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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

#851

Post by [deleted] »

handoflixue wrote: post #844
oblio wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an intentionally obtuse comment. Compilers are widely available as open source software not coming from companies that need to justify a $1tn valuation ASAP for their development of LLMs. Also the LLM = compiler comparison is generally just ridiculous. Their complexity, both internal and in usage for coding are multiple orders of magnitude apart.

Oh yeah, nothing complex about a compiler, that only takes 4 years of college to understand. That's soooo much simpler than typing "make me a Tetris clone". Literally no one has 4 years of experience with LLMs, because they haven't existed for four years. Today's experts are tomorrow's college graduates.

[deleted]

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

#852

Post by ramses0 »

zogrodea wrote: post #847
nivethan wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for that link, I've thought that friction was helpful but this gives me a word and a concept to look at.

Happy to learn about the concept today. It resonates with me. I sometimes think of something Kant wrote, about how friction (hardship, etc.) elevates us. In Kant's own words: "Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with…

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903): "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/end-user.html

"""Master Foo turned to the end-user. “Tell me”, he inquired, “why do you seek the Way?”

“I am discontent with the software I see around me”, the end user replied. “It neither performs reliably nor pleases the eye and hand. Having heard that the Unix way, though difficult, is superior, I seek to cast aside all snares and delusions”."""

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

#853

Post by jraph »

anthonypasq wrote: post #602
jraph wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that hit piece would be an answer to the (multi-billion dollar) studio saying how much better the result is after the rewrite to Unreal, except it's not because Unreal is better (which it could be btw, or not, or more probably it depends on the use case), it's because the studio worked hard to make it look better, which they could have done without the rewrite. Anthropic does this to sell LLM rewrites and make th…

> But that hit piece would be an answer to the (multi-billion dollar) studio saying how much better the result is after the rewrite to Unreal this in fact happens all the time and engine creators dont come out with bitter blog posts about it

(note that you cut the critical part of this sentence)

I'm not saying Andrew was right to write bitter personal attacks.

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

#854

Post by jraph »

joshuamorton wrote: post #330
jraph wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Of course when you are the creator of Zig, that may feel quite unfair and you should highlight it. Then highlight that, don't repeatedly insult someone. If Andrew thinks the same kind of ai-assisted improvement would be possible in Zig, and that avoiding the kinds of errors migrating to rust achieved would be possible in Zig, he should demonstrate it . And I don't necessarily mean rewriting all of Bun in "better-zi…

> Then highlight that, don't repeatedly insult someone

I wrote in my comment that I don't support him doing so.

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

#855

Post by jraph »

entrope wrote: post #460
jraph wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

When accusing someone of "good looking lies", it would help to provide an example or two with an explanation of why you think they're lies (rather than mistakes, oversights or differences of opinion). Complaints that the post "subtly and misleadingly throws shade at Zig" are hard to accept without that kind of support.

I did this there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48898514

But others did before me in this very HN submission, we are not going to repeat everything in every comment, are we?

It's not the first lies from Anthropic and more generally from the AI industry as a whole neither. It's their default communication mode.

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

#856

Post by mtlynch »

AndyKelley wrote: post #842
mtlynch wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that part is not in dispute. If Sumner says today, "We do X," then Kelley can say, "Nine months ago, Sumner did not do X," and both can be correct. What Kelley can't do is say, "It's an outright fabrication that Sumner does X today," based on an observation from nine months ago.

Now you've misquoted me. Actual quote[1] is: "This appears to be an outright fabrication." To quote yourself[2], "The honest thing to do is acknowledge that you were mistaken and apologize for the false accusation." Are you going to do that for me now? I don't expect you to, because I don't think you are being dishonest. I think you are earnestly trying to untangle the facts from two parties for whom you have no bias…

Are you talking about this line?

> What Kelley can't do is say, "It's an outright fabrication that Sumner does X today," based on an observation from nine months ago.

I think it's clear that I presented it as a hypothetical dialog, not something you literally said. But I agree that the fairer way to present it would be to say, "Kelley can't say 'It appears to be an outright fabrication'," to match the original language in your blog post.

