ants_everywhere

I think if you take a step back and try to fight against confirmation bias you'll see that the arguments you're making are very weak.

You are also moving the goal posts. You started with it was sketchy to claim a namespace now you're moving to it's sketchy to own domains. Of course people are going to buy variants on their domains.

This is easily in the top 5 most toxic moments in open source, and off the top of my head seems like #1. For all you know this is some kid in a country with a terrible job market trying to create a resource for the community and get their name out there. And the Zig community tried to ruin his life because they whipped themselves into a frenzy and convinced themselves there were secret signs that an AI might have been used at some point.

I've never seen an open source community gang up like that to bully someone based on absolutely no evidence of any wrong doing except forgetting to include an attribution for 22 lines of code. That's the sort of issue that happens all the time in open source and this is the first time I've seen it be used to try to really hurt someone and make them personally suffer. The intentional cruelty and the group of stronger people deliberately picking on a weaker person is what makes it far worse to me than the many other issues in open source of people behaving impolitely.

This is an in-group telling outsiders they're not welcome and, not only that, if we don't like you we'll hurt you.

And yes there have been repeated mentions of their interest in crypto, including in this thread.

The claims of AI use were unsubstantiated and pure conjecture, which was pointed out by people who understand language, including me. Now it appears that the community has used an MIT attribution violation to make the Zigbook author a victim of DMCA abuse.

That doesn't look great to me. It doesn't look like a community I would encourage others to participate in.

tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx

It seems reasonable for the zigbook namespace to belong to the zigbook author. That's generally how the namespaces work right? https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aeclipse%2Fopenvsx+namespa... https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx/wiki/Namespace-Access. IMO, this up there with the "but they were interested in crypto!" argument. The zigbook author was doing normal software engineer stuff, but somehow the community tries to twist it into something nefarious. The nefariousness is never stated because it's obviously absurd, but there's the clear attempt to imply wrongdoing. Unfortunately that just makes the community look as if they're trying hard to prosecute an innocent person in the court of public opinion.

At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious.

Malicious means "having the nature of or resulting from malice; deliberately harmful; spiteful". The Zig community looks malicious in this instance to me. Like you, I don't have complete information. But from the information I have the community response looked malicious, punitive, harassing and arguably defamatory. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any open source community.

Again, prior to the MIT attribution claim there was no evidence the author of Zigbook had done anything at all wrong. Among other things, there was no evidence they had lied about the use of AI. Malicious and erroneous accusations of AI use happen frequently these days, including here on HN.

Judging by the strength of the reaction, the flimsiness of the claims and the willingness to abuse legal force against the zigbook author, my hunch is that there is some other reason zigbook was controversial that isn't yet publicly known. Given the timing it possibly has to do with Anthropic's acquisition of Bun.

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the actual claim was that Zigbook had not complied with the MIT license's attribution clause for code someone believed was copied. MIT only requires attribution for copies of "substantial portions" of code, and the code copied was 22 lines.

Does that count as substantial? I'm not sure because I'm not a lawyer, but this was really an issue about definitions in an attribution clause over less code than people regularly copy from stack overflow without a second thought. By the time this accusation was made, the Zigbook author was already under attack from the community which put them in a defensive posture.

Now, just to be clear, I think the book author behaved poorly in response. But the internet is full of young software engineers who would behave poorly if they wrote a book for a community and the community turned around and vilified them for it. I try not to judge individuals by the way they behave on their worst days. But I do think something like a community has a behavior and culture of its own and that does need to be guided with intention.

I say this as someone who has been cautioning about Microsoft's ownership of GitHub for years now... but the Zig community has been high drama lately. I thought the Rust community had done themselves a disservice with their high tolerance of drama, but lately Zig seems to me to be more drama than even Rust.

I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.

I was already turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing. But now that we're getting pitchfork mobs and ranty anti-AI diatribes it just seems like a community sustaining itself on negative energy. I think they can possibly still turn it around but it might involve cleaning house or instituting better rules for contributors.

It's true that it's about totalitarianism to some extent. But we have Orwell's actual words here that it's chiefly about communism

[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

And of course Animal Farm is only about communism (as opposed to communism + fascism). And the lesser known Homage to Catalonia depicts the communist suppression of other socialist groups.

By all this I just mean to say when you're reading Nineteen Eighty-Four what he's describing is barely a fictionalization of what was already going on in the Soviet Union. There's just not a lot in the book that is specifically Nazi or Fascist.

I don't have any opinion on whether he thought there were non-totalitarian forms of communism.

Big Brother is a reference to George Orwell's critique of Communism in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Qwen is a video model trained by a Communist government, or technically by a company with very close ties to the Chinese government. The Chinese government also has laws requiring AI be used to further the political goals of China in particular and authoritarian socialism in general.

In the light of all this, I think it's reasonable to conclude that this technology will be used for Big Brother type surveillance and quite possible that it was created explicitly for that purpose.

