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Astral to Join OpenAI

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#641

Post by jhasse »

brabel wrote: post #555
getpokedagain wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using MIT licensed software being run by small vc backed operations if you value stability. They are risky and often costly Trojan horses.

What do you mean? MIT is essentially as open as you can get. The worst that can happen is that they will relicense, eventually, to force big users to pay, but when that happens everybody knows how it goes: some consortium of other big companies forks it and continues development as if nothing happened.

Well if it's GPL without CLA and they accept outside contributions, they can't relicense / make it propriatary. Unlike with MIT.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#642

Post by stephbook »

sschueller wrote: post #385
japhyr wrote: post #105

This has me thinking about VS Code and VS Codium. I've used VS Code for a while now, but recently grew annoyed at the increasingly prevalent prompts to subscribe to various Microsoft AI tools. I know you can make them go away, but if you bounce between different systems, and particularly deal with installing VS Code on a regular basis, it becomes annoying. I started using VS Codium, and it feels like using VS Code be…

MS is actively making your life using VS Codium a pain. They removed the download button the extension marketrplace making it very difficult to download extensions and installing them in VS Codium since VS Codium does not have access to the official MS extension marketplace. Many don't publish outside the marketplace for example Platformio. [1] [1] https://github.com/platformio/platformio-vscode-ide/issues/1...

1. You can add a bookmark that executes enough JavaScript to download the VSIX as usual. 2. I think you can patch the product.json from VSCodium to use VSCode. Gets overwritten on every update probably.

Honestly though, it's easier to disable ~three settings in VSCode and call it a day.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#643

Post by aseipp »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #582
krick wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, well, the fact is that every person who ever touches Python needed uv, but only Astral folks created it. So, nope, there's no one capable of filling the void, just accept that it's fucked now. The best die first.

If that were true, Astral wouldn't have been able to build it in the first place. It's an Open Source tool. Perhaps folks excited about working on it can move to the Python Foundation and maintain it there. Perhaps companies who saw today's acquisition and became deeply worried about the future of this tooling could help support and fund such an effort.

Part of the reason Astral as a team is so well liked is precisely because they are not part of the main fold or related to "Core Python"; they are an independent vendor, one that delivered high quality code and listened directly to users and their own (extensive) experience to do so, and they succeeded at that repeatedly. Python packaging has {been seen as, actually been} miserable for years, and so by the same token the capacity to believe in/buy into solutions from the "core project" has dwindled. "If it took Astral to fix it, why would it be any different going forward?"

So that's all it really comes down to; uv isn't loved just because it's great but because it is in good hands. This real/perceived change of hands pretty much explains all the downstream responses to the news that you see in this thread. Regardless of who bought them, any fork is going to have very, very big shoes to fill, and filling those shoes appropriately is the big worry.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#644

Post by mountainriver »

vaylian wrote: post #579
mountainriver wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What language is universally better than Python? I don't think Python is perfect, but it is definitely one of the best languages out there. It is elegant and it is has a huge ecosystem of libraries, frameworks and tutorials. There is a lot of battle-tested software in Python that is running businesses.

What?! It's one of the slowest languages on the planet, it's not type safe, it has not real concurrency.

I can't believe people say this with a straight face

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#645

Post by PaulHoule »

theptip wrote: post #616
arw0n wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruff is nice, but not important, uv is one of the few things making the python ecosystem bearable. Python is a language for monkeys, and if you don't give monkeys good tools, they will forever entangle themselves and you . It is all garbage wrapped in garbage. At least let me deploy it without having to manually detangle all that garbage by version. I'm done pretending this is a "right tools for the right job" kind o…

I agree uv is great but let’s not get carried away here. Poetry is good, pip was fine for many use-cases after they added native lock files.

if you are working on one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages you probably think pip was OK.

Circa 2017 I was working on systems that were complex enough that pip couldn't build them and after I got to the bottom of it I knew it not my fault but it was the fault of pip.

I built a system which could build usable environments out of pre-built wheels and sketched out the design of a system that was roughly 'uv but written in Python' but saw two problems: (1) a Python dependent system can be destroyed by people messing with Python environments, like my experience is that my poetry gets trashed every six months or so and (2) there was just no awareness by the 'one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages' people that there was a correctness problem at all and everybody else was blaming themselves for a problem and didn't have a clear understanding of what was wrong with pip or what a correct model for managing python dependencies is (short answer: see maven) or that a 100% correct model was even possible and that we'd have to always settle for a 97% model. The politics looked intractable so I gave up.

Now written in rust, uv evaded the bootstrap problem and it dealt with the adoption problem by targeting 'speed' as people would see the value in that even if they didn't see the value in 'correctness'. My system would have been faster than pip because it would have kept a cache, but uv is faster still.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#646

Post by mountainriver »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #480
mountainriver wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> cost of significantly better languages is essentially free Is it? We still need meatspace humans to vet what these AI agents produce. Languages like C++ / Rust etc still require huge cognitive overhead relative to Python & that will not change anytime soon. Unless the entire global economy can run on agents with minimal human supervision someone still has to grapple with the essential complexity of getting a comput…

Yeah that's sort of fair today, although we have switched over most of our org to Rust and it hasn't been much of a problem. The LLM can usually explain small parts of code with high accuracy if you are unsure.

Overall the switch has been very much loved. Everything is faster and more stable, we haven't seen much of a reduction in output

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#647

Post by mountainriver »

kevin42 wrote: post #476
mountainriver wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's an interesting take, but I'm not sure 'easy to write' is the only advantage. There is also a really good ecosystem of libraries, especially for scientific computing. My experience has been that Claude can write good c++ code, but it's not great about optimization. So, curated Python code can often be faster than an AI's reimplementation of an algorithm in c++.

Yeah ML is the one of the only spaces I could see it living on, but even then doing it in C++ isn't that much harder for an LLM

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#648

Post by paddy_m »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #447
throwaway63467 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a small tool shop building a tiny part of the Python ecosystem, let’s not overstate their importance. They burned through their VC money and needed an exit and CLI tool chains are hyped now for LLMs, but this mostly sounds like an acquihire to me. Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.

> Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit. I'm on the fence about cancelling my JetBrains subscription I've had for nearly 10 years now. I just don't use it much. Zed and Claude Code cover all my needs, the only thing I need is a serious DataGrip alternative, but I might just sit down with Claude and build one for myself.

What do you want in your datagrip alternative. I'm working on some stuff, and interested to hear how people approach data with LLMs

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#649

Post by tomrod »

deadbabe wrote: post #477
tomrod wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could. I would stare longingly into the void, wondering if I can ever work another python project after having experienced uv, ruff, and ty. Such an outcome would make me wonder regarding the wisdom of "It is better to have love and lost than to have never loved at all."

Maybe consider something other than python.

Always choose the best tool for the job.

Then import that tool and and check if __name__ == "__main__"

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#650

Post by mountainriver »

jakeydus wrote: post #486
mountainriver wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I feel like this is a relatively hot take. Python has advantages beyond being easy to write. It's simple. It can do just about anything any other language can do. It's not the most performant on its own, but it's performant enough for 99% of use cases, and in the 1% you can write a new or use an existing C library instead. Its simplicity and ease of adoption make python very well represented in the training data. If…

> it's performant enough for 99% of use cases

My last two companies went all in on python and really regretted it. It's performance and concurrency primitives really hurt as you scale

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