Mamdani has been doing great in NYC so far. The hope is that he will inspire similar behavior in others. And drive similar approaches to politics in other constituencies.
"Hammers are now a very popular tool, and one can move quickly building exclusively with hammers, so we have decided to construct buildings strictly using nails, no more screws, bolts, or any other kind of fastener shall be used going forward."
People seem to have adopted very liberal definitions of "personal attack".
When someone criticizes you for things you could improve on that are within your control, it may be difficult to hear, but it is not a personal attack. Someone calling you a stink manager, and listing factors as to why (unreasonable expectations etc.) is not a personal attack.
Someone talking about the inexperience you used to have (being a beginner developer) is not a personal attack.
Someone listing your business decisions (taking VC money, etc) is not a personal attack.
Maybe the only comment in this entire piece that is remotely close to an "attack" is the bit about slop code, but even that, being about the person's work and not the person and aspects of their existence they cannot control or their personal lives, is hardly personal.
I find it really baffling that HN seems to be so sensitive to what's, in my opinion, a relatively tame post with maybe some prickly flavor (which imo is completely understandable given the complete nonsense that had ensured with Bun post acquisition and their very public, and I think unfair, negative portrayal of Zig, intentional or not).
Maybe the only quoted text that I would read as a personal attack is
"already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs" and maybe "low empathy".
Just because the other bits are negative and not so nice pieces of feedback one wouldn't want to hear doesn't necessarily make them attacks.
An attack is often far more personal (making fun of you for aspects of your existence you can't control, touching personal subjects like families, etc). idk, maybe I'm just not soaked enough in the goo goo baby corporate saccharine LLM speak or something but this post felt tame to me, if a bit cheeky. Nothing but a thumb jab at worst.
The history of humanity is full of biting polemics and attacks on the character of others, just read Voltaire. Sometimes, attacks are deserved.
Yes, a world in which everyone is professional and "plays nice" sounds great but it also quickly becomes a mechanism for suppression of the truth. Not the situation here, but "decorum" expectations are sometimes precisely one of the functions that help bad people maintain power (consider how difficult it can be for minorities or marginalized people to speak truthfully about what's happened to them). Sometimes one person being blunt, honest, and a little rude is a necessary step in clearing ground for others to be more upfront about the bad behavior of individuals.
I'm not anti-AI at all but to call people who don't want to use it "moral puritans" is laughable. It's hard to read that as anything other than a self-report on your own extreme nonchalance when it comes to the many ethical thickets surrounding this technology. While the possible benefits of AI in fields like medicine are promising, the concerns that a lot of people have about LLMs and the supporting infrastructure, power shifts, and more that have come along with them are diverse, serious, and completely understandable, and I can't imagine them being "puritan" to anyone other than those ruthlessly driven by nothing but capitalistic self-interest.
Kind of tangential to the man Rust v. Zig culture debate but:
> I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements).
Kind of reeks of unreasonable expectations to me. I don't think one should expect language designers to redesign a language or introduce new features that would likely be poor fits with the overall existing language philosophy (the design and usage philosophies behind Rust and Zig are practically opposite poles). Language stewards have a responsibility to everyone in their existing user base and they have a responsibility to evolve the language in a ways that's consistent with the expectations they already established (if they want to keep their users that is). Expecting the designers to rework the language to bolt on features from some other language just for your project is kind of absurd. I think Loris's supposed response is actually correct here and probably the best response he could give, without knowing more about precisely what the requests were, how willing you were to contribute work yourself, etc.
> It seems the world is turning hostile to immigration in general - or maybe it is just the impression I get from the media? I don't know for sure.
I view it as growing pains. We inhabit a highly interdependent and interconnected world now, the economy is extremely global. Nation states as the primary governance model simply don't make sense anymore, and the world needs to adjust and find a new political organizing principle. The modern concept of nation state is itself a historical concept, it really arose approx. 18th cen. has worked ok for a while and now we need some new governance concept that is a better fit for our highly interconnected and global world.
What we are seeing now are reactions against what in my view is the inevitable decline of nation based organization and the formation of something else. The "old system" is acting out in an attempt to save itself, in a refusal to evolve. People don't like change. The writing is on the wall though. The degree to which every nation is now completely entangled with every other makes nations themselves as an operational concept inefficient and untenable.
A lot of people will view this as the decline of creative power in adulthood, but I actually think it's just a sign of maturity. Writing a lot of words when you are thirteen is easier for multiple reasons:
- You know less about the world, so bullshitting is easier because you don't know, and maybe don't care about the truth as much (in many senses, ranging from ensuring you aren't spreading misinformation in a nonfiction text to ensuring your fictional work has some plausibility)
- It's easier to write a lot when you don't care about reading time. When you mature, you appreciate the preciousness of time, and understand that less is often more when it comes to written communication.
- Your increased knowledge can also create a kind of analysis paralysis or associative fan effect on the brain that's fatiguing. Again, the curse of knowledge as an adult might actually make it harder to start something even though you have more "raw material" to work with (I personally think this is part of the reason a lot of artists stress "beginner's mind" so strongly (another huge component of it being open to randomness and happy accidents, or course)).
This looks really nice, great work so far! I see a macOS backend is still in development. I'd like to try the language out on macOS, so if I find the time I'll try to pitch in!
Amen. I never understood how such an avid blog reading community existed when, compared to published essays, the vast bulk of it is drivel. I guess I simply hadn't realized that many people out there may have never read a formal or published essay. What a shame.
Many investments are considered a liquid asset precisely because they are basically money.
You're missing the point on a stupid technicality.
