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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

#551

Post by RetroTechie »

deaton wrote: post #359
TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a flavour of Jevons paradox. Make production of software much more efficient (requiring fewer developer-hours), then you might get:

1. Same services provided using similar software stack, but maintained by fewer developers. I suspect this may hold for some sectors in the economy. Or

2. The Jevons case: similar # of developers maintaining a much bigger software stack that provides more services.

I might add:

2a: Similar but with lots of accidental complexity everywhere.

Probably we're heading towards some mix of the above? Depending on which application area you're talking about. Web dev is a lost cause, deeply-embedded won't see a big shake-up.

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

#552

Post by metoobruh »

Aurornis wrote: post #391
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.

> If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad What misleading stuff? Makes Zig look bad how? The posts I read were appreciative to Zig. The only “misleading” piece of either blog post that I recall was the Andrew Kelley claim that Bun wasn’t fuzzing, which was easily refuted by pointing to their fuzzing work. If there’s something more then I’d like to see it, but every time I ask nobody can…

[flagged]

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

#553

Post by theptip »

kalcode wrote: post #474
Lerc wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I think it is worse than that, the comments from people in threads about this suggest that this is an attitude that is creeping into the community. They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a mor…

There seems to be a team sport mentality with AI topic in HN these days. Almost feels like people are picking sides, and thus not being very thoughtful or rational. Sigh, there definitely an attitude creeping into the community and it's a huge turn off unfortunately.

Yeah, I think AI could well destroy this community. There’s a lot of personal identity tied up in being a hacker (broadly defined), and only some aspects of that identity will be strengthened by AI.

Similar to Go and Chess, AI might make “programming for beauty” more accessible and popular. However it will almost certainly make the act of writing “code for money” much less valuable, which means many people will stop getting paid exorbitant sums to do what they love.

Personally what I loved was never the typing characters or optimizing algorithms; building is better than ever. But I really empathize with those who loved the craft of code golf, algorithms, literate programming, the elegance of micro structure of programs, etc. and who see their world under threat.

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

#554

Post by randusername »

Kiro wrote: post #61

I really don't understand what Andrew Kelly hopes to achieve here. Even the non-programmers at r/programming who usually piles on any type of anti-AI posts called it out. I'm trying to not let this affect my thoughts about Zig as a language but it's hard.

TFA has an odd perspective.

> Views are my own. I have no history with Zig. I’ve never spoken to Andrew Kelley

There are better primary sources to explain what ZSF is trying to achieve with its AI stance. Kelley's rant [0] was a bit much but the ZSF AI Policy [1] and Kelley's interview on it [2] are interesting and informative.

[0]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

[1]: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ

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

#556

Post by ibejoeb »

woodruffw wrote: post #28

I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad…

Everyone is motivated. It seems to me that Anthropic went out fishing for something to blow up. As Ray puts it: "Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products." Sounds spot on.

Others have pointed to some plausible technical benefits from the port, namely that it forces an enumeration of unsafe code boundaries. There's probably something to that, but the big idea is that Anthropic bet that its models could do a big job, and they needed to both demonstrate that and make hay of it. Everything aligned. They did the port. The artisans might call it slop, but it runs, they did it like 2 weeks, and they stuck it to the guy that shuns AI.

If you're the type of manager who picks farming out work to a body shop with 100 unskilled workers instead of hiring 2 legitimate FTEs, then this is speaking your language.

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

#557

Post by Xirdus »

metoobruh wrote: post #525
msdz wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you allow, I’m curious: If you felt familiar with the language just as much as with C/Zig/Odin, would you prefer Rust for a completely greenfield project that requires no C interop (or none more detailed than say providing a general ABI)?

[flagged]

I like my datacenters like I like my railway infrastructure - covered in enough protective layer of rust that it will never suffer structural damage even when running for years under extremely heavy load.

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

#558

Post by Orygin »

r2vcap wrote: post #170

Those problems are partly attributable to Zig itself. If the project accepted AI-assisted contributions, this controversy might never have happened. Completely shutting out one side of the industry and taking a dogmatic position is not helpful, especially for a pre-1.0 language that is still relatively immature. Now the Zig community is attacking one of the largest and best-known codebases ever built with the languag…

> If the project accepted AI-assisted contributions, this controversy might never have happened.

Had I given my wallet to the thief, this controversy (me getting stabbed) might never have happened.

This 100% was a way to getting back at Zig for not allowing their parent company's product, and a marketing move for Fable.

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

#559

Post by shimman »

dcre wrote: post #311
embedding-shape wrote: post #4

> Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products. Yeah, don't discount how powerful "marketing" is to management/executives, and also don't discount how absolutely ridiculously petty people can be, especially people who end up like CEOs and similar, req…

I don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all. It seems much more plausible to me that Jarred just does what he wants. He has said as much.

Devs need to start realize how people in power take advantage of them. If you already have a bright starry-eyed Peter Thiel acolyte, it's not hard to see how they can be taken advantage of. Especially when it's a multibillion dollar company that stands to give you literally multigenerational defining amount of wealth.

They hired them because they already agreed with them. Reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote during an interview:

> Marr: “How can you know I’m self-censoring?”

> Chomsky: “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

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

#560

Post by 999900000999 »

Havoc wrote: post #518
999900000999 wrote: post #281

Every one feels a bit wrong here. Zig’s author, Andrew Kelley is out of line here. > We made futile attempts to guide them towards better programming practices. There were a few exceptional heroes who did their very best in a dysfunctional company. You know who you are. But you can't stop a rising tide. https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht... So not only is Zig written by amateurs, but these a…

> can I spend a few thousand in Fable tokens and ship DinnerRoll( Bun in D). Probably. Likely would work with sub fable class model too. > Is that enough to raise a VC round? Doubtful. Think this move only works for someone with an existing product and following

> Doubtful. Think this move only works for someone with an existing product and following

So what you’re saying is actually build it, get it in the hands of end users and then find co-founder who does nothing but call his VC friends.

Maybe this co founder will be merciful enough to let me keep a 5% stake. Although in all seriousness, given Oven sold for ( Google AI estimate) hundred of millions that would still be more money than I’d ever need.

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