>> I think he's being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person's character.
So that's a no, you won't make the attempt to engage with it with any other frame of mind?
>> Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character.
Do you not see this as an overreaction? Andrew writes one (perhaps overly) blunt article about someone who publicly attempts to tarnish his project's reputation and you view it the same as the worst living human?
> you won't make the attempt to engage with it with any other frame of mind?
I told you, I engaged with it with the frame of mind that the author is a role model to me. My conclusion having read the words was that this was an intentional snipe.
People are calling this honest, but I consider it deeply dishonest to make the litany of personal attacks that he did while trying to pretend "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred".
Either Andrew isn't being honest with his audience, or he's not honest with himself. We can leave that as the most charitable framing. Either way it's just not true.
> you view it the same as the worst living human
I didn't say that. I only make the comparison in that they are both emotionally driven to say rude and mean things when they feel attacked.
Zig's community is - bar none - the least toxic programming community I've experienced. People on this website (who have never witnessed a single Zig community interaction) love to read blogposts from afar and come to conclusions this way and that, but if they ever stopped to actually engage with the people involved they'd find out the truth quite easily.
I have engaged with the Zig community. You're saying that people should not come to conclusions based on what they just read.=, from the founder nonetheless.
He's turned that down over time and has said as much.
I figure taking the most successful project of the 90s and using that as a polestar for of newer projects who re trying to get and keep traction over other projects (see this thread and topic) is probably a bad idea.
It in fact is a great thing to learn from, not repeat the same errors.
So you're saying your only singular experience with the Zig community is this one blogpost, and you've written 14 comments so far on here about it? What are you even gaining here?
My apologies, your previous comment read to me as "I have engaged, I just read this blog post". I now see what you intended.
I've realised from the comments under this post that many people seem to desire some sort of performative "professional" communication style from people above all else. I don't know why people care about this so much and I don't think I care to know.
I know you said you don't care to know. But for others wondering: being professional is important because it reduces conflict. Having a leader of the language personally insult someone like this makes the community feel that it is okay to insult others in the community too.
Personally I find it hard to believe that a community isn't toxic when their leader acts in this way.
Those are not personal criticisms, those are all professional criticisms. There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.
> There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.
Nobody is conflating anything, you're just misinterpreting the same words with different meanings.
A professional criticism can, in fact, be unprofessional, and even a personal attack. These are not mutually exclusive.
> Those are not personal criticisms
You're using "personal" to mean "regarding non-professional matters", whereas others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves".
> those are all professional criticisms
You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional".
Yes, professional has two meanings in use here. Professional as in relating to one's profession, and professional as in how one may be expected to behave when carrying out one's profession.
In my comment I was using the former.
I'm not really sure what you're on about me "misinterpreting" something. The author of the article claimed to not have personal criticisms, and I was pointing out that there's a standard interpretation of those words that is true.
> others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves"
Following your logic, we cannot critique anyone in particular ever. How absurd!
> You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional".
At the end of the day, it is the same thing. Person does what is their job according to common standards.
Andrew runs a software foundation, and it is his job to make sure that behavior of one of related projects does not disrupt the stream of all donations or bury his project under a pile of slop submissions. Highlighting the technical dysfunctions of the other project is an effective way to show the differences between the two. Do you have a suggestion that would be just as effective, while being more "professional"?
I think there's a world of a difference between "you wrote some code and it sucks" to "you wrote some code and it sucks because you have beginner energy and live in a fever dream". The former can be an objective statement without attribution to personal failings, while the latter... not really. If I put the latter as a PR comment to my intern in the morning I would expect a meeting invite from HR by the afternoon at the latest
I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional. Maybe it's just a cultural difference but where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say. If something's a shit show I'd prefer someone just said it rather than dancing around it with corpo-speak.
> I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional
This is a blog post: it's purely textual, language is the only thing it uses to convey meaning. The words chosen to do so reflect what the author thinks.
