csb6

The post you linked to seems to jump to conclusions, to say the least. For example:

One probable outcome of an unsafe-language-dominant world is full Andrew communism, which is precisely what Andrew “Smelley” Kelley proposes: abolish ICE and replace the market economy with a globally distributed network of community-maintained allocators.

Rather than a commercial product, software becomes a “public good,” ultimately provided by the Zig Software Foundation as manually managed digital infrastructure.

Calling him "smelley"? Really? Pulling in the political views of the founder of a language and claiming that they inform his language design as part of a grand conspiracy against Rust/capitalism? Where are they getting all of this? Free, open-source compilers and related tooling (both of which Rust and Zig have) are already public goods managed by global communities of mostly volunteers

This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I have never met an unsafe-language advocate who could explain how this ecosystem is supposed to sustain itself without unpaid maintainers, ideological volunteers, subsidized infrastructure, and endless donations to compiler projects that still cannot protect users from basic memory errors.

How is Rust any different than Zig in this respect? Both are projects largely run by nonprofits relying on communities to promote, maintain, and improve them.

Frankly, that entire "Institute for Type Safe Memetic Research" seems like either an elaborate satire or an account run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues.

Laughable to imply that an individual retail investor will have any say or influence on a corporation as large as SpaceX in which Musk has a controlling stake.

There doesn't seem to be information on who else was involved in the scheme. Was the Falun Gong organization involved? Who were the people/organizations that he was laundering money for?

Yes, it has generics. The syntax is Pascal-like, which some people used to C-family languages dislike but I personally find nice. Performance can definitely match performant C code. (intended use cases include real-time systems and embedded devices)

The language overview can be found here: https://docs.adacore.com/spark2014-docs/html/ug/en/spark_201...

For people looking for other languages with statically checked contracts, you might want to check out SPARK, which has been around in some form since the late 1980s. It is a subset of the Ada language and had been used for safety critical code in aerospace and defense projects, as well as for some Nvidia firmware.

It also uses Z3 to discharge proof obligations generated by the contract annotations, and it lets you use swap out different theorem provers as backends.

The GNAT Ada compiler (which is part of GCC) allows you to turn off the dynamic safety checks that are usually inserted into Ada programs at build time so you can optionally remove them if they are proven unnecessary.

Here are some resources for comparison:

- https://www.adacore.com/languages/spark

- https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-spark/chapters/01...

In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."

Seems pretty cut and dry

They have definitely done a lot of marketing through social media and forums like HN. There have been large numbers of posts here by Zig's developers for years, and a few releases of LLVM even mentioned Zig prominently in their release notes.

"Real excesses" is a bit of an understatement. There is the security theater instituted by the TSA, the militarization of police, normalized Islamophobia, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, torture as an official military policy, indefinite detention of "unlawful combatants", a trillion dollars spent destroying Iraq and Afghanistan, a million killed and many more made refugees. The rise of ISIS and the refugee crises in Europe can be traced back to the War on Terror. The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").

That is a rather narrow definition of checks and balances. The term can be applied to any group of organizations where each organization has power and interest to limit the power of the others.

If you want view ticket pricing as a pure economics problem (it is not), consider that live shows are also a way to build up and expand a fanbase. If only a handful of rich people (or people who bought tickets the second they went on sale) are at your show, you are not expanding your audience. Since streaming has decimated most artists' income from record sales, it makes sense to try and build a large fanbase who will regularly come to shows as well as buy merchandise. Tours often have exclusive merchandise than fans will want to buy, so all the more reason to attract more people.

As a side note, this notion that a phenomenon being the result of market forces means it is fair and has no issues seems to be a blinkered view of the world. Surely enjoying high quality art should be possible for a broad section of society?

I have no qualms with him deciding to step away from developing Zulip or setting up a foundation. My qualms are with his choice to work for an AI company when someone of his experience could easily have found a job working somewhere else. Public figures should be subject to criticism of their ethical choices when they make bad ones.

If he thinks working for Anthropic is a good "cause" to devote his time to then that is also very disappointing. That would make him either very delusional as to the effects of Anthropic's work or naive in what he can achieve as their employee.

Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting deeply on the myriad ways in which AI is changing the world, and how it might change the world in the future. And I came to the conclusion that it’s vitally important that we navigate this strange adolescence of technology well, and that I should contribute to this cause more directly than I ever could as the CEO of Kandra Labs.

The compensation for a senior developer at Anthropic is also certainly much better than a FOSS nonprofit - I'm sure that had nothing to do with his reasoning.

