Comment by gpm

2 days ago

> 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.

28 comments

gpm

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whateveracct  2 days ago

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

johnfn  2 days ago

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.

  • oaweoifjwpo  2 days ago

    > 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.

    • johnfn  2 days ago

      That's fair - I updated my comment a little. What I mean is that the decision was driven by an ideological basis, not an empirical one. Bun was written with AI, AI doesn't fit with my ideology, therefore I reject it. As opposed to Bun has these new problems X Y and Z, therefore I reject it.

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  • happytoexplain  2 days ago

    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.

    • johnfn  2 days ago

      The opposite of political would be someone saying "I have observed that Bun has X, Y and Z bugs -- therefore we are no longer support it". An example of this is the recent announcement that Ghostty is leaving GitHub[1]. Compare and contrast the rationale:

      > I've felt this way for a long time, but for the past month I've kept a journal where I put an "X" next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage3. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.

      That isn't ideological in the slightest. Count the X's, and move off once you see too many.

      [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579

      1 reply →

  • watwut  2 days ago

    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.

  • add-sub-mul-div  2 days ago

    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".

    • johnfn  2 days ago

      I think there is a lot of overlap between politics and ideology, and an increasing amount of overlap between ideology and emotion.

      I think it's fair to call me out for skipping a step, but I wasn't using it to mean "idea I don't agree with".

      4 replies →

    • usef-  2 days ago

      In software engineering the word has also long meant "a decision not made purely on technical terms"

  • awesome_dude  2 days ago

    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.