> where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say
Yes. What ark is trying to say, via the words he chose, is what's earning him the description of "unprofessional".
He could say every factual thing in the blog post without being unprofessional, he just chose not to.
I think you're, intentionally or not, misinterpreting my comment. Language is used to convey meaning, and Andrew wrote words that presumably meant what he meant them to mean. However, in many comments on here people are not commenting on "what he meant them to mean" and instead focusing on which words he chose to convey that meaning.
I'm sure Andrew could've switched out every word in the post and still conveyed the same meaning, and perhaps offended the peanut gallery's sensibilities a little less, but why should he?
In the example I was originally replying to, suppose Andrew had instead said "Jarred showed poorer than desired management abilities" and "Employees disliked working at Oven". Approximately the same message is communicated, a little watered-down maybe, but who's gaining from this tone-policing? Certainly not us, the readers. And I don't see how this affects how "professional" this is, unless "professional" is just performative nonsense and nothing to do with the substance of the text?
> And I don't see how this affects how "professional" this is, unless "professional" is just performative nonsense and nothing to do with the substance of the text?
It changes my opinion of whether I trust ark to actually be right, or whether he has (and will continue to) let his emotions get in the way. The particular quote I noted was
> We probably tried to tell you to try enabling it and you didn't listen. We have good advice, damn it!
He wanted to say this, more than he wanted to know if he was right. It reduces my trust in his judgement.
Do you normally assume that if someone shows any emotion that that emotion is "get[ting] in the way"? People's emotions are influenced by real things, and they don't have to speak dispassionately about those things. Especially when the blog post is entitled "My Thoughts on ---".
I don't know what you're getting at with your final paragraph, I feel like he's in a pretty good position to assert something he probably did or did not do.
As someone from a cultural background that is considered very direct and blunt, I can say that there is a rather fine line between being direct and being an asshole.
This post devolves into a personal attack one sentence in. There was no reason to go into Jared's life at all to begin with. The entire post doesn't need to exist at all if you're confident that Bun leaving will have zero or even positive impact. Why turn an already negative event of a slop rewrite into drama? It's petty and immature.
It's a good thing there's nothing of the sort in TFA then?
Quoting:
"He moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a whole heck of a lot in the process. I see it as quite a healthy attitude, particularly for young people and students. This is the best way to level up and learn new things."
I don't know, maybe you just don't understand what he's saying here? Or rather, are applying some sort of a negative spin to what is a factual analysis of a valid approach to doing something?
My issue with the paragraph is that it doesn't really connect into anything meaningful. It's just saying that Jarred was a beginner.
The only connection it has is as a segue into calling Jarred a terrible manager here:
> It was at this point - when he suddenly became a manager - that this "beginner energy" started to hit differently for me.
Note how "beginner energy" is considered good in the first paragraph, but suddenly terrible when applied to a different thing here. Terrible work culture aside, and the fact that it seemingly worked out for those who joined aside, Jarred would obviously have beginner energy in management as well considering he's not done it before. Why is it suddenly bad here?
Honest question, is there any record of Andrew actually saying Jarred had "beginner energy," or was this invented for the post as well?
If you view that first sentence as a personal attack I'm not really sure what response I can make here. As a sentence it almost says nothing at all. 'When Jarrad started he gave off a real "starting" vibe'.
Also I learned nothing about Jarred's life from this post, so I don't understand that point. That he lives or lived in San Francisco I guess, and didn't go to university?
Well, first off, it's literally the first sentence of a post which is ~62% about Jared, ~26% about the rewrite itself and 10% closing thoughts. It also sets up Jared as a beginner who apparently never learned.
Again, this post never needed to say anything about Jared. It looks weird to pull him in in literally the first sentence. It really shows what you're actually writing about.
This blog post about Jarred never needed to say anything about Jarred? What on Earth does that mean? It is a response to a blog post written by Jarred, about actions taken by Jarred, and yet you think Jarred shouldn't have been mentioned.
