12 ms·

It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it ra

by lins1909 2mo ago

It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.

tuckwat 2mo ago
Do you have bias? I'm not saying I don't have some hidden bias but I have no skin in the game. I don't use Bun or Zig or plan to. My reflection comes after reading Jarred's post yesterday, which I found interesting, and then Andrew's today. I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone and the summary is: > The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending.
- lins1909 2mo ago
  Uhm, I'm very confused by the last part of your comment. You put it into an LLM to...understand the tone? Is that supposed to convince me of something?
  - lifthrasiir 2mo ago
    Reality check. The confirmation that the author is not alone in having this particular feeling by using an LLM as a proxy.
    - lkey 2mo ago
      Using an LLM as a proxy for an 'unbiased' source of personal confirmation bias is perhaps the most common 'use-case' for an LLM.
  - QuadmasterXLII 2mo ago
    I guess they use an LLM to work out the tone of prose they read. These are strange times.
  - ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
    They phrased it poorly, but from context it seems clear they intend the LLM as a less biased third-party measure of the tone which agrees with their own assessment.
    - zeratax 2mo ago
      which they very much are not
      - ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
        Less biased? Maybe on political questions, etc, but this is a classic NLP task and I expect LLMs to be very reliable here
        dgellow 2mo ago
        LLMs are predictive engines based on Reddit data, what they generate is very far from neutral
  - uludag 2mo ago
    Very weird indeed. People must not realize that you can completely change the response you get back from an LLM by how you ask questions. Any bias can implicitly be implanted in the question you ask and drastically modify the response. This is what I got Gemini to say about the article: The author’s tone in this piece can be described as brutally candid, deeply relieved, and unapologetically sarcastic. very different from "The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending."
    - alienbaby 2mo ago
      this is what worries me. I have friends that love what AI tells them about their personal pet 'thing' and how awesome it is. Yet not one of them has even tried once to get the AI to criticise it's own answers, and hence learn that you can trivially get an AI to make a convincing-_sounding case for any point of view. I tell them to try, and they laugh at me as they roll their eyes and waffle on about 'tricking' the AI like its some kind of hacking.
    - lifthrasiir 2mo ago
      Personally I don't think that matters, because the article is problematic enough when it can be read like ad hominem. Assuming that the question was phrased reasonably neutrally (but not necessarily free of hidden biases), the fact that LLM concluded so is an enough evidence here. Also as a non-LLM data point, I felt roughly same (especially the "softening" bit).
    - dofm 2mo ago
      Not very different, mind you. I don't really agree with using LLMs to do this but it correctly identified the attempt to soften the ending, which is to my mind significant in the whole piece; this person wants to repeat and frame unkind things he's heard, say unkind things, and then assert that he wasn't doing either.
- galangalalgol 2mo ago
  I think I have some bias. I like rust. I like using opus, I don't want to use zig, don't see the point for it, but I find it aesthetically pleasing. I don't use JavaScript I wish it would disappear. If I did ise JavaScript I wouldn't run it on bun. Some of those tilt me either way. I agree with the LLMs take on the tone. The result of the two posts is that I think Jarred is a poopyhead, andrew is a bit childish but genuine and I'd probably like him, and I still won't use zig or bun or JavaScript. I plan to keep using rust and opus.
- titularcomment 2mo ago
  I'm glad that you asserted that you do have potential hidden bias and say that you used an LLM to judge the tone of an article partly pertaining to AI usage in coding right after.
  - lkey 2mo ago
    Edit: Ah, my brain's been fried by comments that say this unironically and I read this as sincere, thanks commenter below, and apologies commenter above.
    - speedster217 2mo ago
      They are saying that someone who will summarize an article with AI is already implicitly biased. It's not about the AI, it's about the user.
  - vitorfblima 2mo ago
    Let me check real quick with ChatGPT if you are being sarcastic or not.
- lkey 2mo ago
  Please, I'm begging you, and the people that scan across this comment: Finishing mastering reading comprehension; It will help you for the rest of your life. I'm not snarking, this is a problem affecting 30% or more of the population here in the states, and it's getting worse because of tools like AI. I'm not judging you, I don't think you are bad or deficient people, but this externalsing of comprehension and trust is self-harm. Worse, it will lead you astray in ways that you won't tie back to this core problem. To use an LLM safely you must have the discernment to understand when it has fallen into sycophancy, folly, or madness.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- taybin 2mo ago
  Did you have a hard time picking that up from the article itself? I don’t see the point of asking an LLM to tell you what to feel about the article.
  - ahartmetz 2mo ago
    I'm rather critical of spamming humans with low effort LLM writing as well, but getting a neutral opinion about a text seems like a decent use tbh - for lack of alternatives because you'd hardly ask a human to do it. Conventions are still being made, and I think this use might end up being acceptable.
    - bulder 2mo ago
      How is pasting an article into an LLM going to get you a neutral opinion? It'll be at best an 'opinion' that aligns towards the fine tune dataset used by the org that made the LLM. I'd rather people own their own bias and bring something into the conversation rather than act as a mouthpiece for a statistical median.
    - em-bee 2mo ago
      i think only if you contrast it with your own assessment. just using LLM to get an opinion is bad. eg: after reading the article i felt this X. LLM says it's Y. then draw conclusions from that. myself i found the article contained a bit to much personal criticism. the kind that eg. on hackernews would not be welcome. so i guess i mostly agree with the LLM assessment.
