Comment by johnfn
2 days ago
> It seems a bit unfortunate to me that they've apparently already intending to never support future releases instead of planning on re-evaluating in the future. On the other hand the yt-dlp developers definitely don't owe anyone anything.
I think your final comment gets at it. If they said "OK, I am skeptical, so we're going to pause on updating to see how this Rust thing plays out" -- that sounds like a reasonable engineering decision. Saying "because they vibe coded we are dropping support for Bun" sounds political.
Why is it "political" to say "I don't trust software fully written by an LLM that has not been vetted by a human"?
That feels like an entirely reasonable stance to take.
And I see the argument/correction downthread that it's an "emotional" or "ideological" stance. Why does it have to be that? It seems completely rational and logical not to trust software written by a technology that is known to hallucinate and "cheat" to make tests pass.
Of course, I can't say that the yt-dlp maintainer is or isn't being political/emotional/ideological when making this decision; none of us can know their true motivations without asking them, and I choose the charitable explanation unless shown evidence otherwise.
> Saying "because they vibe coded we are dropping support for Bun" sounds political.
I disagree that this is a political stance. People based on their experiences have formed opinions on whether they trust that model of development or not. Bun having taking extreme measure of going 100% in within a week is itself extreme positioning from their side which will likely result in extreme reactions because depending on who you are and your experience you'd bet on the fact that it may or may not work out.
I disagree as well, and wonder if the OP meant an emotional or ideological stance instead.
Yes - this is indeed what I meant, thanks.
In all sincerity, what does political even mean in this context? ELI5, I’m a toddler when it comes to the politics of AI/LLMs.
Its a polarizing world with AI. There are fanboys drinking the kool-aid blindly listening to whatever Sammy/Dario/... say as gospel, and on other side there are haters who again blindly reject the fact that these AI tools can be actually be useful. I think that's what the politics is.
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> Saying "because they vibe coded we are dropping support for Bun" sounds political.
I don't think "political" is necessarily a bad thing. Engaging in politics is how you shape the world. The mere act of writing and maintaining yt-dlp is quite political considering the context of IP law and enforcement that we live in.
It happens that in this case that I'd disagree with their politics if that's why they are dropping Bun support - I think there's a great deal of value in moving to memory safe languages, little harm in accepting anthropic compute and funding to do so, and that use LLMs themselves is roughly value neutral (though many uses are very much not value neutral). That said reasonable people definitely disagree with me.
vibe coding isn't a political topic lol
this amounts to "i don't trust this dependency anymore, so i'm cutting it out for my own good"
that's fine
That's not what I meant by political. I meant political in the more modern sense of "appealing to emotion rather than thought".
EDIT:
Everyone is rightfully calling me out that this doesn't make a lot of sense. What I meant is that the move is driven by ideology. I think there is a lot of overlap between politics and ideology, and an increasing amount of overlap between ideology and emotion. But it's fair enough to call me out here.
> I meant political in the more modern sense of "appealing to emotion rather than thought".
I'm not familiar with this definition in any modern or archaic sense. Is there somewhere I can read about it? Just because a decision is not directly engineering related (which I'm not even convinced this is) doesn't mean that it's not thoughtful.
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I can't see how this counts as "political" or "ideological" by your definition unless you believe that emotion can't exist as part of any decision, in which case you should give up interacting with human beings entirely.
Regardless, the decision was 99% logical. In fact, even the emotional parts are laudable. For example, I love software. That's an emotion. If you disagree with that foundation, we will fundamentally never be able to converse with each other about what's best for software.
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Wait, expecting all code to be verified and tested by a human is not engineering-driven but instead emotion-driven mindset???
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Whole OSS is driven by ideology. It does not exiat without ideology. And not just that, whole massive development companies are driven by ideologies.
OpenAI itself is a bundle of ideologies and pretend ideologies. Thw whole puah for AI and AIG is way more about emotions and ideology then about business ir engineering.
That has nothing to do with what "politics" means but it's exactly how people have started using "political" to mean "idea I don't agree with".
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Humans have always appealed to emotion - as part of their logical process.
