[cropcirclbureau]

I stand with Andrew.

As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus.

And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified and one in a long lines of successful psyops Dario and co. cooked and delivered.

Now, would Andrew's message have been better received if it had better "decorum"? Maybe. But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. You have to appreciate that.

[laserbeam]

> But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts.

If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.

[iamflimflam1]

Early on in my career I wrote a highly critical email - I asked a coworker for his opinion before I sent.

He said “there’s just one thing that would improve this” and hit the delete button.

That intervention saved me, and everyone I was working with, from a lot of unnecessary stress.

Venting is great - get it out of your system. Then take a deep breath, go for a walk, and then decide what to do.

[Rendello]

Abraham Lincoln used to write angry letters and stow them away, unsigned and unsent [1]. The book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" claims he stopped harshly criticizing people publicly after being challenged to a duel [2] by a government official he had attacked anonymously in the press.

1. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/lincolns-...

2. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/abraham-lincolns...

[preg_match]

The problem is if everyone does this then nothing gets done and everything burns down and everyone dies. Okay, a little hyperbolic.

But assholes know how to get things done, they just do. If everyone becomes a bystander, then 100% of all decisions will be made by the absolute bottom of the barrel of humanity. I'm talking sub-human morally inept fundamentally evil people.

We're already kinda there, and maybe my phrasing here is harsh, but it's true. We've all seen what happens when you let the mad king be mad. It might be pleasant and peaceful for a while, but ultimately it is "your problem". Eventually the madness touches YOU, and now what?

[bourbonproof]

Unlikely a useful lesson here. If it would have been written as "political correct" version up to the point of not calling Jarred out at all would have missed the core message. The fact that it was written blunt is the reason it went viral.

[bob001]

Viral is not an inherently good thing unless you're an influencer. Not all publicity is good publicity.

[dakolli]

uhhh, that's not how the how that figure speech goes. There's a reason why people say all publicity is good publicity, and you can't just flip that to fit your perspective.

[adwn]

People repeat that figure of speech because it's a meme (in the original sense of the word), not because it's unconditionally true.

[dakolli]

No, they repeat it because it's literally true.

[stingraycharles]

I also don’t really like his closing section, it has a big “sorry but not sorry” feeling to it.

[rafterydj]

I read that as him beginning the healing stages. Acknowledging his flaws as soon as he could even if he couldn't change what he already said - because that post did blow up, if he had taken the whole thing down it may have just exacerbated things.

[tonypace]

I think if the last decade has taught us anything, its that decorum has zero to negative value in public communication. People pay attention to drama, and you need attention to be heard. When the penalty for rudeness is gone, just go for contention.

[bob001]

> penalty for rudeness is gone

I assume Andrew's goal isn't to be a viral influencer but to achieve some type of long term impact or goal. Programmers don't pick languages based on maximal vitriol and if anything do the opposite.

[ActionHank]

Wankfluencer has now been added to my lexicon. It's a word that feels like it should always have existed, but didn't. So very aptly describes these personas who would pimp their own mother for a t-shirt with a logo on it.

[cropcirclbureau]

The fact of the matter is, the reason Bun chose to go with Zig in the first place was for clout and clout only. Bun is a textbook case of a wankfluencer operation: unnecessary rewrite of an existing useful project using the latest hot language or ecosystem to get lip-service by influencers and get easy VC buy in.

There's nothing wrong with chasing a little clout really but I was not surprised to hear Bun's engineering itself wasn't up to par. A single person was shipping not just a runtime but half the ecosystem/tooling justified by sketchy benchmarks? As someone very familiar with the effort it takes to ship solid code in Node and Deno and the ecosystem writ large, their early claims of performance and being production ready were very suspect and it was unfortunately proven false once it duped real projects into getting adoption.

Again, there's nothing wrong being overly ambitious and failing. But I dare anyone to refute that in Oven.sh and many other twitter first projects today (usually in the Js ecosystem), solid engineering and actual usefulness takes a backseat to being viral and being featured in some idiot's weekly roundup news segment.

If you're familiar with Kelley's and the Zig Foundation ethos, it's not surprising that there was internal clashes and drama with such a project.