  - mathisfun123 2mo ago
    an enormous number of people have never taken a literature class and in fact have no idea how to assess tone, diction, rhetorical purpose, etc.
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
  > I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone That's your brain's job, don't outsource it.
- hoppp 2mo ago
  Bun is better in rust and they can finally break up their relationship. It's not a happy breakup, but not a super sad one either.
dataflow 2mo ago
> It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more. I know nothing about the drama here other than what's in the blog post, but these feel more like unnecessarily public personal attacks which don't really reflect well: - a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective - already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs - their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce
- krautsauer 2mo ago
  > I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred. was the cherry on top.
  - dpatterbee 2mo ago
    Those are not personal criticisms, those are all professional criticisms. There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - dwattttt 2mo ago
      "a stinky manager ... Just a total shit show" are examples I would reach for to demonstrate someone is not being professional.
      - dpatterbee 2mo ago
        I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional. Maybe it's just a cultural difference but where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say. If something's a shit show I'd prefer someone just said it rather than dancing around it with corpo-speak.
dofm 2mo ago
FWIW I was really interested in Zig and now I see that its lead developer is thin-skinned and bitter and has confused minimal criticism of his project with an attack on his person. This is such a bad look and it's also flatly self-contradictory. He spends time in his conclusion asserting he doesn't have any personal criticisms of Jarred but he's fully happy to claim, reframe and repeat everyone else's, even criticisms he evidently heard in private. You can also see that it was incompletely rewritten from a pure, personalised and personally-directed rant: "I noticed that you…" does not belong with the rest of the text. Whatever the merits of Claude-driven rewrites (I suspect few, long-term), the article he is responding to has little to none of the vituperative quality of his own. I think if it needed a response, and I was this angry, I would have written this whole post as a draft, filed it away in Apple Notes, and then posted "I have, yes, seen the article on the Bun blog; you don't need to send me it anymore! I will respond to parts of it in the future as and when they are particularly relevant." Writing the response post can be valuable as emotional release or exploration. Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.
- orangedog 2mo ago
  This entire thread puts me out on devs. I stuns me that there are this many people who either excuse or cheer on being hateful. Wanting to use a project becaues the author was this rude....what? Just a complete lack of emotional intelligence. You do not treat people like this.
  - asa400 2mo ago
    I've read some of your other comments in this thread and I completely agree. It's dismaying how many devs seem unable to distinguish poor project leadership/communication from being a bold truth-teller "telling it like it is". This is a major project lead demonstrating that if things don't go well between him and you, he's going to retcon your whole relationship, collect gossip about your company and management style, chastise you for your life choices (taking venture capital?), talk shit about your code and your project, question your moral choices, and then publish all of it. This insistence on "being right" is really caustic. It's just ugly.
  - 2mo ago
threatofrain 2mo ago
Yes, perhaps Jarred is professionally dishonest, making up fake conversations about Zig. That is the most salient point in the whole article, and Jarred shows up to simply post receipts with kind words and minimal commentary. Would you like to discuss that point as a fellow professional in the field?
tptacek 2mo ago
The points in the article aren't great. It opens up personal and stays personal. As people in this thread have pointed out, several of the falsifiable bits turn out to be false. The big thing though is, you get to the end of it and have to ask: why did this need to be written at all? "It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article." He does get that Anthropic is Don Draper in the elevator meme here, right?
- deleted 2mo ago
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- xyzzy_plugh 2mo ago
  Unless you're implying that Anthropic is actually threatened by Zig here (???) and perhaps even is working to sabotage it, I could not think of a worse meme to reference. I honestly find your comment confusing.
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    My point is that Anthropic does not in fact have a lot of money riding on whether or not they use Zig, or probably really anything else that happens with Bun. In the meme, Anthropic is Don Draper, and the author of this blog post is Ginsburg.
    - xyzzy_plugh 2mo ago
      I think that meme is dangerous precisely because the shallow interpretation is the opposite of the one the scene intends to convey. Draper sabotages Ginsburg because he's threatened by him. In the elevator Don is masking his insecurities, as he deeply fears Ginsburg's talent. His own creativity, and confidence, has been crumbling. It's all ego.
      - tptacek 2mo ago
        Draper sabotages Ginsburg because he couldn't possibly care less about Ginsburg and is irritated to be saving his feelings by pitching two different campaigns when he knows he has it in the bag. I know the Mad Men wiki says otherwise, but 51% of Mad Men wikipedians are wrong about this: Draper is being honest in the elevator. Ginsburg's tagline wins Jaguar! (Joan clears an obstacle to them winning it, but they still had to win it). It's the most important account in the history of SCDP. Don doesn't care; he's overjoyed just to have a good tag. And then, of course, the insecure Draper interpretation makes absolutely no sense here --- there's no conceivable universe where Zig is at the top of Anthropic's mind right now. Which was the only point to bringing up the meme in the first place!
tomnipotent 2mo ago
What points? All I'm reading is just a collection of emotional ad-hominems.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

