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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

#341

Post by postalrat »

dcre wrote: post #306
pizza234 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users Anthropic absolutely is in the programming language market. If/since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy, a success story will tie the given language(s) to the given AI company. Rust may have a tremendous success in the futu…

> since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy This premise makes no sense. AI makes rewrites to any language easy.

IMO there is no reason to believe llms create equal quality code in all languages.

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

#342

Post by dakolli »

bob001 wrote: post #273
bourbonproof wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely a useful lesson here. If it would have been written as "political correct" version up to the point of not calling Jarred out at all would have missed the core message. The fact that it was written blunt is the reason it went viral.

Viral is not an inherently good thing unless you're an influencer. Not all publicity is good publicity.

uhhh, that's not how the how that figure speech goes. There's a reason why people say all publicity is good publicity, and you can't just flip that to fit your perspective.

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

#343

Post by skybrian »

qwery wrote: post #277
jonkoops wrote: post #142

What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. I don't care that Bun was ported to Rust; I don't care that Andrew wrote a hit piece about it; I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush. What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of ref…

The facts as presented from the Bun side show a lack of technical merit for the rewrite. This shouldn't be surprising, because rewrites are bad engineering , in most cases. The Bun project was started in Zig by someone with a lack of experience using the language, despite the massive scope and complexity, and was effectively a rewrite from another language in the first place. From the Bun post: > Bun started as a lin…

Porting TypeScript to Go in 7.0 doesn’t seem like bad engineering. Neither does this port, given that that Bun started out in a somewhat buggy state.

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

#344

Post by mbesto »

manphone wrote: post #208
sph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…

It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

You can't unilaterally say all AI blogs are low quality. That's bullshit.

> would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading

To your point however, the reason people don't like AI generated blogs is because there is a explicit recognition that the author of the blog lacked effort. There is a visceral response for the reader about the social contract "if you didn't spend as much time as I did why should I care about what's written here", it's however NOT that the quality is inherently poor (but perhaps one my insinuate that notion).

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

#345

Post by postalrat »

embedding-shape wrote: post #294
Anon1096 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post seems pretty polite. Did you have Claude write it for you?

That'd have been fun, wouldn't it? No, I'm too lazy for that, HN gets my raw and unfiltered disgustingly human thoughts and feelings, unfortunately for all of you. For shits and giggles, I asked Sol xhigh what it thought about my previous comment, giving it a "6.5/10 for politeness", saying "it’s polite in tone, but somewhat provocative and reductive in substance.". Maybe this filter should also include provocativene…

To be useful the filter should give a positive on content I personally disprove of.

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

#346

Post by Leonard_of_Q »

27183 wrote: post #259
manphone wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

Writing is thinking. If you don't spend time writing, then you didn't spend time thinking. LLMs don't think. Consequently, if you outsourced your writing to an LLM the resulting artifact was born of a thoughtless process. Instead of engaging your readers in your thought process you're tricking them with a puzzle. Readers will try to understand what you're thinking about (at least the non-passive ones will). This acti…

Is writing thinking? Good writing requires thinking but does that also go for sloppy writing? What is thinking? This is the subject of a discussion [1, 2] I'm in - which in true HN style has been greyed-out because of ${reasons} - regarding the question whether these models 'think'. Your comment on writing [being] thinking supports the idea that what these models do is a form of thinking: selecting the next most likely descriptor given the current problem space including all previously added descriptors.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884193

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48890755

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

#347

Post by pseudony »

Gigachad wrote: post #334
whizzter wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen. What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lo…

All I’ve seen is there is literally no programmer smart and careful enough to never create a use after free or out of bounds read in a sufficiently complex codebase. The state of computer security has moved on from the old model of just patching bugs when you find them. To now where we need to systematically prevent them from happening to begin with.

- types rarely catch the interesting errors

- any GC'ed language can manage memory for you if you want

- My first rust project (a gui app in GTK) managed to segfault just fine in spite of Rust (no unsafe blocks on my part, not deliberately trying to break anything).

- I think the state of computer security has moved on still, we now rely on LLMs armed with various tools to pick apart and try to break our code AND to generate our code -- it is not at all obvious to me that banging your head against the borrow checker is a worthwhile tradeoff in this new world.

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

#348

Post by Ygg2 »

shirol wrote: post #325
Ygg2 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. I just think you're taking judge by number of segfaults out of context. That said, I wrote this before the edit.

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

#349

Post by taude »

BetterThanSober wrote: post #271
sph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…

I wonder how much they spend on this rewrite, in tokens and $ using commercial pricing

it said in the original article on the bun rewrite ~165K.

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

#350

Post by lolinder »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #203
herrkanin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with? In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.

> clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries This is not done by blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day. You do have to make conscious decisions about code architecture to manage Unsafe code, since you need choose the right invariants for your Safe Rust code to conform inside the module (Note that unsafe pollutes the whole module containing it, not just the code inside the unsafe block!)

No one involved in the port proposed "blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day". From the first blog post the creator said:

> We can gradually refactor it to reduce unsafe usage and look more like idiomatic Rust after Bun v1.4 ships.

What the rewrite does is make the unsafe code greppable, which is a necessary first step to eliminating it and one that's actually achievable rather than going straight to idiomatic.

Every successful refractor takes this form of stepwise changes that leave the behavior intact. It just so happens that in this case the first stepwise change was the implementation language.

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