Fear (emotion) is used (advantageously) to force us to check that something isn't going to break us
In this instance fear is being used to ensure that yt-dlp is not exposed to (genuine) concerns about the quality of bun that is openly being built making use of tools we as a whole know is problematic.
I agree with you that the statements are a bit over the top (that's an emotional response to their statements btw) and that (eventually) you would /hope/ that bun gets to a point where it's got some genuine reliability from a users perspective.
Edit: I see your edit to explain that the issue is ideology - but unfortunately (perhaps) that's not an improved stance - ideology has to guide us when we just don't know - it's a heuristic.
That's a perfectly cromulent meaning of the word.
Vibe-coded code is a code no human has written, so no human truly understands how it works. It's a perfectly reasonable technical decision not to support such software, especially if actual human effoft is required for that
I wouldn't have problems with AI-generated code, but LLMs are not AIs, they are random sentence generators. They don't have logic, yet programs are logical constructs. So let's call this what it is: randomly-generated code, kinda sorta filtered by humans and tests. It's not because the output distribution has a good match with the expected distribution that it's not random. An LLM that is "hallucinating" is still working perfectly well and isn't doing anything different, in the same way that a straight-line fit through data points isn't "hallucinating" where it isn't overlapping the data points exactly.
> I wouldn't have problems with AI-generated code, but LLMs are not AIs, they are random sentence generators.
AI includes a lot of technologies, LLMs being just one of them. Several of these technologies use probabilistic algorithms, so having randomness does not disqualify something from being classified as AI.
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I wouldn't say it's random. But I do like referring to them as statistical code generators.
Adding support again later is cheap.
Stopping maintaining and testing support for upcoming versions is cheaper than doing that work.
Sure it’s political but it is also just a sane approach, to stay away from such disruptive change and treat it as wait-and-see instead of tagging along for the ride. There is not really any technical upside to tagging along and promising support.
> Stopping maintaining and testing support for upcoming versions is cheaper than doing that work.
If it’s based on predictions of how some alpha software might turn out in the future then I don’t see how you can claim it’s cheaper.
If a bunch of new bug reports came in then you said no, then everyone would understand.
This is pretty obviously ideological otherwise. Which is fine, but we shouldn’t pretend otherwise because we might agree with it
I don’t thing maintaining and testing support for an extra runtime is free.
It is by definition cheaper to not support extra runtimes like Kaluma, Elsa, WinterJS. Adding support is not just the initial work of adapting CI and writing policies, maintenance and support is ongoing work.
I think it's perfectly rational to take a wait-and-see approach when a dependency has been completely rewritten from scratch.
That would still be rational if it had been rewritten by hand, and not by an LLM.
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I disagree it's a political stance, this reads like a technical decision to me. In my opinion, there is no vibe-coded project that's going to be reliable long term. Eventually there's too much code, too many bugs and the whole things slows to a halt. Or it gets too expensive to continue to be vibe-coded, because token cost.
If they had decided to drop Bun for "AI assisted coding," that might strike me as a political decision.
I'm repeating a point I made in a sub-thread but please WHY should the onus be on yt-dlp to review their decision on a project that has zero commitment to review their very code?
I get the idea to "battle-test" the rewrite first but (a) how does one even determine a reasonable timeframe for battle-testing that much LOC and (b) each vibe-coded update pushed to the Bun upstream basically resets the battle-testing timer. I guess you could lag behind $LATEST by a given window but that just brings us back to (a).
That wasn't my read, though. I think if they don't want to go with the vibe-coded version then they have to go with the last release before that. And presumably that last release won't be updated (except with the vibe-coded version). Therefore it makes sense to deprecate.
What's wrong with yt-dlp - an app almost entirety driven by political stances - taking another one regarding llms?
What does "political" mean in this context? To me it seems obvious that yes, that is a political choice, as is every other choice a group of people make for themselves together.
“Vibe coded” means “human programmers did not review the code”. So I think that’s an entirely reasonable line to draw that’s no more political than dropping support for some other project that suddenly decided to drop all unit testing or to refuse to do any security vetting.