tuckwat 2mo ago

Do you have bias? I'm not saying I don't have some hidden bias but I have no skin in the game. I don't use Bun or Zig or plan to. My reflection comes after reading Jarred's post yesterday, which I found interesting, and then Andrew's today. I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone and the summary is: > The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending.

lins1909 2mo ago
Uhm, I'm very confused by the last part of your comment. You put it into an LLM to...understand the tone? Is that supposed to convince me of something?
- lifthrasiir 2mo ago
  Reality check. The confirmation that the author is not alone in having this particular feeling by using an LLM as a proxy.
  - lkey 2mo ago
    Using an LLM as a proxy for an 'unbiased' source of personal confirmation bias is perhaps the most common 'use-case' for an LLM.
- QuadmasterXLII 2mo ago
  I guess they use an LLM to work out the tone of prose they read. These are strange times.
- ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
  They phrased it poorly, but from context it seems clear they intend the LLM as a less biased third-party measure of the tone which agrees with their own assessment.
  - zeratax 2mo ago
    which they very much are not
    - ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
      Less biased? Maybe on political questions, etc, but this is a classic NLP task and I expect LLMs to be very reliable here
      - dgellow 2mo ago
        LLMs are predictive engines based on Reddit data, what they generate is very far from neutral
- uludag 2mo ago
  Very weird indeed. People must not realize that you can completely change the response you get back from an LLM by how you ask questions. Any bias can implicitly be implanted in the question you ask and drastically modify the response. This is what I got Gemini to say about the article: The author’s tone in this piece can be described as brutally candid, deeply relieved, and unapologetically sarcastic. very different from "The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending."
  - alienbaby 2mo ago
    this is what worries me. I have friends that love what AI tells them about their personal pet 'thing' and how awesome it is. Yet not one of them has even tried once to get the AI to criticise it's own answers, and hence learn that you can trivially get an AI to make a convincing-_sounding case for any point of view. I tell them to try, and they laugh at me as they roll their eyes and waffle on about 'tricking' the AI like its some kind of hacking.
  - lifthrasiir 2mo ago
    Personally I don't think that matters, because the article is problematic enough when it can be read like ad hominem. Assuming that the question was phrased reasonably neutrally (but not necessarily free of hidden biases), the fact that LLM concluded so is an enough evidence here. Also as a non-LLM data point, I felt roughly same (especially the "softening" bit).
  - dofm 2mo ago
    Not very different, mind you. I don't really agree with using LLMs to do this but it correctly identified the attempt to soften the ending, which is to my mind significant in the whole piece; this person wants to repeat and frame unkind things he's heard, say unkind things, and then assert that he wasn't doing either.
galangalalgol 2mo ago
I think I have some bias. I like rust. I like using opus, I don't want to use zig, don't see the point for it, but I find it aesthetically pleasing. I don't use JavaScript I wish it would disappear. If I did ise JavaScript I wouldn't run it on bun. Some of those tilt me either way. I agree with the LLMs take on the tone. The result of the two posts is that I think Jarred is a poopyhead, andrew is a bit childish but genuine and I'd probably like him, and I still won't use zig or bun or JavaScript. I plan to keep using rust and opus.
titularcomment 2mo ago
I'm glad that you asserted that you do have potential hidden bias and say that you used an LLM to judge the tone of an article partly pertaining to AI usage in coding right after.
