which to hunt for a few useful things.

The Idle scan was conceived at the end of 1998, evidenced by emails. I had moved to Milan a few months prior, having been there since September if I recall correctly, brimming with new ideas, unaware that my stay in that city would be brief. I spent the summer on the beaches of Sicily, mainly occupied with reading many books recommended by the folks at Seclab (mostly by David). However, those readings needed a catalyst: the Idle scan was an attack born from theoretical rumination, but the stream of thoughts originated from a rather practical circumstance. I had recently created Hping, a tool whose logo was borrowed from that of Nutella. I mention this to emphasize the seriousness that governed my efforts at that time — after all, I was only twenty-one and already in Northern Italy with a full-time job on my shoulders; some understanding was warranted.