That's true, claims of professional dishonesty is a kind of professional criticism. Shall we begin discussing whether Jarred is the kind of person who makes up fake conversations about Andrew?
As fellow professionals in this field, shall we engage in this very professional debate about Jarred's honesty as a moral human being?
This is not true in any meaningful way. The most widely-used zig project (Ghostty) is very welcoming of AI contributions, and the lead developer of the project uses it heavily.
In elixir, processes (these are Erlang "processes", not OS processes) are designed to fail when they encounter errors, and the supervising process will restart it according to various rules you can configure. This isn't dissimilar to how kubernetes restarts jobs when they fail, but at a more fine-grained level.
It's actually intended that your function doesn't try too hard to validate it's input types, and just that it will malfunction and crash when it gets something it doesn't know how to handle, because the supervision tree will rescue it and your program can continue, albeit without whatever input caused the malfunction.
This obviously isn't ideal for many types of software, but for complex backend servers and other long-running operations it works really well.
Of course this is not a guarantee to eliminate bugs, but it's a factor that reduces them more than you'd think when coming from a different programming paradigm.
I mean - you're arguing there about a small blast radius, and I genuinely appreciate that not taking down the whole system when a bug occurs is incredibly valueable.
But, the discussion is about dynamic typing, and the fact that the function is in a state where it cannot compute because of bad input.
This might as well be a Null Pointer Exception - the function has encountered bad input, and crashes.
The argument is, that a MUCH stronger position is for all callers to be forced to provide input that cannot get the function into such a state - and a major subset of the set of all inputs possible can be eliminated with static or strict typing (I know the nomenclature gets a bit hazy here, but I hope that my intended meaning is clear)
If the callers know in advance that they cannot provide input shaped in ways that the function will not handle, then they will not call the function in those ways.
And that forces the call chain to be sure about the data transferred from top to bottom.
People only need cars because people have cars and cars make cities worse for everyone outside of one. If nobody owned cars everyone would get by just fine. It's a race to the bottom.
Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that today people need cars. In an ideal world I'd also love a European or Asian city model but American cities are not like that.
Most American cities have decent enough public transit where it is viable (or even a preferable) alternative to driving. I can think of Seattle, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. Not every city in America is like El Paso or Phoenix. But even in cities like El Paso or Phoenix, the hostility towards public transit is a political choice and an alternative policy is available if politicians want it.
I my self live close to the good American cities and even though my community is rather rural (I literally live across the street from a dairy farm) I still prefer biking to town. And when I go to the city, I rarely bring my car with me, as I prefer the bus over waiting in the ferry line and dealing with parking in the city.
I contacted their support because my charging cable frayed and I thought I was still in warranty. Turns out I'd miscalculated and I was a year out but they replaced it for free anyway.
Their support has been very responsive and helpful every time I've contacted them so I'd be surprised if they wouldn't have helped the GP.
Git rebases don't work if there are conflicts, jj doesn't have this problem. Also idk if you can rebase onto multiple parents with git but jj can do it.
JJ can save conflict related state with the change so that you don't need to resolve a conflict in the middle of a stack of changes for rebasing to continue for the remaining changes. Concretely, it uses a "conflict algebra" where it can track the impact of a conflict as it propagates through the stack of rebased changes: https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/technical/conflicts/
You have to fix them at some point, but not in the middle of doing other things. Right now. With no possible way to make progress elsewhere while deferring this decision.
Not really very similar at all for the scenario discussed here. Rerere remembers how you have resolved a conflict before. It doesn't let you rebase a stack of commits that result in different conflicts. You will have to stop and resolve each conflict and then `git rebase --continue`.
Avoiding manual conflict resolution isn't really a good thing though - conflicts are an indication that multiple different changes affect some code and you really should think hard about what the combination of them should be. Even what git does automatically already can be dangerous.
We probably don't want to head down the path of creating new competitions for people that meet arbitrary criteria. White-straight-man only olympics anyone?
