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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

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Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#321

Post by oblio »

BetterThanSober wrote: post #280
oblio wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic isn't selling that, that's the point. Anthropic is selling "coding is solved", worth $1tn. If they keep hiring developers and LLMs need huge procedural harnesses, then the hypocrisy is open for all to see. And worse for them, it probably means their business model is worth maybe 5-10x what Jetbrains is worth, not $1tn.

I agree that "coding" isn't solved but LLMs needing a harness is not necessarily a huge hit on AI As for valuation, it's all a grift, always has been for anything hip in tech. SpaceX should've been in the $500b range and they have an actual rocket and working satellite constellations

LLMs needing harnesses is a hit on AI because it means LLMs can't be extended a lot (or indefinitely as AI boosters hope). We're back to (enhanced) expert systems from the 80s and nobody is excited about those.

And regarding SpaceX, SpaceX even without xAI didn't make a ton of money and it's business initiatives are super long horizon things. Moon bases won't be profitable for at least 10 years and Mars bases probably for 20+.

Also, even though they are behind, competition is moving. China caught their first rocket yesterday (and we know they can move fast), BlueOrigin is behind but they have the money to keep going. The EU and India will keep investing and developing as rockets are a core concern for both, at some point they will have reusable rockets.

These huge valuations for SpaceX are predicated on winner takes all mechanics, which are mostly software based. Many markets don't work like that since the cost to get another unit of revenue increases linearly with that unit. Not like software where extra copies and customers are basically free.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#322

Post by piokoch »

jonplackett wrote: post #9

The thing is - is it a self fulfilling prophecy? We already know junior hiring an are down. And how many people are now excited to learn to code compared to 5years ago? How many of those excited people are ACTUALLY learning to code and not just learning to prompt? LLMs/agents will take over (or at least dominate) software dev even if they don’t get any better because humans will just get old and there’ll be no new hu…

Well, I see LLM coding capabilities as a great enabler for people who have some codeing-like skills or needs, but were not sufficiently skilled to do something more complicated. Think of people who are good at Excel, who use statistical tools like SAS, SPSS, other analytical software. Now they can ask LLM to create a Pandas/SAS lang script and do much more advanced stuff.

People who were in the marketing data analysis (like sentiment analysis) - 5 minutes and they have a code that uses Hugging Face model suited for sentiment analysis, zero-shot classification, etc. No need to pay for expensive online services or expensive NLP software. It's here for free or $20 a month.

Still, it does not mean you will be able to code database engine with LLM, application server, rewrite Django in Rust, etc. So software engineers still will be needed to do ambitious, complicated stuff.

So, I kind of see it backwards, real skills, like knowing algorithms, understanding performance (including hardware stuff like processor caches, etc.) will become needed, as other, simpler jobs that needed only a "coding monkey" will be gone.

We no longer need to dig ditches manually, we have machines for that, but the purpose of the ditches is still planned by man.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#324

Post by skilning »

woodruffw wrote: post #299
jraph wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad when you leave and if you avoid ghosting the Zig foundation in scheduled meetings you had with them, I suppose you should be good.

I think we can quibble about the Bun post’s factual claims. But I don’t think the post was deceptive or dishonest in its claims. Like most technical writing, it represents a vantage point. As for ghosting in meetings: sure, that seems bad. I would also be upset if someone did that to me. But you can state that factually without making it into a personal attack. It would even be more convincing.

> Like most technical writing,

I think you've missed the core thesis of the article. That post _wasn't_ technical writing. It was marketing disguised as technical writing.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#325

Post by shirol »

Ygg2 wrote: post #284
shirol wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just search "segfault" on the Zig issue tracker and you'll see why people are starting to be skeptical of the future utility of such a language in the face of something like Rust. Zig has 110 open "segfault" issues [1] versus Rust's 175 open "segfault" issues [2]. So, by your logic, Rust is also bad. edit: I was just trying to point out that the parent's "just search segfault" argument is lazy. Also, Zig is still i…

Without base rate you're comparing #X in a city vs #Y in a continent and drawing conclusions from that. It's not even wrong.

You’re literally agreeing that the parent’s argument is bad. I was just applying his logic, and I didn't draw any conclusions.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#326

Post by pier25 »

RetroTechie wrote: post #97

There's so much good stuff in this post. Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why? Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen. Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite. Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test su…

> Are Bun users happy with this?

I've gone back to Node.

There was a poll on r/bun with about 2000 votes and only about 30% of users voting they were going to use the Rust version. Can't seem to find it now.

Edit:

The poll was deleted

https://www.reddit.com/r/bun/comments/1u3j4d7/are_you_going_...

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#327

Post by Keyframe »

Sarcasm hat on - You know what, if LLMs were so infallible at coding and engineers useless for hands-on, then why even bother with anything except asm or even skip the mnemonics completely and go straight for the binary? Why even bother with abstract code when abstraction is now your LLM.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#328

Post by fridder »

cfiggers wrote: post #222
petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there. I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language becau…

I would say the flagship Zig project is TigerBeetle, not Bun.

or libghostty

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#330

Post by joshuamorton »

jraph wrote: post #215
entrope wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people are entitled to their emotions, but the ways they behave in public and express their emotions reflects on them in a major way. The Bun blog post focused on the technical reasons to change, and was complimentary about Zig. The Zig blog post was heavy on personal attacks, with some technical claims that the Bun blog post had mostly addressed already. Between the two, the Bun post is a lot more compelling fr…

[flagged]

> Of course when you are the creator of Zig, that may feel quite unfair and you should highlight it.

Then highlight that, don't repeatedly insult someone. If Andrew thinks the same kind of ai-assisted improvement would be possible in Zig, and that avoiding the kinds of errors migrating to rust achieved would be possible in Zig, he should demonstrate it. And I don't necessarily mean rewriting all of Bun in "better-zig", but like, if you're going to say "this project is bad because it is badly maintained, not because the language has limitations" then demonstrate something to that effect.

The only technical detail I recall from Andrew's post is that zig has faster compile times, which may well be true but what do I care?

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