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Open-source Zig book

zigbook.net

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Re: Open-source Zig book

#181

Post by agucova »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #123
gamegoblin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pangram[1] flags the introduction as totally AI-written, which I also suspected for the same reasons you did [1] one of the only AI detectors that actually works, 99.9% accuracy, 0.1% false positive

Keep in mind that pangram flags many hand-written things as AI. > I just ran excerpts from two unpublished science fiction / speculative fiction short stories through it. Both came back as ai with 99.9% confidence. Both stories were written in 2013. > I've been doing some extensive testing in the last 24 hours and I can confidently say that I believe the 1 in 10,000 rate is bullshit. I've been an author for over a de…

How long were the extracts you gave to Pangram? Pangram only has the stated very high accuracy for long-form text covering at least a handful of paragraphs. When I ran this book, I used an entire chapter.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#182

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

downrightmike wrote: post #165
dcre wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect most developers do not know C.

C is fine C++ is where they jumped the shark

C++ is far better than C in very many ways. It's also far worse than C in very many other ways. Given a choice between the two, I'd still choose C++ every day just for RAII. There's only so much that we can blame programmers for memory leaks, use-after-free, buffer overflows, and other things that are still common in new C code. At some point, it is the language itself that is unsuitable and insufficient.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#183

Post by oconnor663 »

kaycey2022 wrote: post #150
Rasthor wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also Brainmade: https://brainmade.org/

What's stopping AI made content from including this as well?

I imagine it's kind of like "What's stopping someone from forging your signature on almost any document?" The point is less that it's hard to fake, and more that it's a line you're crossing where everyone agrees you can't say "oops I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do that."

Re: Open-source Zig book

#184

Post by agucova »

gamegoblin wrote: post #61
fuzzy_biscuit wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this feel like an ad? I've seen pangram mentioned a few times now, always with that tagline. It feels like a marketing department skulking around comments.

The other pangram mention elsewhere in this comment section is also me -- I'm totally unaffiliated with them, just a fan of their tool I specify the accuracy and false positive rate because otherwise skeptics in comment sections might otherwise think it's one of the plethora of other AI detection tools that don't really work

FWIW I work on AI and I also trust Pangram quite a lot (though exclusively on long-form text spanning at least 4 or more paragraphs). I'm pretty sure the book is heavily AI written.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#185

Post by [deleted] »

mendelmaleh wrote: post #64

> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices. I think it's time to have a badge for non LLM content, and avoid the rest.

[deleted]

Re: Open-source Zig book

#186

Post by geophph »

smj-edison wrote: post #56
tredre3 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the same experience as you with Zig. I quite love the idea of it Zig but the undocumented churn is a bit much. I wish they had auto generated docs that reflect the current state of the stdlib, at least. Even if it just listed the signatures with no commentary. I was trying to solve a simple problem but Google, the official docs, and LLMs were all out of date. I eventually found what I needed in Zig's commit…

Wait, doesn't `zig std` launch the autogenerated docs?

It’s currently broken, or was recently on the 0.16 dev branch (master)

Re: Open-source Zig book

#187

Post by Brian_K_White »

James_K wrote: post #101
mendelmaleh wrote: post #64

> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices. I think it's time to have a badge for non LLM content, and avoid the rest.

> Most programming languages hide complexity from you—they abstract away memory management, mask control flow with implicit operations, and shield you from the machine beneath. This feels simple at first, but eventually you hit a wall. You need to understand why something is slow, where a crash happened, or how to squeeze every ounce of performance from your hardware. Suddenly, the abstractions that helped you get st…

Right in those same first few paragraphs... "...hiding something from you. Because they are."

Would most LLMs have written that invalid fragment sentence "Because they are." ?

I don't think you have enough to go on to make this accusation.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#188

Post by Brian_K_White »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #140
jesseb34r wrote: post #125

This source is really hard to trust. AI or not, the author has done no work to really establish epistemological reliability and transparency. The entire book was published at once with no history, no evidence of the improvement and iteration it takes to create quality work, and no reference as to the creative process or collaborators or anything. And on top of that, the author does not seem to really have any other p…

Do you have any criticism of the content, or just "I don't know the author"?

They didn't say "this is in error", so they don't need any such example errors. They also didn't say just "I don't know the author".

Re: Open-source Zig book

#189

Post by keyle »

Zambyte wrote: post #166
xeonmc wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also just such a supremely unziglike thing to state.

Early talks by Andrew explicitly leaned into the notion that "software can be perfect", which is a deviation from how most programmers view software development. Zig also encourages you to "think like a computer" (also an explicit goal stated by Andrew) even more than C does on modern machines, given things like real vectors instead of relying on auto vectorization, the lack of a standard global allocator, and the la…

I'm not sure how what you stated is different from writing highly performance C.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#190

Post by assbuttbuttass »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #187
James_K wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most programming languages hide complexity from you—they abstract away memory management, mask control flow with implicit operations, and shield you from the machine beneath. This feels simple at first, but eventually you hit a wall. You need to understand why something is slow, where a crash happened, or how to squeeze every ounce of performance from your hardware. Suddenly, the abstractions that helped you get st…

Right in those same first few paragraphs... "...hiding something from you. Because they are." Would most LLMs have written that invalid fragment sentence "Because they are." ? I don't think you have enough to go on to make this accusation.

Yes, that fragment in particular screams LLM to me. It's the exact kind of meaningless yet overly dramatic slop that LLMs love
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