Comment by 4aksh19
6 days ago
"No one has the intention of building a wall" - Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the central committee, a couple of months before the Berlin Wall was built.
The AI companies and their associates are beginning to surpass that level of denials and lies.
It’s disrespectful to immediately jump to adversarial conclusions from a simple desire to refactor and poor netiquette.
The right to be suspicious of the motives of powerful people is infinitely more important than protecting their feelings from being hurt by suspicion.
Powerful people figured out how to make suspicion work for them long ago. You have every right to be unconditionally suspicious, but it’s not a good way of accomplishing any change. Also their feelings are not hurt by what you or I think, they don’t care.
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This isn’t about rights. It’s about not being a jerk. Assume positive intent unless you have direct evidence to the contrary.
Protecting software creators, engineers, builders, and their work, regardless of their tools, is infinitely more important. Full stop.
Four days ago there was no intention to rewrite, now it's a simple desire to refactor. It's not adversarial conclusion, it's pointing out the clear hypocrisy.
Running an experiment, the experiment being more successful than you thought, and then deciding to put more effort into a bigger experiment is not hypocrisy. It’s engineering. If you think some of the objective facts they’re putting out (like test coverage and performance) are lies, go and prove it instead of appealing to emotion.
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Being able to change your mind is a excellent exercise in free will.
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"People cannot change their mind!
One must stick to old assertions forever!
Giant foot is gonna squish us!"
...this forum is as bad as a single backwater sub Reddit.
I am so sick of emotionally frail software engineers. I don't know why I keep bothering floating back here every once in a while to see what is up.
Same old rustled jimmies over technology evolution like back during the emacs and vi! tabs vs spaces! Sysv init vs systemd!
Super hero power scaling message boards are more engaging than this site.
AI save us from these needlessly economically empowered labor exploiting non-contributor script kiddies. Such an unserious community.
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If experienced (in open source and corporate politics) developers would bet on Polymarket if the rewrite is going to be ultimately merged, which side would you bet on?
What would the emerging odds be? My guess is 19/20 in favor of ditching Zig.
I have followed many initial denials on a wide range of topics, not only rewrites, over the years. Like clockwork, most of them were lies.
I don't think there's much chance it gets merged.
Even if it passed the full test suite there are a ton of software qualities that are not captured by tests and I think it's unlikely the AI made the right trade-off in every such case.
* We haven't seen the benchmarks yet.
* It hasn't seen wide usage. Zig Bun has had tons of bugs ironed out, Rust Bun has a different set of bugs to iron out.
* The developers know the zig codebase well, they don't know the rust code base.
I don't think most serious developers have time to watch prediction markets.
Not to mention invoking a major historical event, appeal to emotion move.
you know this whole exercise is both a marketing exercise and a way to make noise.
would the world come to a standstill tomorrow if every Bun instance out there ran on Node.js ?
they know their A.I can't sell without the noise that it's now on the edge of the frontier. this is hype.
zig adopting a strict 'no LLM' policy affects the LLM vendors.
A good point. The business and marketing aspect of this situation can not be overlooked. The rewrite in Rust was a clear marketing opportunity, to maintain the LLM hype, that team Bun warmly embraced.
At this point one should just say Anthropic team. I can't think of a Bun team since Anthropic bought Bun.
Jared, the hacker is now replaced by Jared, the millionaire soon to be billionaire as Anthropic valuation keeps going up.
Exactly. Always asks “who benefits from this?” . The answer in this case is: AI vendors, not us.
It’s also just a useful exercise in general, especially for getting feedback for models and harnesses.
I’ve been thinking about setting up a non trivial project to use as a benchmark for any plugins and/or harness changes I make.
Having a prebuilt verification suite is great. You can use it to asses things like token usage, time, across different harnesses, models, plugins.
I don’t think the Zig project adopting a strict ‘no LLM’ policy affects the LLM vendors at all. How many developers are working on the Zig project itself that will (maybe) now not buy a Claude subscription? I can buy that this is a marketing stunt, but nobody at the top cares if a relatively small open source project doesn’t allow AI contributions.
I don't know about that. Zig's bdfl got significant mainstream press attention for his anti-LLM stance. Definitely enough attention for various LLM vendors to notice.
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If you think Claude needs manufactured hype at this point to sell it you're delusional.
Anthropic literally has an astroturfing program:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945021
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Manufactured hype is just marketing. And companies losing money and looking to get listed very soon absolutely need it.
That’s how marketing works.
If you think they can survive without hype, you are the naive one