this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

No. I most often see the AI generate python to do things it can’t directly. But this is a huge question: that program could do anything, do you let it?

How do you safely use an AI, anyway? You start with guardrails, like limiting it to read-only, you tell it to plan only, make sure that any data is also held in a safe place, when it prompts you to let it run something, try to understand it first ….. but in order to get any benefit from AI, you have to let it do potentially dangerous things.

Any language that is turing complete is equally powerful, you should compare languages based on featuresets and syntax. Compiled vs interpreted is probably the biggest thing for you to pick between.

[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 8 points 14 hours ago

From an AI safety perspective, the language used isn't that important. An analogy might be asking what kind of hammer is good and safe for building a bomb. Some hammers might let you get the job done easier and/or faster, but ultimately you can do it with any of them (and get into long arguments with hammer fans on which one is the best). Similar to the hammer example, "powerful" isn't a meaningful quality either; is a hammer with a nail extractor thing more "powerful" than a heavier one you can swing harder?

There is lots of nuance, of course, but it comes down to "best tool for the job" rather than one being more "powerful" than another.

[–] CombatWombat@feddit.online 18 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Programming languages are pretty interchangeable at the heart of it, so you're not gonna get consensus on "most powerful," and no, it's not safe to use with ai because llms are not healthy and safe for humans and other living things.

[–] Hirohito@fedinsfw.app 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you. I don't know how computers work at all!

[–] CombatWombat@feddit.online 3 points 12 hours ago

If you're curious about diving deeper on why I say languages are "pretty interchangeable," the key terms to read up on are "Turing equivalence" and the "Church-Turing thesis."

[–] modernangel@sh.itjust.works 5 points 15 hours ago

assembly language

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 0 points 15 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Hirohito@fedinsfw.app 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I confess I don't really know how this works.

[–] iceberg314@slrpnk.net 3 points 12 hours ago

I say, if you're interested in kinda hardware start with an Arduino (C++). Or just generally curious about messing around with code, start with Python