nihsett · HackerTrans

قبل 3 ساعاتdiscuss

Zig creator's article seems to have changed? I don't remember the bottom bit being there when I read it a few days ago.

> Ray’s story: Faced with a legitimate challenge of memory bugs, there were several viable options. Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products.

Kinda makes sense. They also tried to make a C compiler earlier in the year. Idk what happened to that.

I guess it's an experiment without much downside for Anthropic, if it works use it to make a point about AI assisted coding - if it doesn't bun users will learn a costly lesson but who cares, it will just be another case study to make their product better.

That said, I think it'd be great to see this actually work out.

nihsett

قبل 11 ساعةdiscuss

They optimized it to burn more token in the recent months I feel. I made a small ~100 line change to a codebase by hand and threw claude at it to review. It spawned several sub-agents and burnt a ton of tokens. I guess the word 'review' now triggers some sort of in-built skill or something. It's absurd how rapid enshittification is taking over.

nihsett

قبل 12 ساعةdiscuss

Does ghostty have any features that makes it better than kitty in anyway? I keep seeing this all over the place, but I still don't understand why it's better than existing options.

Can someone help who's used both help me, what's the elevator pitch for this, why is it worth checking out?

nihsett

قبل شهرينdiscuss

My dad exclusively uses perplexity and I think completely stopped using google. It's definitely more common than we realize.

nihsett

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Yeah, me too. I argue with multiple models at the same time via a markdown doc to coordinate the discussion. I feel like it makes me less anxious about the final output if nothing else.

nihsett

قبل شهرينdiscuss

That's true. GC and manual are the two ends of the spectrum with other options in between like Rust. By catastrophic mistakes I mean security vulnerabilities created by memory safety related mistakes.

Maybe it's just me but I cannot write a huge program in rust as easily as I can in Java or Python. I have to spend more effort bending my program to fit the language and it's semantics. I get safety and speed but it feel like I'm wearing a straitjacket for those gains paying in my time and productivity.

Sometimes that tradeoff makes sense, but if I'm writing a backend webserver or some other application why would I bother with all this effort. Just doesn't make sense to me.

nihsett

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Buffer overflows for one. I don't have numbers but many security vulnerabilities have some kind of memory safety problem underneath.

nihsett

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Exactly. 95% of programmers are application programmers - they ship software used by regular users. I think it's insane to use a non-GC language for most of those cases. Manual memory management is mentally taxing and it's easy to make catastrophic mistakes. The marginal benefit from it is just not worth it unless you're making games or a trading system.

5% who write tools or other "infra" layer for the other 95% to work on top of maybe need that level of control over memory. It doesn't make any sense to me to sign up for that complexity unless you really really need it.

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