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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

#251

Post by queenkjuul »

phoghed wrote: post #229
kqp wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is massively bigger than a studio, Zig is massively smaller than Unity, and it wasn’t a quiet switch, it was a huge publicity event. It’s more like the #1 movie of the year being “The Profound Joy of Finally Leaving Unity”. Sometimes things are big enough to warrant a response.

It was a pull request and a blog post which HN et al. collectively foamed at the mouth about. You’re acting like Anthropic sunk millions into a marketing campaign.

Well if the whole thing is a marketing ploy and it did cost them millions...

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

#252

Post by mi_lk »

threatofrain wrote: post #241
woodruffw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a huge stretch to call Bun’s post slander. It’s a relatively bland technical post with an extremely contextual negative opinion about Zig. I read both posts, and didn’t leave the Bun one with a negative opinion of Zig. But I did leave the response post with that opinion.

Is it true that Jarred and the Bun team at large engaged in "outright fabrication" in professional business discussions? What do you think of that statement made by Andrew? It was serious enough that Jarred showed up to post receipts with very little commentary, so as not to distract from the receipts. The charge of professional dishonesty is very strong.

Of course you'll buy that because "receipts" were only half the story and posting little commentary gives him an edge.

See: https://hachyderm.io/@kristoff/116898483283387067

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

#253

Post by diegoholiveira »

busterarm wrote: post #221
simjnd wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Zig community is triggered, I think only Zig's creator is triggered because he is afraid of people interpreting this as "Zig is unsuitable for X". I think a lot of people will, but those who do probably weren't the target audience for Zig in the first place?

Context matters. Big announcements and uninformed blog posts can kill your momentum. I still remember the Twitter dev blog where they abandoned Ruby/Rails and the damage that did. It turned out Twitter was doing a lot of stupid things and there was a mismatch of tools and their goals. They loudly blamed the tools and people ate it up because Twitter was big, visible and adored at the time. Their conclusions bypassed…

I remember that. It was the first time I heard about Scala.

I saw a lot of RoR companies/users thinking “should we do the same?” without even realizing that they do not have the same twitter scalability problems.

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

#254

Post by matsemann »

wowoc wrote: post #14
aaa_aaa wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stating you use Codex does not add any meaningful information to the case.

I think the point of mentioning Codex was that the author of the post has no relationship with Anthropic, even as a user.

It's said to imply they have no bias. But someone using Codex or AI agents heavily already have a bias here, just to be clear. Because the discussion isn't just about bun/anthropic/zig/rust, but also between AIs role in coding. So them touting their use of Codex, while not Claude, can still be a bias, especially in the direction they're trying to absolve themselves from.

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

#255

Post by neutronicus »

petcat wrote: post #133
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…

> 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…

Yeah, I mean … as a C++ dev I have those same existential “what’s the point” questions about Zig.

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

#256

Post by nicce »

LtWorf wrote: post #153
JuniperMesos wrote: post #101

> From my perspective, Anthropic is the party we need to hold accountable here. It's insane that Ray Myers thinks that Anthropic did anything related to this port that requires holding them accountable; the fact that he used those words makes me want to prevent him from having any influence over AI policy.

Funding and owning something makes you accountable yes, that's how it works normally.

Also pushing it for marketing purposes and giving free preview to Fable might contribute something.

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

#258

Post by woodruffw »

threatofrain wrote: post #241
woodruffw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a huge stretch to call Bun’s post slander. It’s a relatively bland technical post with an extremely contextual negative opinion about Zig. I read both posts, and didn’t leave the Bun one with a negative opinion of Zig. But I did leave the response post with that opinion.

Is it true that Jarred and the Bun team at large engaged in "outright fabrication" in professional business discussions? What do you think of that statement made by Andrew? It was serious enough that Jarred showed up to post receipts with very little commentary, so as not to distract from the receipts. The charge of professional dishonesty is very strong.

Who knows? I certainly don’t.

I think there were valid technical and professional criticisms in that post. For example, “Oven’s working culture was poor” is an excellent thing to communicate that I otherwise wouldn’t have any sense about.

At the same time, I also think they were essentially wrapped in an insult sandwich: the post starts with personal swipes against Jarred (who, again, I don’t know) and end with an insult to the reader (who is expected to not believe their lying eyes about all the personal attacks they just read).

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

#259

Post by 27183 »

manphone wrote: post #208
sph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…

It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

Writing is thinking. If you don't spend time writing, then you didn't spend time thinking. LLMs don't think. Consequently, if you outsourced your writing to an LLM the resulting artifact was born of a thoughtless process. Instead of engaging your readers in your thought process you're tricking them with a puzzle. Readers will try to understand what you're thinking about (at least the non-passive ones will). This activity is a dead end for LLM output.

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

#260

Post by neutronicus »

ACCount37 wrote: post #228
ctvo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t write Zig off yet. The faster compilation time is a giant moat. Depending on how LLM usage evolves it could be what ends up mattering.

I'm not writing Zig off myself. I would prefer if it succeeded. But the outlook is: not good, in my eyes. Pre-2022, Zig was doing decently, but not particularly well. It didn't have Rust level of enthusiasts and ambassadors (love them or hate them, they did succeed in driving considerable Rust adoption), it didn't have a major corpo backing it, it had too much API instability to be truly relied on. Picking a stupid f…

A day or two ago someone posted about abandoning Haskell because compilation times had become a bottleneck with Agents. FWIW
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