> I think you are earnestly trying to untangle the facts from two parties for whom you have no bias one way or the other, which is commendable.

Honestly, my bias is to support Zig. I personally like the Zig project and you as a person (this blog post notwithstanding) enough that I've contributed a small monthly financial amount for the last 2.5 years. You've never sucked up all my code and then tried to sell it back to me.

So, despite the fact that I have many reasons to favor you and Zig over Sumner and Anthropic, when I read both blog posts, the impression I walk away with is that your blog post is needlessly critical of Sumner as a person and that you made unsubstantiated accusations against him.

> To do this, they need to make this rewrite appear successful, so they need to retcon this idea that they were doing good engineering practices in their zig codebase the whole time, including fuzzing, even though that is not the case.

I don't get that from their blog post.

Both you and Loris seem to be saying that Sumner's "We've been fuzzing Bun" claim implies to everyone that they've been fuzzing it for a long time as much as they possibly can, but I think it just means what it says. They've been fuzzing it some, and some bugs fell out of it, not that they fuzzed it perfectly or followed every software engineering practice perfectly.

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

#857

Post by handoflixue »

fragmede wrote: post #845
handoflixue wrote: post #844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, nothing complex about a compiler, that only takes 4 years of college to understand. That's soooo much simpler than typing "make me a Tetris clone". Literally no one has 4 years of experience with LLMs, because they haven't existed for four years. Today's experts are tomorrow's college graduates.

ChatGPT was released November 30, 2022. GPT-2, before that. So we're right around 4 years.

Thus why no one has 4 years of experience yet, yeah.

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

#858

Post by GuB-42 »

cfiggers wrote: post #233
p-e-w wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it. You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another langu…

> it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting Zig isn't finished yet (they still have not released a v1.0). They're still iterating on the language itself and want the flexibility to make backwards-incompatible changes while they do so. So in a sense, they have not yet asked anybody in mainstream industry to "bite." After v1.0, when there's an understanding of stability and ongoing language support, industry ado…

This. I talked about Zig to my company CTO for embedded systems, he told me he was happy that someone mentioned it as he finds it promising and not much talked about, especially compared to Rust.

He then told me that it is, as you said, unfinished, and that he can't reasonably recommend it for embedded projects that are often long term and demand stability. C, a 1970 language is still king for a reason! So he is keeping Zig on his watchlist for when it becomes more mature.

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

#859

Post by GuB-42 »

eatonphil wrote: post #290
cfiggers wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the flagship Zig project is TigerBeetle, not Bun.

If TigerBeetle is the Zig flagship then Zig is untenable for almost any team, because Tiger Style is untenable for almost any team. No, I think that Tiger Style makes Zig mostly unimportant. On the other hand, as a corporate backer for Zig, TigerBeetle is definitely a big deal. But in terms of exemplary and imitable projects in the ecosystem I would think something like Ghostty is the safer label for "flagship".

TigerBeetle is interesting because even though something like TigerStyle is unusual for a database, it is very much at home for embedded systems.

In fact we could summarize TigerBeetle as "the financial database developed like embedded software". Determinism is a cornerstone of critical software like in avionics, and naturally, dynamic allocation is forbidden, as in TigerStyle.

So even though it is not obvious, TigerBeetle represents one of Zig biggest strengths: embedded systems.

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

#860

Post by vga1 »

andsoitis wrote: post #831
vga1 wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is going to be something that would not have existed without LLM because there wouldn't have been enough resources to create it before. Probably already is. Some of it will be amazing, although most of it probably not. Example: Qobuz has no official Linux client, but there's https://qbz.lol/ which it seems to me is mostly vibecoded. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well and can do some fancy stuff like bit…

I hear you, and those are good applications of LLMs: create something that didn't make economic sense before. But I'm asking something slightly different. I'm asking about something that's amazing, not due to a different economic calculus, but something that's AMAZING that would not be possible to create by humans.

I think it's possible, but probably beyond my capability of imagination, so I cannot give a satisfying answer beyond this.
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