If I have more liquid and therefore more purchasing and capital power than you, I have access to more resources than you, and I am immediately in a position in which I can potentially exploit you (get you to labor to generate more resources in exchange for some of the capital I have, then retain most of all of the newly generated capital and production from your labor for myself while paying you a fraction of what's generated because you are in a position of immediate need (need access to necessities) and I wasn't).
I think there is a massive difference between wanting power and wanting freedom and security from undue exploitation and/or economic hardship.
Most people I know don't "want power". They just want to be able to afford basic necessities (food, housing, clothing) without feeling like they are on the brink of survival every day.
Billionaires are starting to take the heat because people are starting to recognize that the wealth created for these billionaires is 100% dependent on their labor, time, and sweat, yet many of them see fractions of fractions of what the billionaires make. If it's somehow unfair for the billionaires to have to pay the government a wealth tax it is equally unfair for said billionaires to withhold so much of the capital generated by their workforces for themselves.
I wouldn't necessarily categorize giving people opportunity to do underpaid, tenuous, non-career, zero-mobility gig work as "giving back to society" nor would I classify the unregulated harms of social media, phone additions, etc. as social good either. That's not to say some of these things aren't also good in many ways, but I also still don't understand why you think this somehow leads to a moral or social justification for unbounded levels of amassed wealth to a single individual.
> Structural problems such as what? The idea that wealth is power? That's the same structural problem that has always existed, except that there are more players than ever before.
So your response to issues such as most people being unable to have a single living wage, rising homelessness, unaffordable housing, is "shrug wealth is power". This is not some kind of inviolable law of nature. We as human beings defining the terms of the game, can set up some legislation.
Learn history. America specifically has combated very similar issues in the past and curbing unimpeded accumulation and breaking up monopolies led to more innovation more diversity in the market and a better distribution of wealth. America has taxed the wealthiest classes more in the past and it wasn't a disaster. Look up the new deal.
> You're not doing this, but when you try to have this conversation amongst the general population what is the response?
Who are you conversing with, me, or the general population? What do you mean when you try to ascribe a belief to the general population? Have you done polling on this? Or are you basing this on media? What are you actually talking about? Why are you so confident in arguing against some perceived hypothetical belief you think "the general population" holds? How do you know there aren't more people who actually agree with your perspective?
> Who lowered that barrier? It was the billionaires
No. Scores of laborers employed by the billionaires lowered the barrier. Yes, many of the billionaires begin with a great idea, but there's no reason having an idea justifies having unbounded wealth. All enterprises depend on legions of people to actually materialize production. There is nothing written in nature that states that the person risking upfront capital should always be compensated more than the people who make production a reality, nor is there any corollary that states that the accumulation permitted should be completely unbounded.
You have convinced yourself that anyone not agreeing with your own belief is ruled by nothing but an emotional or psychological state rather than rational, but different, perspective. This is a perfect way to be a stubborn ass and ensure that no one will ever change your mind. It is anti-intellectualism at its finest. I hope one day you realize how foolish you are being about this.
Since you seem to be into super-reductive arguments, here's mine: we are all clearly hyper-dependent on one another on this planet. There is no reason people who make lots of money shouldn't have to give a reasonable portion of it back to the government and country that they draw labor, customers, and much more from daily. There is no reason that accumulation should be permitted without bound. It is pointless and leads to problems. We can and should argue for reasonable limits or at the very least taxation on massive wealth.
As for me, no envy here. I live comfortably and I am happy with what means I have, something most billionaires don't ever seem to experience. However, I also have eyes and functioning neurons so when I clearly see other human beings unable to afford basic necessities without feeling tremendous stress and pressure and then I see certain high-profile billionaires blowing money on dumb shit, underpaying and abusing workers (piss bottles) and more, I can understand why people want better guardrails in place, and no, wanting to limit the degree to which random people who got lucky in the market can exploit you is not envy.
I don't think anyone is simply envious. People mean to point out that allowing individual accumulation of wealth to extreme degrees lead to runaway structural problems. Billionaires and companies existing and providing wages are not inextricably intertwined. It's entirely possible to have one while preventing the other. The idea that the only way you can incentivize individuals to start companies is to allow them to accumulate so much wealth that they become tiny kings is patently absurd. The world has thousands of companies and founders who happily sustain their businesses without ever reaching this ungodly and idiotic level of uber wealth.
yawn hack writer issues wealth-hoarding and inequality apologia.
Economics is simple. Resources are finite, and money plus markets preserve that finitude as an invariant (that's why it works as a store of value). If you sit on more money and accumulate more money a natural consequence is that someone else has less access to the finite resources available (either in actuality or in potentia), period, because you can accumulate enough to begin to dictate how much they can access (by having decision power around wages). There is no reason to assume private individual wealth-hoarders have public interest in mind, and indeed they have often proven that they don't. They want to maximize value at specific points in the system, which is the literal definition of instability and eventual collapse in chaos theory. You need to bring the system back to stability through structural intervention and regulation. Tax the rich. Cap individual accumulation. It's that simple. The world does need or benefit from kings, whether minted through politic or finance.
This. Neural Nets have existed conceptually since the 1950s. They weren't realized materially and practically until later, but it's astonishing how ignorant people are of the history of AI.
But one of the reasons they switched was because the compiler upstream for the original language they used, Zig, wouldn't accept slop contributions they wanted to make for Bun perf. What will they do when they need to try to push a slop contribution upstream to rust?
At this point they will probably just fork yet again and maintain some vibe compiler.
All great things, but helping other philosophers have careers and inspiring cool art does not necessarily imply that you yourself had substantial philosophical concepts.