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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

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

#351

Post by calgoo »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #279
ACCount37 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think there's a good niche for "better C" - and that Zig was the one language angling for that. A language that can be used in the same contexts as C, to do the same things as C code, in very much the same way, but with some modern features, some stronger guarantees and some helpful syntactic sugar? A welcome thing for embedded development. On the other end, Rust to me felt like "better C++" - outside the e…

What makes go so awful to write? My impression was that Rust was hard, at least until you understand the borrow checker, and go was pretty easy. (This is my impression from outside, that is, I don't actually use either language.)

Not OP, but normally people complain because its boring, but these days, have an LLM generate all the template coding, the json mappings or whatever people dont like. Personally, with all the compromised NPM and PiP packages, when i PoC / vibe code something, i tend to use Golang very few external packages (native sqlite) and thats it. Also really nice to be able to package up the App and all related files into 1 binary.

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

#352

Post by dakolli »

phoghed wrote: post #247
jonkoops wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And also he implied he doesn’t even want to engage with anything relating to this since Jarred is toxic and there is no value in the debate. If he doesn't want to get involved, then why even write this piece?

He essentially was having a tantrum

You're allowed to have a tantrum when a 10 figure company is doing a marketing stunt and shitting on your life's work to do so.

If you spend X amount of years building something, and someone you know to be a mediocre dev trashes it in an effort to enrich themselves, you're allowed to expose the things you know about them. End of story. I wish more people would throw a tantrum. We should expose all these charleton and thieves.

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

#353

Post by asdf88990 »

mbesto wrote: post #344
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.

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 shou…

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

Quality is a bit nuanced but that quality of AI generated content is subpar to expert output is fairly established.

The implications of this ever becoming false amounts to GAI.

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

#354

Post by fg137 »

I have no beef in this flight -- I don't write Zig or Rust or use Bun (other than using Claude Code which runs on Bun, but that's an implementation detail that I don't care). But the more I look at this, the more I despise Anthropic and respect the Zig foundation. One is like "we can do whatever we want because WE HAVE MONEY, what can you do about it", the other looks at things from a engineering perspective.

It will be sad if everyone buys Anthropic's hype, forget the basic engineering principles in this industry and think that AI solves every problem. Fortunately lots of people don't.

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

#355

Post by deaton »

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…

I've always viewed unsafe Rust as a sort of last resort you use when you just can't do something safely. Porting something to "unsafe Rust" to me feels pointless, and of course this hasty rewrite was probably not the best idea from any perspective.

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

#356

Post by sph »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244
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…

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and…

Yes, there is a widespread belief in tech that 'removing friction' is a good direction to aim for. But you can have too little friction that completely ruins a product and the user experience.

In game design friction very important; remove all friction and you don't even have a game any more, you might as well show the You Win screen. My favourite metaphor for it is sex: there is no sex without friction.

What LLM have done is massively reduce the friction of intellectual effort, completely devaluing most expressions of it.

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

#357

Post by lolinder »

torginus wrote: post #211
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…

I don't even get what they gain by Rust - Bun imports Webkit, which is a C++ project, relying on it for stuff like JITing Javascript. I would say that's a major concern, and making sure the JIT doesn't emit anything broken or naughty is completely outside the scope of Rust.

> making sure the JIT doesn't emit anything broken or naughty is completely outside the scope of Rust.

It's also outside the scope of the project if they're using Webkit's engine for that part. Which means Bun itself isn't a JIT, it's all the stuff built around the Webkit JIT, so whether or not Rust is useful for the JIT is entirely immaterial to the question of if Bun would benefit from Rust.

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

#358

Post by fg137 »

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.

easy or good?

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

#359

Post by deaton »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244
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…

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and…

I think you're right, and I think this principle of friction-is-good-actually applies to a lot more domains than just software, but whether the world will ever accept that is a different question.

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

#360

Post by [deleted] »

cheikhcheikh wrote: post #160
embedding-shape wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Incredible the different takeaways people get from text content on the internet It is incredible isn't it. "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs" "The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total sh…

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