Sad to see yet another longtime open source developer begin working for AI companies that disregard free software licenses for their training and enable the deluge of low quality AI pull requests that waste maintainers' time.

In the United States, "college" and "university" are generally used interchangeably. I absolutely agree with your second point and the shift has been going on so long that people are genuinely baffled by the idea that college should not just be "white-collar vocational school"

The FAQ was mostly written before C++11 with some updates since then. I don't think he is rewriting every code snippet to match modern styles. It is an enormous FAQ and not meant as an introduction to the language.

This whole gerrymandering war really shows the tremendous dysfunction of the American political system. A state legislature's ruling party has such a strong incentive to gerrymander that it is extremely hard to pass reforms such as independent redistricting commissions. (my state is lucky enough to have citizen ballot initiatives that can bypass the legislature, but not all states have that process)

In a functioning system the U.S. Supreme Court would step in and check the power of all legislatures to gerrymander, ending the tit-for-tat redistricting, but this Court has instead chosen to fan the flames by reducing barriers to gerrymandering. (whether racial or political party based)

I wouldn't be surprised if they strike down independent redistricting commissions in a future case given their recent decisions on independent agencies. The 5-4 decision in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission likely wouldn't be decided the same today given the changes in the court's composition since 2015. So it goes.

I've never understood that stance because surely the mere threat (even implied) of a sponsor removing thousands in funding would be enough to exert influence on the project.

The sponsor money is used to pay developers to work on Ladybird so a major sponsor pulling out could mean laying off core developers, which the project would obviously be motivated to prevent.

I am skeptical billionaires will actually leave their mansions in Malibu or Santa Barbara in any significant numbers just because of higher taxes they can easily afford to pay.

Ada 83 did have generics - maybe you meant OOP support? That wasn't added until Ada 95.

If profit is the measure of utility, then gambling is just as useful: a winning bet makes you a profit or reduces your overall losses (depending on how you view it). But fundamentally you are making a bet that some future dice roll will go your way. It is still gambling.

The key contradiction is that financial speculation and gambling are a distinction without a difference. Financial speculation is just now more accessible and widespread than ever due to the accessibility and aggressive promotion of gambling/stock trading/crypto trading apps/websites.

Rather than reigning in financial speculation and gambling our institutions seem to have resolved the contradiction by reclassifying gambling as a legitimate "market".

A house can be aesthetically appealing and matched to its surroundings without being leaky or damp. A house that is ugly and out of place can also be leaky and damp (they often are because those architects often are also prioritizing form over function, but an ugly form instead of an appealing form).

They should be trying to mesh with and improve the neighborhood they are in. They should be rooted in time and place.

I take it you are not familiar with FLW's philosophy? He believed buildings should mirror their environment using local materials and forms that fit into the landscape. He definitely wasn't in favor of the houses you seem to be describing, which don't fit their environment or local nature. That doesn't mean his buildings can't be considered beautiful or art. Art can fit into and mirror its environment.

There is no evidence Iran has an active nuclear weapons program or has had one since the early 2000s, which even the article's author seems not to know. They have enriched uranium that could be further processed and used to make weapons, but there is no evidence they are doing so or have the capability to do so (and no, Israeli government/military sources are not reliable. They have every interest to lie about Iran having/nearly having nuclear weapons)

It just doesn't seem that hard to send someone a message stating: "Run foo.exe --bar from command prompt/the terminal"

Seems a lot easier to have a --help flag that lists all of the options and their function. That is self-documenting (assuming the descriptions are useful) and helps with discovery. Changing the name of the file to foo--bar.exe doesn't seem any easier than writing foo.exe --bar

Interpreters for Python, Lua, etc. can be embedded so using them does not require a separate process.

I was responding to this comment in the article and wondering about the historical context:

Although, I do not know for sure why the original Wayland authors chose to combine the window manager and Wayland compositor, I assume it was simply the path of least resistance.

Yeah, that makes sense. It seems like instead of introducing another IPC protocol like this project does, there could be a compositor that loads different window managers as plugins. Then everything is in the same process and there is no need for async communication. Of course a crash in the window manager would take down the compositor, but this is already true for Wayland compositors that combine both.

Was it moral or good for the American republic? Again, he is not an elected official so it doesn’t matter.

Not sure where you have gotten this idea that morality or "doing the right thing" only applies to elected officials. The choices people make can be criticized even if those choices were legal or beneficial for their investors.

Destroying the credibility of a leading newspaper for some lucrative government contracts seems to be a net loss for society, but hey, at least Amazon's investors are happy and Bezos' tremendously unprofitable space company has some more cash.