HN user
Awesome, I hope they attract a better industry than this. Maybe something that builds useful things for the world, and not a shrieking blight of a warehouse, dependent entirely on the economic dead end of frontier AI. An industry that provides better jobs than the menial long term work opportunities provided by a 5 acre box full of single purpose RAM chips.
"Already being generated and sold to other utilities," i.e., "already bought and paid for by you rubes to do useful things like heat your home and run your refrigerator."
I'd love to import a couple of high paid weirdos from out of town to build a data center for a year and then jet off to some other poor community to do it all over again. At least a couple of the locals can work as janitors and night security at the empty, shrieking warehouse that they erect.
Here's an eloquent counterargument: emissions.
The world is on fire and these clowns are completely fine with dumping a good portion of France's GHG emissions back into the atmosphere if it means we can turn a few more millionaires into billionaires.
Most of them don't get access. So let's hook them up to an insane, unproven, unpredictable autocomplete math equation and entrust it to their development as a human being.
So gross.
Gross
Technology does not exist in a vacuum, nor does anything that is engineered. It's not this abstract stuff detached from the world.
PEOPLE make stuff, people use stuff, and people are ultimately the ones who are going to pick and choose which stuff gets made, used, adapted, enhanced, and carried into the future.
AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.
Assessed from the perspective of "technology in a vacuum", of course. it's a success. He did the thing that transformed the thing from one kind of stuff to another kind of stuff. It still does all the things it did before, and in many cases with better stats than it did before.
Assessed from the human angle, and especially the angle of Bun as a community, I would bet money that this rewrite -- executed by nobody for nobody, built and maintained by machines, maintainable only by machines -- has killed the entire project.
Maintainable only by machines, because anybody with any knowledge, experience, or investment into Bun as a platform, or who contributed patches themselves, or whoever had a question about how it works and went "Hmm, I'm gonna go into the codebase and take a look at how that happens", they all got slapped in the face and summarily kicked out of the tent with the rewrite.
And the leaders of these companies are so genuinely surprised at the fact that the people are refusing this technology.
Sam Altman: “Looking at what’s possible, it does feel sort of surprisingly slow.”
Satya Nadella: “For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread.”
At least with a person, you can say that there's one person in your org that understands the code after they write it and submit it for review.
Maybe they stick around for a while, maybe they move on to another job, but they were THERE at some point. They have a name. You can ask them questions about what they did. And hey, they still exist in the real world too, so you can get in touch with them even after they leave if you need to.
AI powered development is like a guy shows up, gets hired for 90 seconds, writes part of a feature, and dies instantly once the code hits the screen.
I sure don't.
But when I'm using all of those things (pickaxe, mineral mine, power station, internet network hub), I know that there was a thinking human being that took some measure of human care and consideration when creating them. And that there are people on the other side of the economic transaction to talk to or hold accountable when something goes wrong.
"The future belongs to whoever understands what they just shipped."
Perfect summary.
It's like we invented a world where you can finally, _finally_ speedrun an enormous legacy codebase and all patted ourselves on the back like that was a good thing.
If code must be correct, and review time is not free, and review time is costlier than code time, why not just ...
... write the code yourself?
If code is now free, why does the language matter at all?
Those Lasko fans have pretty raw edges on the blades of the fan itself, which I think contributes a lot to the noise. If you take the cover off, sand down the nubs and bits of flaking plastic, and reassemble, I think that will take care of a lot of noise.
It is very possible!
Just this year these girls discovered a proof for the Pythagorean theorem using nothing but trigonometry, a feat considered impossible until they did it: https://youtu.be/VHeWndnHuQs
These guys have a fabulous bit on microservices that I watch at least monthly to maintain my sanity.
Congrats Michael! I've been following along with your story on and off since 2019-ish, very cool to read about how things are getting along.
Pound for pound, mining and processing minerals for batteries has a much smaller environmental impact compared to extracting and processing fossil fuels for gas.
It's not nothing, but way less.
If I had a dime for every time I saw somebody copy and paste "#myExampleWidget" into production code ...
Very cool!
