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The right to be suspicious of the motives of powerful people is infinitely more important than protecting their feelings from being hurt by suspicion.

by johncolanduoni13 hours ago|

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Powerful people figured out how to make suspicion work for them long ago. You have every right to be unconditionally suspicious, but it’s not a good way of accomplishing any change. Also their feelings are not hurt by what you or I think, they don’t care.

by klausa1 hours ago|

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> Also their feelings are not hurt by what you or I think, they don’t care.

I would have agreed with this like 15 years ago, but the very existence of Twitter (and the acquisition saga) proves this to not be true.

by irishcoffee7 hours ago|

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> Powerful people figured out how to make suspicion work for them long ago. You have every right to be unconditionally suspicious, but it’s not a good way of accomplishing any change.

How does one accomplish change? Even being a martyr doesn't get traction. As far as I can tell, you need to already be powerful. Nobody lets you into that group if you're not aligned with said group.

Protests (at least in their current form) don't work. Trying to assassinate someone doesn't move the needle (also not the play, I don't support murder), vocal grassroots leaders are no longer relevant at all, if they ever were.

How does one accomplish any change?

by airstrike1 hours ago|

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Become mighty rich too first, and then accomplish change.

by johncolanduoni7 hours ago|

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Not by trading the same suspicions on the internet with fellow true believers over and over again, I think the past 10 years have proven that pretty conclusively. Maybe people should try some of the things previous social movements did, seemed to work pretty well even against a much more uniform media environment and a stronger hostile social consensus.

Protests don’t immediately solve everything, but I think looking at 2026 and concluding they don’t move the needle at all is a weird take. There are recent examples of protest movements (especially long-term ones) working all over the world.

by otterley13 hours ago|

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This isn’t about rights. It’s about not being a jerk. Assume positive intent unless you have direct evidence to the contrary.

by christopherwxyz14 hours ago|

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Protecting software creators, engineers, builders, and their work, regardless of their tools, is infinitely more important. Full stop.

by dandellion15 hours ago|

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Four days ago there was no intention to rewrite, now it's a simple desire to refactor. It's not adversarial conclusion, it's pointing out the clear hypocrisy.

by johncolanduoni15 hours ago|

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Running an experiment, the experiment being more successful than you thought, and then deciding to put more effort into a bigger experiment is not hypocrisy. It’s engineering. If you think some of the objective facts they’re putting out (like test coverage and performance) are lies, go and prove it instead of appealing to emotion.

by baranul12 hours ago|

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Especially if given near unlimited tokens to burn through, because any level of success fuels the LLM hype machine, which brings ROI.

> It’s engineering.

Significantly, but not totally. The marketing value can't be ignored.

by johncolanduoni10 hours ago|

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What do you think one would have to pay to have flesh-and-blood engineers get a cross-language port of a codebase of over half a million lines with a broad test suite to over 99% conformance? I think it would be astronomically high, especially given that for this specific project your hiring pool is going to be limited to people who can get up to speed with Zig and JavaScriptCore right away (or you’re going to have to pay them for low output for a while as you train them). Also it would be literally impossible to do in 6 days no matter how much money you paid, so unless they’re lying about that it’s still something that couldn’t have been done prior for any price.

More handwaving about the LLM hype machine is incredibly boring and enough of it is spewed everywhere that whatever social good it was going to accomplish must have already happened by now. If you want to inject reality into the situation, talk about reality (like Anthropic is at least pretending to).

by rkajdh10 hours ago|

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The hype machine is real and we will talk about it as long as it pleases us. It took decades to get rid of smoking in public places and restaurants, and the clankers will eventually fall, too.

So cash out before that.

by johncolanduoni9 hours ago|

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Did I say it wasn’t real? Or tell you that you couldn’t talk about it? No, I just pointed out that it’s all anybody talks about and it’s boring and doesn’t engage with anything specific about this stunt/project. And I can make melodramatic analogies too — like to the panic about global overpopulation that led to mass sterilizations in The Emergency. Panic is not an unalloyed good, and if you want to fight “the clankers” you should understand what they are and are not capable of.