[jeremyjh]

It was poorly justified up-front but frankly I did not need the examples to understand Jarred’s frustration.

What I found helpful were his explanation of how the interaction with JavaScript’s garbage collector created unique challenges for Bun. Andrew did not address this point at all. It was also helpful to understand how the test suite covered the new code - many people had assumed the tests were also vibe translated and couldn’t be trusted. Andrew pretends he didn’t understand that tests don’t catch all bugs, which is true of all software including Zig.

To me this whole exchange is mostly the typical “memory unsafe languages lead to time consuming and disruptive defects that can be almost entirely prevented with a choice of programming languages” versus the “git gud and don’t write bugs” response.

Layer on the AI tension, Anthropic’s involvement and Andrew’s classic Linus impersonation and of course its viral.

[budsniffer952]

>Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified

In what world do you think they have to justify a rewrite to anyone outside their company? Bizarre mentality.

[mikey_p]

They didn't have to but Anthropic chose to open their mouth and announce their "reasons" for the rewrite. Don't blame anyone but Anthropic for this, they didn't have to try to justify it, but they decided to anyway.

[theamk]

Sure that had to justify it, people were writing all sorts of posts about how Bun was no longer trusted since it was rewritten with Rust.

Bun's post was explanation of that process that was (IMHO) pretty reassuring in that the new version of Bun is not 100% garbage.

(Now in the ideal case that post would be released before, or at the same time as, rust-based source code on github... Then there would be much less drama)

[antonvs]

Exactly. The people criticizing the rewrite for the most part are just trying to exert power from the wrong end of a parasocial relationship. And then they get upset when no-one takes them seriously.

[moomoo11]

i appreciate people saying it like it is.

like linus lol

i hate marketing pr speak when it comes to technical things.

save that for the non technical customers

[ksec]

>like linus lol

I am not even sure if that is an insult.

Linus attack on "things" he dislike and call the person out on it. I don't believe Linus has ever call out on that person's other non related behaviour.

People keep using Linus here as if they are the same. They are not.

[eptcyka]

What is the behaviour that Jarred was called out for that was not related to Bun?

[pcollins123]

Being a bad manager. That’s a very personal attack.

[thereforegrin]

if he actually was, then it's not a personal attack but stating facts about a person - there's a meaningful difference.

A personal attack has no informational value (about the accused), while bringing to light bad qualities of a person does - especially if those qualities are related to the issue at hand, which in this particular situation seems to be the case.

Again, the distinction between a personal attack and proper characterisation of bad qualities rests on actual facts i.e. was it slander or was he really a bad manager?

I don't know but I personally give less probability to the former than the latter.

[eptcyka]

Managing a very public project that advertises Zig and doing so poorly is a matter of fact, is it not?

[ksec]

That was what ZSF try to implies. And would have been much better if it was written as such. But the way it is currently framed is a personal attack.

[nozzlegear]

Didn't Linus famously say that he regretted his behavior, that making things personal was not okay, and that he needed to change some of his behavior?

[anthonypasq]

what exactly is technical about personal attacks?

[kordlessagain]

> psyops Dario and co. cooked and delivered

Does that include Claude itself? Half joking aside, my main concern remains that both OpenAI and Anthropic practice this fear mongering as strategy at the executive level because they have to. A corporation is a different beast. Not human, exactly. Not AI either. What happens when a corporation starts being informed by the AI it is building?

If you want a lens into master craft corporate human slung bullshit, read this: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/944138/microsoft-ai-ceo-mus...

In this, not only did the interviewer admit he knew Suleyman had written about the issues he talks about in his rebuttals, he then says he's only asking (the hard question) because the "audience" wants it.

Suleyman's response talks about taking "accountability for the things that we build" and the "types of problems that we choose to work on," it highlights the fundamental flaw in the cloud-rented AI model.

In that ecosystem, "we" means a handful of corporate executives deciding what tools the rest of the world gets to use, how they operate, and what data they extract. All based on the profitability of the corporation. It is the absolute antithesis of a sovereign architecture where execution happens locally and the user dictates the terms of the system.

They are coming for open models. It's time to harden the gates.