This issue of the review includes a very cool submission from a few weeks ago which did pretty well on the front page: https://alex.miller.garden/grid-world/
I don't know about incurious, maybe "extreme". A lot of the tools, techniques, etc. mentioned in the article aren't appropriate for ... well, most websites probably. But they do have their roles to play in large, complicated systems.
One of my absolute favorite YT coding channels, I will second that recommendation!
For my emacs friends, here's a wonderful package that provides the same functionality: https://github.com/abo-abo/avy
And, if you're interested in some historical context for this "type characters and jump to point" functionality, the Canon Cat: https://youtu.be/o_TlE_U_X3c
The 2:00 timestamp in this Veritassium video on expertise goes into exactly that phenomenon. We acquire expertise by recognizing the patterns in what we do. But once you take the patterns away, a lot of that "expertise" disappears too: https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA
Jazz piano vs classical is a perfect example of this: same instrument, two paradigms with totally different idioms.
It's the "sadness of mortal men" as Tolkien put it. So many awesome languages in this world, so little time to learn and use them.
I wouldn't be so sure! There are companies which are developing ICE->EV conversion kits which put the price point in a pretty reasonable place.
This company has it down to 5000 Euros: https://youtu.be/98mlJ1N50DU
That 5000 figure is after EU subsidies, so who knows how such a system would shake out with CA subsidies, but even still: it's possible.
I wish I could find this post again, but one company had a clever approach to the problem. If you can figure out which countries the cracked software is originating from, you can serve up a version of your page where you offer up a free, unlocked version of your app.
You're still losing out on sales, but cracked software often originates in those same low-income countries. They get to have their free copies, and it's a likely bet that your customers in wealthier parts of the world will just buy the license instead of attempting to crack it themselves.
That point you make about syntax highlighting being slow while using eglot/LSP-mode is a great one. I've been a bit underwhelmed with eglot, and I think that must be the reason: it feels like I'm programming in a bowl of oatmeal with every keystroke.
Do you have any tips or guides for using treesitter for syntax highlighting/structural editing and eglot/LSP-mode for everything else?
Indeed. It feels unsafe to follow the "rules of the road" on a bike because the rules were created for an entirely different kind of vehicle.
I think about this a lot when approaching a stoplight or stop sign.
For any road user, where is the most dangerous part of any road? You guessed it, the intersection.
When is an intersection safest? When it's empty.
So, for a cyclist, it makes the most sense to cross through the most dangerous part of the road when it is devoid of danger; i.e., when it's empty, or when other cars are stopped.
This of course gets a little dicey when you consider protected turns, leading pedestrian intervals, jaywalking, or anything else which would make that "empty" intersection a little less empty and therefore unpredictable and dangerous. But generally speaking, I feel way safer running a predictable red light than crossing it with moving traffic.
Decarbonizing the grid will be much easier if we have less of a "grid" to decarbonize. The article mentions this aspect, if you had cared to read it. Modern buildings can use this lattice to reduce the load on their air conditioners.
Although I do agree with you in principle. One of the lasting impressions I got from the early Covid lockdowns was that even though we stopped a good chunk of the world from driving to work, flying, running factories, etc., we didn't come close to reducing our energy use enough to prevent more warming. Those lockdowns were a huge exercise in "energy austerity", and they weren't enough.
I have indeed! This is my first year of using Emacs. Previously I was using VS Code, and before that Atom, and before that Sublime.
Two things which have contributed to my success: - The System Crafters YT channel. David has an amazing tutorial series where you build a config file from scratch. I followed along, and it both gave me a very functional Emacs config and taught me enough about Emacs to get out of trouble when I goof up: https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemCrafters - Not being afraid to go back to other editors/IDEs for a while, or even rely on other editors for some tasks. Learning Emacs is tough enough as it is, but when you're a working programmer and you're on the clock for getting something done, it's extra tough to tolerate the slowdown from all those 1000 little things that you haven't gotten comfortable with, or features which were present in your previous editor but aren't yet present in your Emacs config. In past lives I would have just rage-quit and given up on Emacs, but I tried to be gentle with myself this time and take breaks from Emacs when I need to, and it has been a winning strategy.
Never going back.