7 ms·
There's a book that changed a lot of the way I think about attention and media [0]. The book isn't very good, but it flags something relevant here. There is a h
by dangerlibrary 4mo ago
There's a book that changed a lot of the way I think about attention and media [0]. The book isn't very good, but it flags something relevant here. There is a huge asymmetry between the reach of a big, flashy announcement (here: bun was re-written in memory-safe rust in a couple weeks), and the relatively small reach of a correction (often just a footnote on an old article, here a GH issue).
This asymmetry is well understood by marketing and PR professionals, and actively exploited.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoNot just marketing and PR, the mainstream media knows that pushing out BS and then retracting it later can have lasting effects because people will remember the original article / headline, and never see the correction.
- beberlei 4mo agoonly the mainstream media knows about this? Quite odd to qualify media this way here, when most of all media uses this mechanism. We also forgot politicians who are experts in this field.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoCtrl + F "only" is only in your messaging not mine. I never said they were the only ones doing this? It's not just politicians, celebrities know about this and will use it to their advantage. Whoever makes the headlines first might have a stronger sway over their adversaries. I'm not even poking at any side in particular, this is reality across the board unfortunately. People will just blindly take and believe the primary headlines.
- alpinisme 4mo agoI don’t think the media care about having lasting effects. They just want to catch the wave of interest and not wait around and let someone else get the scoop while they fact check or add nuance.
- pavel_lishin 4mo agoIs this the concept that's referred to in the quote "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes"?
- kakugawa 4mo agoYou could view it as a specific application of the quote. In your quote, there is no time-dependency between the lie and the truth. Whereas here, it's an attractive lie (easily parsed, great narrative), followed up by truths (that need more than surface-level analysis).
- kibwen 4mo ago> a big, flashy announcement (here: bun was re-written in memory-safe rust in a couple weeks) Did they even claim it was "memory-safe"? Every discussion of this topic has had dozens of comments noting that their vibed codebase is bursting at the seams with unaudited unsafe blocks, lightly reviewed by people who seem to not only seem to not understand Rust, but who seem incensed at the idea of needing to understand any programming language in the first place.
- parchley 4mo agoThe author kept bragging about classes of bugs that would not happen with Rust.
- Anon1096 4mo agoA bug-for-bug port to Rust is the first step to fixing that. Assuming the port is actually 1:1 without any behavioral changes, these bugs already exist in the Zig code. The difference is now it's known where effort can be dedicated in order to one day have a memory-safe release of Bun. People have absolutely lost their mind over this and completely forgotten the benefits Rust gives you. I feel like I've gone back 10 years reading threads about the Rust port of Bun these are the exact same arguments we see from people advocating continued use of C++.
- Henchman21 4mo agoIts almost like AI is rotting our brains?
- awesome_dude 4mo ago[flagged]
- pdimitar 4mo agoAnd yet, all I ever see are attacks against these convenient bogeymen with artistic exaggerations like yours... but I never see the bogeymen themselves.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- rcxdude 4mo agoHmmm, given the general mood in this case, I feel like there's a lot of people keen to find any criticism of the code they can and amplify it as possible. Most of it strikes me as relatively shallow at the moment, though (that is, apart from the fact that merging such a large LLM assisted port is certainly a, uh _bold_ move (to put it lightly), there's not much that people are pointing out about the actual result that feels like it's worse than any other port in progress, but there is definitely a lot of hay being made about any issue that is found).
- whimsicalism 4mo ago[flagged]
- beepbooptheory 4mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
- whimsicalism 4mo agoI did not say that HN is turning into reddit nor indicate any view on any way in which HN is trending. Remarking that Reddit and HN are similar is not rule breaking, they are both vote systems, etc.
- antonvs 4mo ago> Most of it strikes me as relatively shallow at the moment It is. We’re what, a week into this exercise? Absolutely everyone criticizing it, with no exceptions, is behaving like a micromanaging middle manager who couldn’t even dream of doing the work themselves. I half want to start a list of “people to ignore”, but such people tend to expose themselves in every other comment anyway.
- rajup 4mo ago
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Aurornis 4mo agoI thought you were going to call out the problem in the other direction: There has not been a "big, flashy announcement" because the port is a work in progress. It's not done or released. The only big flashy announcements I see are these drive-by dunk attempts on the work in progress code combined with attempts to imply that they said it was done or perfect. The rewrite was a code translation meant to be a starting point. > a big, flashy announcement (here: bun was re-written in memory-safe rust in a couple weeks), and the relatively small reach of a correction (often just a footnote on an old article, here a GH issue). The Bun team never made a big announcement that the code is now memory safe. They've been clear that this is the starting point. Anyone expecting it to be perfect immediately and to have solved all of the memory problems in the original Zig code is arguing with an announcement they imagined, not what the Bun team has said. Did anyone try to map this code back to the original codebase to see if this memory problem exists in the original codebase?
- tonfa 4mo ago> Did anyone try to map this code back to the original codebase to see if this memory problem exists in the original codebase? FWIW what is being discussed is not memory problems, it's breaking rust invariants (the unsafe code has to follow specific rules, e.g. annotate lifetimes properly).
- whimsicalism 4mo agostrongly agreed, all of the flashiness is coming from the detractors. the port itself has been quite lowkey
- poncho_romero 4mo agoBun being a high profile project, that has had visible conflicts with Zig over AI contributions, and was recently purchased by Anthropic, is naturally going to make something like this big and flashy regardless of the author's intentions.
- whimsicalism 4mo ago
- QuadrupleA 4mo agoThe effort required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude more than to create it.