ModernMech

What about a director of a movie. They aren't responsible for the creative performances but they are certainly given a heap of credit for having made the movie.

I ask 10 actors for 10 scenes and I combine them into a movie I wanted.

I ask 10 agents for 10 functions and I combine them into a program I wanted.

What's the difference and why is the guy who used agents not credited the same way as a director? Maybe all that's missing is a long list of credits for everyone involved -- so transparency in who did what?

Yeah I'm kind of confused about this announcement because I started seeing ads on ChatGPT like 6 months ago. It's the reason I switched to paying, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.

I saw robots doing this in tech demos 15 years ago. And even those robots weren't doing anything new. Like all AI models, this is just AI repackaging and rebranding of things that robots have already been programmed to do using more classical control methods. The idea to do everything via AI was of course thought of for a long time, but the conclusion has been we have faster and more reliable methods to do the same thing with less compute, and that's still true.

During my undergrad I worked on a project where we set off a bunch of walking robots, recorded their walks, and then used the data as the basis for a learned walking controller. I see this Xiaomi model as pretty much like that.

It's a nice technology and maybe could lead to better folding one day but unfortunately it's not "finally we have robots that can do our laundry" (yet).

Shame then that despite all that, they landed on the same design used by every "I asked an LLM to make me a language and a website this weekend here's what it spit out" project. I mean, I'm not saying it looks bad or is a bad result. Just it's very similar to other things that have put in much less effort.

Dude just stop. This has been embarrassing and damaging enough to your reputation, you should just give it a rest for now. Your friends have made you self-aware enough to realize you have unprocessed emotions about this — process them. Best to get out of the comment section, and your head. The saying is if you’re explaining you’re losing. I’m not a fan of Bun or Jarred but of your Zig work. Stick to that, it’s where you serve the community best. In the future, just present the verifiable facts and you’ll be okay.

No causal link was demonstrated, only gossip. Maybe if evidence was provided you could say that, but that’s not what happened.

Yeah this is why Vlang is banned from discussion on HN; any time it comes up people have a critical thing to say about Vlang, these guys descend with paragraphs, links, and a list of grievances about how their language is slandered and hated by people fueled with envy. Doesn’t matter if it’s buried in a thread in a comment section in an unrelated story, these guys rush in to defend the honor of Vlang.

Meanwhile, years later Vlang still have not delivered on the initial claims that made the language even remotely interesting.

Yes, I’ll cite “the juicy grapevine” and that should be enough given the evidentiary standards people are setting here.

If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks.

The post did no such thing — it spread rumors and leaned into gossip. There’s no proof or evidence or examples whatsoever offered by Kelley except Jarred’s own public words, which means the post didn’t reveal or expose anything about his management.

It’s not weird considering what we’ve learned through this: the Zig project is driven by people with fragile emotions and egos who lash out at people personally when they feel threatened.

We’d like Zig to be a project with steady and technically driven leadership like Rust, but Kelley has made clear (many times) it’s more of an egoistic vanity project like Elm, designed to cater to the emotional needs of the BDFL.

I'm not defending the blog post as a great way to build the biggest bestest community. Clearly it isn't.

This has been everyone's point the entire time. You agree with everyone here. No one is suggesting a binding contract exists, but a _social_ contract does exist -- and you concede that with the above recognition of how clearly this post violates it.

I mean you’re not wrong, the only power his community has is to vote with their feet, and that’s what will happen. We’ve seen it before in other languages where the BDFL had an unchecked ego problem. Others brought up Elm and Evan and I agree. We all saw how that turned out.

To be precise, they said “the kind of contributors you attract with this kind of writing are just assholes” not “the community is only assholes” and also not “anyone who associates with him is an asshole". You’re strawmanning.

He doesn't owe me anything. But his community deserve better than this.

I think if one is going to call someone else's code slop, it's up to one to a) define the term because it's meaningless and b) to actually give at least one example. Not idiomatic or exemplary is one thing, but as I understand it, slop means that no care was put into creating it.

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.

I think he’s being completely sincere in this attempt to assassinate this person’s character. I say this as someone who before this day regarded Kelley as a role model. Now I see him in the same category as a Musk like character. Don’t blame “unmasked neurodivergence” for this, plenty of neurodivergent people can communicate effectively and professionally to a wide audience without attacking someone’s professional character.