Also I already cashed out, jokes on you.

by simianwords1 hours ago|

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Anti AI cope is unreal, the comparisons to smoking won't stop lol. The mental model of such people (like you) will be studied. LLM's won't go anywhere, keep dreaming.

by sdhAt13 minutes ago|

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Studied by whom? Your virtual AI concubine who has you under her thumb? I thought human thinking is obsolete, as can be seen by your comments.

by renticulous1 hours ago|

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This attempt is like shooting for the stars. Most of us software developers are plumbers and we just need to reach to the moon.

by dandellion1 hours ago|

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Running an experiment and deciding based on the results is not hypocrisy, it's engineering, 100%.

Saying you have no intention of doing something then doing it is not engineering, it's being dishonest. He could have said "well decide when we see the results", why didn't he?

by awwaiid29 minutes ago|

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Maybe he didn't think it would work. Maybe even if it does "work" they'll keep the zig version anyway. Maybe further study is needed beyond existing compiling/test-suite. Intentions and perspectives change over time, even only a few days, without dishonesty.

I'm guessing that if I said it ... that we have no intention of re-writing in rust ... that what I mean is "we have no intention of spending the extreme cost it would take to rewrite". When I discover the cost model is completely different that changes things.

by christopherwxyz14 hours ago|

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Being able to change your mind is a excellent exercise in free will.

by dandellion1 hours ago|

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Totally.

Saying you don't intend to do something and then doing it is free will.

It's also lying. They are not mutually exclusive.

by y3ahd0g9 hours ago|

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"People cannot change their mind!

One must stick to old assertions forever!

Giant foot is gonna squish us!"

...this forum is as bad as a single backwater sub Reddit.

I am so sick of emotionally frail software engineers. I don't know why I keep bothering floating back here every once in a while to see what is up.

Same old rustled jimmies over technology evolution like back during the emacs and vi! tabs vs spaces! Sysv init vs systemd!

Super hero power scaling message boards are more engaging than this site.

AI save us from these needlessly economically empowered labor exploiting non-contributor script kiddies. Such an unserious community.

by dandellion1 hours ago|

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Okay, that's such a shallow take I'm going to try and explain it to you like you're 5 years old:

Changing your mind is okay, for example if someone said it was impossible to do the migration with current LLMs and it turns out they did it in four days, that person can and should admit they were wrong. That's not what he did though. What he did is say he had no intention of doing it, and then did it. That is lying. If he was testing and he didn't know if the change was going to be worth it, he could have said for example:

"This branch is a test, it's not a given it will work so until we see the results we won't decide if we'll be migrating or not."

He didn't say anything like that though, he basically said:

"We have no intention to migrate."

Why did he said the latter and not the former? Because he wasn't being honest, he was just trying to get people off his back, and so he didn't say what he was doing, the best for his own interest. We have a saying in my country: "it's easier to catch a liar than someone who's lame".

Also, before you come and say but he said he had no "intention" not that he wasn't gonna do it. A five year old might think that's a valid argument, but this person is an adult and we're all adults here, so it's not, it's equivocation and it's a logical fallacy.

> I am so sick of emotionally frail software engineers.

Then don't look in the mirror, you're probably being the biggest crybaby in this thread so far.

by erkat14 hours ago|

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If experienced (in open source and corporate politics) developers would bet on Polymarket if the rewrite is going to be ultimately merged, which side would you bet on?

What would the emerging odds be? My guess is 19/20 in favor of ditching Zig.

I have followed many initial denials on a wide range of topics, not only rewrites, over the years. Like clockwork, most of them were lies.

by christopherwxyz14 hours ago|

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I don't think most serious developers have time to watch prediction markets.

by geysersam8 hours ago|

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I don't think there's much chance it gets merged.

Even if it passed the full test suite there are a ton of software qualities that are not captured by tests and I think it's unlikely the AI made the right trade-off in every such case.

* We haven't seen the benchmarks yet.

* It hasn't seen wide usage. Zig Bun has had tons of bugs ironed out, Rust Bun has a different set of bugs to iron out.

* The developers know the zig codebase well, they don't know the rust code base.

by Cthulhu_15 hours ago|

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Not to mention invoking a major historical event, appeal to emotion move.