[smcl]

> Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.

I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". It is also bizarre that some people are still hopeful despite it being acquired by one of the most enormously unprofitable companies in the most enormously unprofitable sectors of our industry.

[ahepp]

Are there any situations you would compare this to historically?

To me, the obvious comparison seems to be Docker. Their tooling revolutionized software development and made cgroups and containerization accessible to the masses. Yet they generally seem to have failed to extract payment from users, even with managed service opportunities.

It seems to me that there are substantial obstacles to monetizing a project licensed with even a weaker OSS license like MIT. I think this is especially true for projects that don’t have managed service / “open core” potential.

Any gratis project you rely on runs the risk that it will no longer be provided gratis. That alone is not a strong basis for making decisions.

[switz]

It's a shame that VCs have corrupted a $200MM/year business into the perception as a failure. Who cares if the VCs didn't get a large return, or if the outsized impact of the software didn't quite fully capture the value created. $200MM/yr without aggressive R&D or operational costs could be an incredibly healthy business.

Maybe we should stop trying to build so many billion dollar/year businesses and work on more sustainable models.

[antonvs]

I haven’t followed Docker’s case in particular, but how much investment was required to get it to that point? If it’s a case of “How do you become a millionaire? Start as a billionaire and invest in Docker”, then the perception may have some basis.

[pjmlp]

The audio and 3D card pioneers in the PC world.

The ones that were first to market went all bankrupt, or were acquired by others that came later into the scene.

[marshray]

1. At least 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth are now extinct. I.e., that's life.

2. "But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

[pocksuppet]

Failure for those species though.

[marshray]

What a strange way to view life.

At least you could go out with the accomplishment of having out-competed some other species along the way.

[atonse]

> I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point".

Why? What's the risk? It's open source. Also, speaking of open source, we are happy to commit to open source projects that have no monetization, nor any plans to ever monetize.

[enedil]

I think parent commenter meant that what's insane is that js runtime is not treated as an utility which should never be monetized. It's as if GCC developers haven't figured out how to monetize, but they are willing to at some point.

[spankalee]

I partially agree with you, but I also think that it's good that people can make something they want, that seems to have no monetization path, and have some hope of being bailed out.

It's not great that the search for profit will usually corrupt projects, but the other most common option is that the projects don't exist at all. It's very rare (or it used to be before this year) that someone can do something like this on their own with no compensation. So now at least Bun exists.

[tracker1]

I'm with you... I think it's helped Node.js a lot to have Bun and Deno implementing new features that help push node forward. I think it's been a bit of a miss not integrating npm into node along the way... Mostly in that npm is a separate org from node, which is its' own issue... I kind of like JSR a lot myself, so hope it continues to pick up some traction.

[animuchan]

It's a bit insane, but the cost of switching to regular NodeJS is low (for all but most bun-specific projects).

All valid points though, I'm pessimistic about Anthropic still actively diverting resources to these side quests when tough times hit (which might be in a week for all we know).

[motbus3]

I know people say it is unprofitable but I wonder if there is a way to verify it is truly is. I will not say any details but I worked for a giant company which was barely making money YoY but somehow the bonuses for heads were bigger and bigger given a proxy metric related to profit.

There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.

[bombcar]

"Profitable" is the wrong metric, really, it's whether it is sustainable - can development continue indefinitely given the current financial situation?

[motbus3]

I'm thinking about your comment... It put many wheels to spin...

Tldr; I think the don't care about what will happen to the company in medium or long term.

---

Are any of those companies looking for stability or sustainability?

I have the impression they are completely aware of the diminished return effects and they will explore the moment to the fullest of their capabilities promising even more absurd things when the results are even smaller.

I do agree there is a considerable improvement comparing from a year ago but definitely not ground shaking as it was from the year before to the last.

Many of the promises turns out to be empty or at least having huge number of asterisks to it.

I think there are flags everywhere. From minor things such as everyone using different benchmarks or plotting performance differences on weird choices os axis and ordering.

Other mild things such as promoting the "system" created a compiler from scratch when such compiler does not even do a hello world and runs and gave output binaries running 300x then the counterparts.

(I am aware there was a misusage of the agentic benchmark to build a compiler but there was an active choice on how to tell the story. Given other movements I am not quite sure if I believe it was an accident)

There are other red flags such as people rolling back to previous versions of models because they can't get the new one to work properly.

Other situations such as the affirmations that they have such "dangerous" model that apparently seems to be more of a benchmark trick than real results with <100B models being able to replicate the benchmark results only by changing the methodology.

I don't think we are yet in the turning point where everything will collapse but my feeling is that we are going in that direction unless something that makes these models much more intelligent AND efficient.

It makes sense to not hire a person when you can have a machine for the same job for the same price. But AI prices are getting higher than the returns do the margins for it to be a sensible choice are getting smaller.

That all said, I say again that I think that they are completely aware of this effect. Not because they understand the technology but because this happens more frequently than not. Because of this, I don't think they care to be sustainable. All of them,smell that they will take the money and leave the ship to sink.

[bombcar]

I think there's also an idea that sustainability requires constant maintenance and improvement; but TeX is sustainable and it's approaching a limit function - it (plain TeX) gets no new features, but has very few remaining bugs.