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Comment by christopherwxyz

6 days ago

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.

    • > 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.

      How does one accomplish change? Even being a martyr doesn't get traction. As far as I can tell, you need to already be powerful. Nobody lets you into that group if you're not aligned with said group.

      Protests (at least in their current form) don't work. Trying to assassinate someone doesn't move the needle (also not the play, I don't support murder), vocal grassroots leaders are no longer relevant at all, if they ever were.

      How does one accomplish any change?

      4 replies →

    • > Also their feelings are not hurt by what you or I think, they don’t care.

      I would have agreed with this like 15 years ago, but the very existence of Twitter (and the acquisition saga) proves this to not be true.

      1 reply →

  • 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.

    • Especially if given near unlimited tokens to burn through, because any level of success fuels the LLM hype machine, which brings ROI.

      > It’s engineering.

      Significantly, but not totally. The marketing value can't be ignored.

      6 replies →

    • This attempt is like shooting for the stars. Most of us software developers are plumbers and we just need to reach to the moon.

    • Running an experiment and deciding based on the results is not hypocrisy, it's engineering, 100%.

      Saying you have no intention of doing something then doing it is not engineering, it's being dishonest. He could have said "well decide when we see the results", why didn't he?

      4 replies →

  • "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.

    • Okay, that's such a shallow take I'm going to try and explain it to you like you're 5 years old:

      Changing your mind is okay, for example if someone said it was impossible to do the migration with current LLMs and it turns out they did it in four days, that person can and should admit they were wrong. That's not what he did though. What he did is say he had no intention of doing it, and then did it. That is lying. If he was testing and he didn't know if the change was going to be worth it, he could have said for example:

      "This branch is a test, it's not a given it will work so until we see the results we won't decide if we'll be migrating or not."

      He didn't say anything like that though, he basically said:

      "We have no intention to migrate."

      Why did he said the latter and not the former? Because he wasn't being honest, he was just trying to get people off his back, and so he didn't say what he was doing, the best for his own interest. We have a saying in my country: "it's easier to catch a liar than someone who's lame".

      Also, before you come and say but he said he had no "intention" not that he wasn't gonna do it. A five year old might think that's a valid argument, but this person is an adult and we're all adults here, so it's not, it's equivocation and it's a logical fallacy.

      > I am so sick of emotionally frail software engineers.

      Then don't look in the mirror, you're probably being the biggest crybaby in this thread so far.

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.