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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

#671

Post by Cyberdog »

edude03 wrote: post #517
mech998877 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this, and I've been spending time thinking about it because some of my friends had a similar conversation. The friction itself does not add value. The time spent thinking on the problem does. Friction should be minimized beyond the absolute bare minimum. Programming is a discipline where your workstation is already streamlined, and it is easy to forget where the friction is. Programming is done in a w…

I liken it to dieting. If your only goal is to be certain weight, then learning how to cook, learning how to portion, learning to make a meal plan, learning about macro nutrients is all "friction" now that we have GLPs. And maybe using a meal prep service reduces some "unnecessary friction" but you still would have to learn a bunch of useful skills along the way. Concretely, If your only goal is to produce "software"…

As someone who has been losing weight over the past year, the cost of GLP1s is and was a greater point of friction to me compared to just eating less garbage.

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

#672

Post by 27183 »

nsagent wrote: post #515
sporkland wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's so much good stuff in this post. The post starts off so cynical. I know a few people at anthropic and oai and the simplest explanation also matches my observations that they actually believe what they say. That agents will be doing the bulk of the programming in the not so distant future. They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point. They aren't managing some message and trying to teach th…

Then they are naive. I've seen this a lot first hand during my PhD. Interpreting results in a way that reinforces their beliefs and ignores alternate hypotheses. Frequently, those alternative hypotheses are demonstrated to be true. For example, "emergence" as was researched and proclaimed by many labs, including places like OpenAI and Anthropic is due to using too few discrete steps in sampling a continuous phenomeno…

The number of people who think the emergence thing is settled smh... It's been a thing for at least 30yr, answering it one way or the other would be a big deal. It does nobody any favors having these infinitely capitalized hype firms calling themselves "labs".

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

#673

Post by ksec »

coldtea wrote: post #36
sajithdilshan wrote: post #15

I really don't understand what's the big deal here. Anthropic converted Bun from Zig to Rust using Fable and used that for marketing, but do people blindly trust them? Also isn't Zig still unstable and from that perspective regardless of how they did it, wouldn't it make sense to migrate it to a stable language?

> but do people blindly trust them Judging from internet posts and HN comments, many do.

>Judging from internet posts and HN comments, many do.

Judging from the HN comments in the past on Bun's rewrite. I wouldn't even use the word "many". It was literally all Anti-AI comments and reckless engineering behaviour complain.

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

#674

Post by woodruffw »

colinsane wrote: post #663
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…

> 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. my instinct is to step up and defend Andrew: to say that truly, he has strong opinions -- which is to say he _cares_ about doing things right -- but that he's more patient and accommodating than you're judging him to be from this 10,000ft view. that's kinda weird:…

I want to be very clear: I don't dislike Andrew (or Jarred). Everything I've seen about him suggests that he's a bright and motivated person, and (like a lot of people, including myself) I suspect he struggles with how is tone is read online versus IRL.

I'm not judging him as a human being. I just think the post does not accomplish his goals, unless his goal really was to write a personal attack.

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

#675

Post by unknownfuture »

guardiangod wrote: post #527
unknownfuture wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absolutely not true. Differently languages have greater or lesser representation in the training sets. You see a similar bias toward specific libraries within a given ecosystem, so much so that I worry about AI created technical monocultures as AI generated code converges to specific languages, packages, etc. The LLM companies have truly astounding power to now steer the direction of the entire industry. It sh…

Rust does not have a bigger training set than say Python/JS/TypeScript/C++ .

I never said it did.

My comment shouldn't be read as an explanation for why Anthropic chose Rust in this case.

I was simply disputing the claim that LLMs are good at all languages, and that their biases--both intentional and otherwise--will swing the entire industry.

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

#676

Post by J_Shelby_J »

ksec wrote: post #621
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 think Zig community should get triggered on any of this. As far as I can tell No one from Zig community got triggered by this other than the Zig team. People were angry about Bun switching to Rust not because it is abandoning Zig, but this reckless behaviour of not letting users know up front, no migration path or two parallel version testing and basically trust AI on everything. The internet was pretty much…

Agreed. That seemed to be the consensus in /r/rust

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

#677

Post by flumpcakes »

ModernMech wrote: post #73
audunw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results improving the end user experience didn’t have much to do with the rewrite. Improvements in binary size and speed could be had with similar efforts on the Zig codebase. They spent extra effort to get those metrics to look good to sell the rewrite. The memory safety aspects could be discussed. Arguably they could have had equally good memory safety by employing AI, tests and fuzzing (the Zig integrated fuzz…

> If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks. The post did no such thing — it spread rumors and leaned into gossip. There’s no proof or evidence or examples whatsoever offered by Kelley except Jarred’s own public words, which means the post didn’t reveal or expose anything about his management.

It doesn't need to expose something as new to point out a causal link?

Someone saying that work-life balance means all work and no life, and then producing substandard quality at said work seems worth pointing out.

A trillion dollar company vibe-porting a vibe-coded low quality product for clout/advertisement seems worth a call-out.

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

#678

Post by redsocksfan45 »

therobots927 wrote: post #459
cheikhcheikh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've read the andrew blog. It is a personal attack a very petty one, you're clearly a biased fan of his and of zig probably if you cannot see the obvious, but we're telling you as outsiders how poorly it reflects on andrew and the future of zig, and this is coming from someone who originally had a very good opinion of zig and andrew, now not so much. You can choose to ignore that and engage in the massive circlejerk…

[flagged]

[dead]

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

#679

Post by arjie »

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…

> Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

No, this is a classic mistake. The value of a project is in the instantaneous utility it provides integrated over time. Some things are valuable because they are throwaway single shots that do a thing that's hard. In the past, making those was too costly for the value, but as software drops to near-zero in marginal cost they're worth doing.

e.g. the costco receipts site involves clicking through to view receipts and only 10 'view receipt' buttons per page. I might have stuck it out in the past, but instead I just described the problem to my claw-like and gave it my user/pass and it found it for me while I was dressing the baby. It wrote some Playwright code and this and that and drove the browser interactively.

That code is throwaway code but it was quite useful.

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

#680

Post by saghm »

the__alchemist wrote: post #632
saghm wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I agree with this framing because "definition" implies comprehensiveness in a way that "here are some properties which may not cover everything that's relevant" does not. Your "definition" implicitly ignores the safety mechanism that Rust has and Zig lacks, which does a lot of rhetorical work into making it seem like the only difference is in "flavor" rather than "substance". My argument that there is a…

Semantics on "definition". "safety" is not why I use and love it. I brought this up because someone who hasn't used Rust, but reads about it may assume it's a "safe" language; I would describe it instead as a nice all-around language.

I don't know if I totally agree with your characterization here either. I'd argue that if you're not actively writing unsafe code, then you are using it as a safe language, in the same way that Python and Java are also safe languages. Yes, I also think it's a quite nice language, but safety is important enough that any time you're comparing a language that can be used safely to one that fundamentally can't enforce safety, framing the choice as purely ergonomic (even implicitly) is misleading.
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