- lkey 2mo ago
  Edit: Ah, my brain's been fried by comments that say this unironically and I read this as sincere, thanks commenter below, and apologies commenter above.
  - speedster217 2mo ago
    They are saying that someone who will summarize an article with AI is already implicitly biased. It's not about the AI, it's about the user.
- vitorfblima 2mo ago
  Let me check real quick with ChatGPT if you are being sarcastic or not.
lkey 2mo ago
Please, I'm begging you, and the people that scan across this comment: Finishing mastering reading comprehension; It will help you for the rest of your life. I'm not snarking, this is a problem affecting 30% or more of the population here in the states, and it's getting worse because of tools like AI. I'm not judging you, I don't think you are bad or deficient people, but this externalsing of comprehension and trust is self-harm. Worse, it will lead you astray in ways that you won't tie back to this core problem. To use an LLM safely you must have the discernment to understand when it has fallen into sycophancy, folly, or madness.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
taybin 2mo ago
Did you have a hard time picking that up from the article itself? I don’t see the point of asking an LLM to tell you what to feel about the article.
- ahartmetz 2mo ago
  I'm rather critical of spamming humans with low effort LLM writing as well, but getting a neutral opinion about a text seems like a decent use tbh - for lack of alternatives because you'd hardly ask a human to do it. Conventions are still being made, and I think this use might end up being acceptable.
  - bulder 2mo ago
    How is pasting an article into an LLM going to get you a neutral opinion? It'll be at best an 'opinion' that aligns towards the fine tune dataset used by the org that made the LLM. I'd rather people own their own bias and bring something into the conversation rather than act as a mouthpiece for a statistical median.
  - em-bee 2mo ago
    i think only if you contrast it with your own assessment. just using LLM to get an opinion is bad. eg: after reading the article i felt this X. LLM says it's Y. then draw conclusions from that. myself i found the article contained a bit to much personal criticism. the kind that eg. on hackernews would not be welcome. so i guess i mostly agree with the LLM assessment.
- mathisfun123 2mo ago
  an enormous number of people have never taken a literature class and in fact have no idea how to assess tone, diction, rhetorical purpose, etc.
BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago
> I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone That's your brain's job, don't outsource it.
hoppp 2mo ago
Bun is better in rust and they can finally break up their relationship. It's not a happy breakup, but not a super sad one either.

dataflow 2mo ago

> It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more. I know nothing about the drama here other than what's in the blog post, but these feel more like unnecessarily public personal attacks which don't really reflect well: - a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective - already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs - their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce

krautsauer 2mo ago
> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred. was the cherry on top.
- dpatterbee 2mo ago
  Those are not personal criticisms, those are all professional criticisms. There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dwattttt 2mo ago
    "a stinky manager ... Just a total shit show" are examples I would reach for to demonstrate someone is not being professional.
    - dpatterbee 2mo ago
      I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional. Maybe it's just a cultural difference but where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say. If something's a shit show I'd prefer someone just said it rather than dancing around it with corpo-speak.

