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I am worried about Bun

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Re: I am worried about Bun

#191

Post by nofriend »

stkdump wrote: post #109
AntonyGarand wrote: post #11

I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Especially given the context of both of these different context: C…

It's interesting how quickly people buy the "abuse" line of thinking. We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription. That is independent of which agent/harness is used. The fair/real price for profitable use is the pay per use token pricing. These labs play the game of trying to kill competition in the har…

> We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription.

"profit" is a weird concept in the software business. it might be true that there is an opportunity cost to these users, either because they displace other potential users by using up capacity, or because they would be willing to pay more if forced. but I don't believe that anyone is losing money on inference costs on any of their plans.

> At some point they have to price their product fairly

they are competing in a market. if most of their costs were inference then this would be a good thing, because everyone would have roughly the same prices, so as long as they had the best model they would win. in fact model development costs eclipse the cost of inference, and is something that non frontier labs get for much cheaper by distilling from the frontier companies.

> They will have to compete on merit alone, and that is much less profitable.

that's not really true. google won search on merit alone, and were massively successful as a result. the trick is that everyone from the poorest shmuck to the richest businessman uses google, so they win through scale. in ai, google and openai are making a bet that they can do the same thing. there's only really room for one winner at this game, even two is stretching it, so anthropic has to win by being the smartest model that only high end businesses use. that's a very risky bet.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#192

Post by jillesvangurp »

Here's how I evaluate whether I'm going to use a given bit of OSS:

- Is the project important to me or can I replace it? If the latter, I'm more likely to allow failures of other criteria. If not, I need to be more strict. Bun is easy enough to replace if something were to happen to the project. Easy come, easy go.

- Are there any red flags in financing that could become problematic? Many VC funded OSS companies fail this test for me. What happens when they don't make it? What happens post IPO if they do? What happens when they get acquihired? Mostly that's up to share holders, not developers. Most VC funded companies actually don't make it and that's normal in the VC world. A few companies make it, everything else fails quickly. And there are a few examples of projects that have changed licenses under pressure of shareholders. That's why this is a red flag to me. I've used Redis and Elasticsearch, for example. And I switched away from Mongo before they changed the license. I used Terraform before they open sourced. All negative examples here.

Bun initially wasn't great on this. But the Anthropic acquisition has improved things a bit. It's still a risk. But it's unlikely they have any plans for Bun other than just keeping it alive by employing the main people working on it. Anthropic itself might still fail of course.

- Has the project been around for a long time. If so, it likely has a stable community and funding. There are no guarantees but the older the better. Bun is pretty newish still.

- Is the project stable and under active development? If it's stable because nobody makes changes anymore that's usually not a great sign. If it is stable despite a lot of active development, that's really positive. It means somebody competent is in charge. Bun seems pretty good on that front.

- Is the project otherwise structured right to be future proof. For me future proof is a combination of contributor community, commercial activity, and licensing. The more diverse the contributor community the better. If there are multiple companies sponsoring and making money of a project, that makes it less likely that a single one can hijack it for their own good. This is more common with permissively licensed software (but there are exceptions). Bun doesn't have much commercial activity around it and the regular contributor community is tiny. One person seems to be doing most of the work with only a handful of notable other contributors that are probably all Anthropic employed at this point. Out of these, the dependence on a single person looks the most problematic to me.

So, the overall score for bun is not perfect (there a few potential red flags) but I'm happy to risk using it because it's not that critical to me and easily replaceable.

My read of the whole Anthropic acquihire is that it is an improvement over the starting point which was a VC funded company that was probably going to fail otherwise. Otherwise, good tech and generally nice to use. I could see Anthropic going bad and this project surviving in one form or another. So, that doesn't have to be a show stopper.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#193

Post by amlug »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #136
veber-alex wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. It's one thing to use AI to write code but spamming machine generated garbage when talking to another person is just rude.

I see the thread and the patience of the other guy to continue talking to the AI, it's impressive

I'm the "AI cringe guy" if you want to call it that. Yet I am still waiting for someone to produce typescript that compiles wrongly.

I have limited time, and the little feedback that guy provided turned out to be perfectly well answered by AI. So sorry, but either you actually criticize something actionable to just shut up, but I don't have the time to debate this if the simple few lines don't get answered.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#194

Post by amlug »

lioeters wrote: post #107
veber-alex wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like AI slop https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/issues/139

> Good question, and you're basically right — let me show the smoking gun. :vomit:

Is there any Typescript that is compiled wrongly? If so, go ahead and show me.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#196

Post by overgard »

AntonyGarand wrote: post #11

I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Especially given the context of both of these different context: C…

> I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.

Incidentally, Anthropic needs to figure out how to monetize at some point too.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#197

Post by remexre »

Philpax wrote: post #135
ahepp wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I don’t understand about this viewpoint (which I understand isn’t your own): why does one benefit so tremendously from getting there a month before competitors? I’m sure having a month of superintelligence with no competition would be lucrative, but do they think achieving superintelligence first will impede competitors from also achieving it a month later?

A month with a superintelligence at your hands could be quite impactful, especially if you're willing to break the law / normal operating decorum in the pursuit of protecting what you have. A superintelligence, if wielded so, could destroy your competitors in a great many ways, including the relatively-benign solution of outcompeting them, to exploiting them and tearing them apart from the inside. A genuine superinte…

If I interpret "a machine superintelligence" as "a classroom of 300IQ humans," I'm not really sure how this is true? You still have material and energy constraints, you can't think your way out of those.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#198

Post by ec965 »

fhn wrote: post #51

I wonder why Anthropic chose to spend money on Bun when they could have easily spend that resource on Go which is fairly easy to use and fast. I'm sure their SWEs could easily everything things in Go. Anyone have insight on why?

Claude is still better at writing JS than it is Go.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#199

Post by airstrike »

zozbot234 wrote: post #174
zem wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only if said galactic superintelligence takes immediate steps to kill all its potential competitors, or hoover up all the world's resources, or some other aggressively zero sum thing. otherwise I don't see what difference it makes down the line of you have the second superintelligence rather than the first. and that's under the assumption that you can create a superintelligence that will continue to slavishly serve y…

If OpenAI has the second superintelligence they have to merge with the first and cooperate. It's a provision in their charter.

I'm not sure anyone thinks their charter carries much weight at this point.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#200

Post by NetMageSCW »

srdjanr wrote: post #54
DrBenCarson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree, you definitely don’t want to be looking back saying “hm I knew it, I saw the signs, should have trusted myself” Plus it’s not a huge lift right now

Genuine question: why not just wait? If Bun stays great, you saved yourself some time for switching, and got to keep using Bun. If Bun worsens, you spend the same time for switching, just moved a bit later, and got to use Bun for a little longer.

What happens to every new project you start on bun and have to switch?
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