By far the most satisfying piece I've read in this saga. Favorite line:
> I’m not the one saying that their environment resulted in a buggy unmaintainable mess, Bun is the one saying that.
Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
691–700 of 862 posts
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
i appreciate people saying it like it is. like linus lol i hate marketing pr speak when it comes to technical things. save that for the non technical customers
>like linus lol I am not even sure if that is an insult. Linus attack on " things " he dislike and call the person out on it. I don't believe Linus has ever call out on that person's other non related behaviour. People keep using Linus here as if they are the same. They are not.
What is the behaviour that Jarred was called out for that was not related to Bun?
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say the exact opposite, actually - Zig is a language specifically suited for TigerBeetle's all-at-once approach to memory management, and the approach more commonly used in Rust (allocate wherever and whenever) is non-idiomatic in Zig. > only works for very specific use cases. It's not clear to me what you mean by this.
> It's not clear to me what you mean by this. TigerBeetle calculates all the memory it needs at startup. It allocates that much memory once. It does not allocate memory dynamically. This only works for very specific use cases, like a fixed server size where you know exactly how much memory you want to allocate to a process. It’s not portable to general purpose computing, where it’s expected that apps aren’t allocatin…
It works really well for a ton of use cases (e.g. any data acquisition task, which is mostly what I use C for...)
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#694I'm not involved in this community, but I watched Andrew's interview with JetBrains a few weeks ago and I was really impressed. I don't currently have a project that would benefit from zig, but it's a language I want to explore when I have a good use case for it. I view his take as blunt but entirely reasonable.
Bun's rewrite has made me nervous about using it. I do have a project that would theoretically benefit from it, but that amount of vibe coding just makes me nervous. I'm not saying I'd never use it, but personally I'd rather wait for the dust to settle on it a bit. I feel like rewriting to a new language is going to be buggy no matter what (even if the tests pass), but an AI rewrite in a very short time makes me extra concerned. Just my 2 cents.
Also, one thing I want to highlight in the article because I agree hard with it:
> My advice? Don’t work for people that brag about 90 hour weeks. Work for people who will defend your ability to sleep at night.
I used to work in the games industry, where crunch was the norm, and I don't think crunching really helped at all past a couple weeks. I'm not particularly old (early 40s), but my performance falls off a cliff if I sleep poorly or don't practice self care. To me, people working ultra-long hours for marathon periods of time are making a grave mistake. It usually ends up being productivity theater rather than real productivity. Taking care of yourself is really important for being productive.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#695Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#696Earlier 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 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…
"Rust - that it's frankly a bitch to write, nearing Go levels of awful"
Go, awful? That's wild. I find Go to be maybe the most pleasant language I've ever used. It's just delightful for its niche (web services, system tools, things of that nature), I've never seen anything better.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, nam…
none of this justifies a nasty mean spirited blog post.
I didn't say or imply that it did. I just don't believe that the decision to port bun was based on innate technical merits of zig vs rust. I also don't think that it is entirely meritless, as I mentioned, because now that there's a par rewrite, there is clear delineation of the areas that need to be ported to safe rust. Still, does anyone really think that this would have happened without Anthropic's provocation?
I see it like this: Anthropic saw an opportunity to make a splash. Jarred made it happen without directly disparaging zig, but the implication is that zig couldn't cut it. Andrew made it more personal.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Sadly, like intelligence and reasoning, I think emergence is a word that people discuss while having different understandings of what the word means.
In the paper I linked, they talk of a particular take on the word that is commonly discussed in the ML research: between one discrete step and the next a phenomenon came into existence without existing before (i.e. it occurred spontaneously). The paper then goes on to refute specific claims. That's all I'm pointing out (I could point out similar issues with research into reasoning).
I think it's difficult to pin down "emergence" in the general sense as it likely goes into a deep philosophical argument like consciousness, so I'm unwilling to state whether or not some notion of "emergence" actually takes place. In that sense I agree with you.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Most programmers are not being paid "exorbitant sums". Maybe if you can put up with working at Meta or something. I hate how VC culture is pretending that paying skilled people a fair wage is some horrible imposition on the poor millionaires and billionaires.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#700I 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…
To me it's just highlighting the reality -- Anthropic fired the first shots. I think it's reasonable for people to say, hey, if you're going to trash the reputation of Zig (in a pretend-objective way) then it's entirely fair for people to put in important context that Bun was not written well.