dofm 2mo ago

FWIW I was really interested in Zig and now I see that its lead developer is thin-skinned and bitter and has confused minimal criticism of his project with an attack on his person. This is such a bad look and it's also flatly self-contradictory. He spends time in his conclusion asserting he doesn't have any personal criticisms of Jarred but he's fully happy to claim, reframe and repeat everyone else's, even criticisms he evidently heard in private. You can also see that it was incompletely rewritten from a pure, personalised and personally-directed rant: "I noticed that you…" does not belong with the rest of the text. Whatever the merits of Claude-driven rewrites (I suspect few, long-term), the article he is responding to has little to none of the vituperative quality of his own. I think if it needed a response, and I was this angry, I would have written this whole post as a draft, filed it away in Apple Notes, and then posted "I have, yes, seen the article on the Bun blog; you don't need to send me it anymore! I will respond to parts of it in the future as and when they are particularly relevant." Writing the response post can be valuable as emotional release or exploration. Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.

orangedog 2mo ago
This entire thread puts me out on devs. I stuns me that there are this many people who either excuse or cheer on being hateful. Wanting to use a project becaues the author was this rude....what? Just a complete lack of emotional intelligence. You do not treat people like this.
- asa400 2mo ago
  I've read some of your other comments in this thread and I completely agree. It's dismaying how many devs seem unable to distinguish poor project leadership/communication from being a bold truth-teller "telling it like it is". This is a major project lead demonstrating that if things don't go well between him and you, he's going to retcon your whole relationship, collect gossip about your company and management style, chastise you for your life choices (taking venture capital?), talk shit about your code and your project, question your moral choices, and then publish all of it. This insistence on "being right" is really caustic. It's just ugly.
- 2mo ago

threatofrain 2mo ago

Yes, perhaps Jarred is professionally dishonest, making up fake conversations about Zig. That is the most salient point in the whole article, and Jarred shows up to simply post receipts with kind words and minimal commentary. Would you like to discuss that point as a fellow professional in the field?

tptacek 2mo ago

The points in the article aren't great. It opens up personal and stays personal. As people in this thread have pointed out, several of the falsifiable bits turn out to be false. The big thing though is, you get to the end of it and have to ask: why did this need to be written at all? "It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article." He does get that Anthropic is Don Draper in the elevator meme here, right?

deleted 2mo ago
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xyzzy_plugh 2mo ago
Unless you're implying that Anthropic is actually threatened by Zig here (???) and perhaps even is working to sabotage it, I could not think of a worse meme to reference. I honestly find your comment confusing.
- tptacek 2mo ago
  My point is that Anthropic does not in fact have a lot of money riding on whether or not they use Zig, or probably really anything else that happens with Bun. In the meme, Anthropic is Don Draper, and the author of this blog post is Ginsburg.
  - xyzzy_plugh 2mo ago
    I think that meme is dangerous precisely because the shallow interpretation is the opposite of the one the scene intends to convey. Draper sabotages Ginsburg because he's threatened by him. In the elevator Don is masking his insecurities, as he deeply fears Ginsburg's talent. His own creativity, and confidence, has been crumbling. It's all ego.
    - tptacek 2mo ago
      Draper sabotages Ginsburg because he couldn't possibly care less about Ginsburg and is irritated to be saving his feelings by pitching two different campaigns when he knows he has it in the bag. I know the Mad Men wiki says otherwise, but 51% of Mad Men wikipedians are wrong about this: Draper is being honest in the elevator. Ginsburg's tagline wins Jaguar! (Joan clears an obstacle to them winning it, but they still had to win it). It's the most important account in the history of SCDP. Don doesn't care; he's overjoyed just to have a good tag. And then, of course, the insecure Draper interpretation makes absolutely no sense here --- there's no conceivable universe where Zig is at the top of Anthropic's mind right now. Which was the only point to bringing up the meme in the first place!

tomnipotent 2mo ago

What points? All I'm reading is just a collection of emotional ad-hominems.

deleted 2mo ago

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