The writeup makes it sound like an acquihire, especially the "what changes" part.

ChatGPT is feeling the pressure of Gemini [0]. So it's a bit strange for Anthropic to be focusing hard on its javascript game. Perhaps they see that as part of their advantage right now.

[0] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/goo...

It's not just less literate, it's also people who feel the need to be amateur prosecutors.

It's the same thing as judging people who wear their hair too long, or wear pajamas on the plane, or who wear pants that are too baggy, or who have children out of wedlock, etc. Some people are deeply convinced that society is on the decline and that they have a mission to ensure everyone else stays in line.

It's been that way throughout history.

At current job I think we have slightly more microservices than engineers on the team.

You are free to do that, but that's a very specific take on microservices that is at odds with the wider industry. As I said above, what I was describing is what Google referred to internally as microservices. Microservices are not smaller than that as a matter of definition, but you can choose to make them extra tiny if you wish to.

If you look at what others say about microservices, it's consistent with what I'm saying.

For example, Wikipedia gives as a dichotomy: "Service-oriented architecture can be implemented with web services or Microservices." By that definition every service based architecture that isn't built on web services is built on microservices.

Google Cloud lists some examples:

Many e-commerce platforms use microservices to manage different aspects of their operations, such as product catalog, shopping cart, order processing, and customer accounts.

Each of these microservices is a heavy lift. It takes a full team to implement a shopping cart correctly, or customer accounts. In fact each of these has multiple businesses offering SaaS solutions for that particular problem. What I hear you saying is that if your team were, for example, working on a shopping cart, they might break the shopping cart into smaller services. That's okay, but that's not in any way required by the definition of microservices.

Azure says https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/a...

Model services around the business domain. Use DDD to identify bounded contexts and define clear service boundaries. Avoid creating overly granular services, which can increase complexity and reduce performance.

Azure also has a guide for determining microservice boundary where again you'd need a full team to build microservices of this size https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/microse...

That's a pretty extreme definition in my opinion.

Google played a role in popularizing the microservice approach.

When I was at Google, a microservice would often be worked on with teams of 10-30 people and take a few years to implement. A small team of 4-5 people could get a service started, but it would often take additional headcount to productionize the service and go to market.

I have a feeling people overestimate how small microservices are and underestimate how big monorepos are. About 9 times out of ten when I see something called a monorepo it's for a single project as opposed to a repo that spans multiple projects. I think the same is true of microservices. Many things that Amazon or Google considers microservices might be considered monoliths by the outside world.

Most likely they see AI as a competitor to search and are trying to survive by pandering to the anti-AI movement

I understand the cryptography and I agree with his analysis of the cryptographic situation.

What I don't understand is why -- assuming he thinks this is important -- he's chosen to write the bits about the standardization process in a way that predisposes readers against his case?

That was when he had the legal expertise of the EFF to help him make his case. Later he decided to represent himself in court and failed

This time, he chose to represent himself, although he had no formal legal training. On October 15, 2003, almost nine years after Bernstein first brought the case, the judge dismissed it....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

D. J. Bernstein is very well respected and for very good reason. And I don't have firsthand knowledge of the background here, but the blog posts about the incident have been written in a kind of weird voice that make me feel like I'm reading about the US Government suppressing evidence of Bigfoot or something.

Stuff like this

Wow, look at that: "due process".... Could it possibly be that the people writing the law were thinking through how standardization processes could be abused?"

is both accusing the other party of bad faith and also heavily using sarcasm, which is a sort of performative bad faith.

Sarcasm can be really effective when used well. But when a post is dripping with sarcasm and accusing others of bad faith it comes off as hiding a weak position behind contempt. I don't know if this is just how DJB writes, or if he's adopting this voice because he thinks it's what the internet wants to see right now.

Personally, I would prefer a style where he says only what he means without irony and expresses his feelings directly. If showing contempt is essential to the piece, then the Linus Torvalds style of explicit theatrical contempt is probably preferable, at least to me.

I understand others may feel differently. The style just gives me crackpot vibes and that may color reception of the blog posts to people who don't know DJT's reputation.

Yeah, rage isn't something the US needs. It's something the US's enemies need us to have.

one of the current approaches is to turn communities against solar and wind projects on the grounds that it's racist or disturbs plant life etc. This has advocates of environmental justice, which is an important concern on its own, weaponized against building renewable energy.

Here's one example in Florida, but it is happening around the US https://www.eenews.net/articles/fla-solar-plans-stoke-fight-...

The net effect is a win for the fossil fuel industry and a weakened environmental movement.

This is also my take on the market, although I also thought it looked like they were going to win 2 years ago too.

How are we feeling about Google putting everyone out of work and owning the future? It's starting to feel that way to me.

Not great, but if one company or nation is going to come out on top in AI then every other realistic alternative at the moment is worse than Google.

OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta, and X all have worse track records on ethics. Similarly for Russia, China, or the OPEC nations. Several of the European democracies would be reasonable stewards, but realistically they didn't have the capital to become dominant in AI by 2025 even if they had started immediately.

The use of any specific word does not determine in and of itself if something is an assertion of fact or an assertion of opinion. It depends on how you're using the word.

Yes that's the point I'm making. The entire thread is about which words you can get sued over libel for, which isn't how it works.

Computer people have this weird notion that courts are like a computer program. If x == "foo" then punishment.

This seems unnecessarily insulting, especially since your comment is just a repeat of mine with the relevant details removed.

Haha, I know, thanks :). I don't mind saying it... it's just such a raw word and I wanted people to focus on the substance without aggressively escalating the potty mouth in the thread.

where do we land on motherf!cker?

Taken literally it's accusing someone of a specific depraved act, but it's also clearly a term of abuse. My guess (not a lawyer!) is that once a term becomes more associated with abuse the more you're protected.

Hustler basically called Jerry Falwell a motherf!cker but attributed to him a specific act, which they highlighted was satire and not to be taken seriously. Hustler lost in a jury trial and also on an appeal to the 4th circuit. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in Hustler's favor [0]. This is dramatized in the movie The People vs Larry Flint.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell

[1] https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-people-vs-larry-flynt/

Even if one believes everything should be possible with cameras, the goal posts are moving. Other automated vehicles use radar or lidar. Even if Tesla achieves fatality levels comparable with human drivers, other vehicles will outperform them. There's not going to be a great market for the most fatal automatic vehicle. It makes more sense to chase state of the art rather than the state of the median human.

If Tesla's robotaxis develop a reputation for accidents, they'll create an unpredictable traffic bubble around them.

Some people will slow down to minimize the fatality of an impact and to increase reaction time (similar to people slowing down around a marked cop car). Others will speed up to ensure they don't get stuck behind or around one.

That happens with other unsafe vehicles (e.g. a truck that doesn't have its load well secured). But it makes me wonder what will happen if Tesla trains on the data of erratic driving created by its presence.

It seems like they should add lidar or radar.

What is the argument for deliberately impoverishing the Tesla sensory input?

No it's not. I mute people who post that sort of content and it's the math instance.

If you are forced to see it despite spending most of your time silencing it, it's not the people you follow it's the culture.

Judging from the CEO's letter and actions, it sounds like it's possible a bad culture example was set by the top of the project. Although that doesn't always happen. For example, Linux doesn't have a culture of over-the-top personal insults despite that being Linus's personal style.

it's always a config push. people rollout code slowly but don't have the same mechanisms for configs. But configs are code, and this is a blind spot that causes an outsized percentage of these big outages.

this was on the math instance

Mastodon seems pretty unhealthy to me.

I logged in for the first time in months a few days ago and it was mostly angry memes, a surprising number of which were celebrating violence and murder. This is despite me aggressively muting people who post that sort of thing.

I hope they find a niche, but the cultural damage may already be done.

Chances are still good that somewhere within Cloudflare someone really did do a global configuration push that brought down the internet.

When aliens study humans from this period, their book of fairy tales will include several where a terrible evil was triggered by a config push.

working with complex systems and constraints there often isn't an aha moment

You only get the a-ha moment when there's essentially one discrete piece of information needed to decide between alternatives. That doesn't apply to most problems.

Your brain simultaneously assigns probabilities to possible solutions, and in certain cases there's an information update that sets one solution to probability 1 and the others to 0. If your brain is actively expending energy keeping these possibilities warm simultaneously, then this will naturally lead to a rapid change in energy which will feel like something because it's a change in the flow of neuro chemicals.

It's not obvious that it would feel pleasant. But since the nucleus accumbens is active during problems solving then it's not entirely surprising that the the NAc gets extra stimulated in the rush of energy as the probabilities collapse and weights get updated to the real solution.

But relatively few problems require you to simultaneously juggle multiple possible solutions and pieces of evidence that are brought together in a single instant. So chasing that feeling is generally a poor strategy.

this construction is familiar to anyone who has taken a course on writing post middle or high school.

The formal version is "not only... but also" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/..., which I personally use regularly but I often write formally even in informal settings.

"not just... but" is just the less formal version.

Google ngrams shows the "not just ... but" construction has a sharp increase starting in 2000. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=not+just+*+but...

Same with "not only ... but also" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=not+only+*+but...

Like many scholarly linguistic construction, this is one many of us saw in latin class with non solum ... sed etium or non modo ... sed etium: https://issuu.com/uteplib/docs/latin_grammar/234. I didn't take ancient Greek, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a version there.

More info

- https://www.phrasemix.com/phrases/not-just-something-but-som...

- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/not%20just

- https://www.grammarly.com/blog/writing-techniques/parallelis...

- https://www.crockford.com/style.html

- https://englishan.com/correlative-conjunctions-definition-ru...