I'm guessing you wouldn't say this if you attended the paraolympics, or perhaps it would enforce your already held views, I'm not sure. But there are already 64 different classes of impairment that compete as far as I can tell. Frankly I found it a bit fascinating.
I think the point is that regardless of what benefits LLMs are bringing to the table, there are a list of downsides that Drew views as non-negotiables. It doesn't matter what other people are seeing, because he sees a fundamental issue underlying the entire premise.
It does seem like most people completely ignore the obvious harms caused by AI when talking about using LLMs for programming, as though somehow it is disconnected from the other deployments of the technology.
> It does seem like most people completely ignore the obvious harms caused by AI when talking about using LLMs for programming, as though somehow it is disconnected from the other deployments of the technology.
I feel that the people who are completely ignoring the harms are the ones who need and/or benefit from it and do whatever it takes to justify their use of it. The rest are people who understand the harms and minimize interaction followed by the blissfully ignorant.
I was just talking to a content creator who uses AI at work social media platforms to display her personal projects. She talked about how she is fully aware of the harm social media platforms bring while acknowledging they empower her to present her work to the world without gatekeeping. AI allows her to power through boring office tasks but she loathes their use in the art world and replacing people in general.
> It does seem like most people completely ignore the obvious harms caused by AI when talking about using LLMs for programming, as though somehow it is disconnected from the other deployments of the technology.
I would insist that the deployments of a technology should be disconnected from the technology itself - I criticize AI too, and I get a lot of downvotes for it, but I try to separate the science of AI from its economics and politics.
The harms of AI and other technologies come from two sources 1. Capital destroying market bubbles and 2. Deployments motivated and enabled by political and moral corruption.
Both of these are in turn enabled and sustained by legislation. That is, we have to talk politics, not technology and not AI. AI has a great potential - both for improving human life and for making it a lot worse and which way it goes depends entirely on politics.
If we fail to cleanly separate these issues and keep moralizing about technology, we will be chasing red herrings and bumping heads in the dark all the while the tech is being deployed against us.
> there are a list of downsides that Drew views as non-negotiables
Which is all fine and dandy. But why play the "You simply don't understand it as well as I do" rather than something more investigative and curious? Just fuels the whole "holier than thou" vibe Drew been trying to increase seemingly every day.
It's a disagreement of opinion, not some "I'm the only smart person who can realize this", which is why it kind of sours the entire piece.
> Which is all fine and dandy. But why play the "You simply don't understand it as well as I do"
I'll say this from the perspective of a person who publishes content online: because people's revealed preference is for content written this way. You can spend weeks polishing thoughtful, original content that will get few clicks, or you can crank out throwaway op-eds about AI and get thousands of likes and upvotes from people who just wanted to hear their own beliefs explained back to them.
My stuff appeared on HN a couple of times over the years and the less effort I put into it, the better it fared. The temptation to change your writing style and to offer increasingly more provocative and shallow opinions is difficult to resist.
My point is probably this: if you want to see better stuff, I think you gotta stop engaging with articles like this. Patrol /newest and upvote cool in-depth stuff.
> But why play the "You simply don't understand it as well as I do" rather than something more investigative and curious?
That's not the tone of the article; he uses the word "pretending". That tells me that he thinks that people do understand, but they don't want to admit that they understand because that would reveal their values.
In fairness he pretty explicitly states that he thinks people do understand it, but are pretending not to to wash their hands of the consequences. I'm definitely not reading it in the same way you are.
It's a difference in values, not understanding. I understand that AI burns tons of power, and I don't care. Drew understands it the same as I, but he does care. The difference is in what people value, and relative to what.
So that's a no, you won't make the attempt to engage with it with any other frame of mind?
>> Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character.
Do you not see this as an overreaction? Andrew writes one (perhaps overly) blunt article about someone who publicly attempts to tarnish his project's reputation and you view it the same as the worst living human?