For example, given the number of claims made here there’s very little actual evidence and support. Kelley says Jared is a bad manager and credits rumors. He says he writes slop code and doesn’t provide a single example or prove that statement. If this were his “neurodivergence” coming through I’d expect more thorough argument and less “stinky manager” grade school insults.

Yes, jerks love to use Linus’ success to justify being jerks.

Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.

There’s a big gap between corpo speak and “stinky manager”. That’s nowhere close to professional writing. And he’s not giving us his personal opinion, Kelley is telling us the conclusion of the “grape vine” - he’s reporting on rumors and gossip, and agreeing with it.

Right I think the correct term is “character assassination”. It starts by calling him a novice, goes on to call him a “stinky manager”, and then lands the deepest cut possible in this profession: his code sucks. At least Kelley thanked him for his money.

This is not refreshing, I usually expect better from Kelley. The best move would have been to say nothing at all except “best of luck, Zig will miss him but”. Now all Ziglings must wonder if they’re going to receive a hit piece from the Zig founder if they cross him.

You're the one holding him to a standard that it be "truly life changing" when that was never what he was addressing in his comment.

Then maybe he shouldn't have quoted a portion asking for "truly life changing examples that can't be done without AI" with examples that are not lifechanging, and then concede that yes, his job can still be done without AI.

No one argues that AI provides marginal benefits and makes some people's tasks more efficient. But people are noticing that leaders of AI companies have promised everything from "universal high income" to "universal basic compute" and none of that is really happening.

Meanwhile, the big negatives are here now -- job losses, pay cuts, data centers taking over land, poisoning water, and straining electricity grids. If we're going to put up with those downsides, it's reasonable for people to ask where the truly lifechanging upsides are (the whole point of TFA and this entire Hacker News thread), and "I don't have to debug my PRs anymore" is decidedly not that.

The original intent of TFA was "Show me something truly life changing" (emphasis mine). "No longer look at log files, or look up implementation details, or don't try to debug" are marginal improvements to already existing processes, not truly life changing. It's just more of the same but more efficient.

The point is that with this AI technology, we're putting up with a lot of shit -- everything is getting worse across the board -- on the promise of incredible upsides, so where are they? "I'm X% better at my job" is not seriously responsive to "Show me something truly life changing." That kind of technological progress is routine, so why do we have to put up with all the shit for routine technical progress we could get in any number of other ways that don't enshittify everything.

show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart

Of course I could still do my job if AI disappeared tomorrow

So then you agree with TFA, it’s not so critical that if taken away your work would not fall apart.

It’s the old lifecycle of a scene.

1) cool people do cool things, start a scene

2) chill people who enjoy watching cool people do cool things spread the word

3) posers get wind and show up, the scene loses its vibe but reaches critical mass

4) advertisers show up looking to monetize the scene, driving out the cool and chill people who are allergic to advertisers.

5) the scene is now dead, filled with posers and ad execs

I dunno if it’s exclusively his innovation, but Zuckerberg’s insight was that you could actually lie to your users by presenting yourself as trustworthy, while having malicious intent to violate their privacy by selling their data to advertisers, and there are no business repercussions for doing so.

Never — remember, these people believe 3 things:

1) empathy is a weakness

2) introspection is a waste of time

3) move fast and break things

The only introspection will be along the lines of “we should have moved faster and broken more things”; because of (1) and (2), it can’t progress to the level of “maybe we were completely wrong in a fundamental sense”, because they just don’t perceive human minds outside of their own (they really do view us as NPCs).

"But the motto was on display..."

"Yes, it was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

No they’re saying the CEO isn’t barred from bribery.

I would have guessed https://pyret.org ;)

It's the conceit of capitalism. We've structured our entire society around giving the boardroom class most of the rewards from our societal output, so they've taken that to mean they create most of the value. They are job creators, deliverers of technology, builders of nations, and how it gets done at the low level is an fungible implementation detail. Whether it's slaves or workers or robots down in the fields / mines / factories, the board are the ones driving the ship and therefore doing the real, important work.

And yes, this does mean they view us workers as somewhere between slaves and robots, replicable by a token predictor.