[mtlynch]

One of the things I find so disappointing about Kelley's behavior here is that he falsely accused Jarred Sumner of lying about fuzzing Bun, and then when Sumner showed evidence[0] that they've been fuzzing Bun for months, Kelley just silently edited his post[1] to walk back the accusation and never apologized or admitted he was wrong.

I commented on Mastodon[2] to point out to Kelley that it's dishonest to silently remove the accusation, as so many people were already talking about it, and it confuses the conversation if Kelley retroactively edits it, and he replied[3]:

> the false claim is in the bun blog post not mine. I only changed the text because it's easy to lazily argue against it. Please read more carefully. They are the ones being deceitful not me.

Loris Cro, Zig's VP of Community, gave a slightly clearer response[4]:

> Jarred's post has a section about what they "were already doing" to maintain their Zig codebase, which includes "24/7 fuzzing", which will make the average reader assume that the codebase has been fuzzed thoroughly, while in reality it has been for, what, 2 months before the rewrite?

Even then, I find it so bizarre that Loris thinks that if someone says, "We've been fuzzing Bun," and shows evidence of months of fuzzing, then that person is lying because "We've been fuzzing Bun" somehow implies something longer than two months.

The duration is irrelevant. If you say you've been fuzzing it and you've fixed bugs that your fuzzer found, then clearly you're fuzzing. The Zig team doesn't get to arbitrarily move the goalposts of what "fuzzing" means.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845652

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854921

[2] https://m.mtlynch.io/@michael/116896188093796421

[3] https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/116897155344411469

[4] https://hachyderm.io/@kristoff/116898483283387067

[mi_lk]

> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything

If you read the post again this sentence is not removed and Sumner did not refute that

[mtlynch]

Right, that part is not in dispute.

If Sumner says today, "We do X," then Kelley can say, "Nine months ago, Sumner did not do X," and both can be correct. What Kelley can't do is say, "It's an outright fabrication that Sumner does X today," based on an observation from nine months ago.

[AndyKelley]

Now you've misquoted me. Actual quote[1] is: "This appears to be an outright fabrication."

To quote yourself[2], "The honest thing to do is acknowledge that you were mistaken and apologize for the false accusation."

Are you going to do that for me now?

I don't expect you to, because I don't think you are being dishonest. I think you are earnestly trying to untangle the facts from two parties for whom you have no bias one way or the other, which is commendable.

Like you, I am an individual attempting to paint an accurate picture of reality for my readers.

Anthropic, on the other hand, is not an individual nor trying to be accurate. They are doing exactly as they are supposed to: maximizing value for shareholders. To do this, they need to make this rewrite appear successful, so they need to retcon this idea that they were doing good engineering practices in their zig codebase the whole time, including fuzzing, even though that is not the case.

[1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/blob/c39f868e578...

[2]: https://mastodon.social/@[e-mail]/11689618811296...

[mtlynch]

Are you talking about this line?

> What Kelley can't do is say, "It's an outright fabrication that Sumner does X today," based on an observation from nine months ago.

I think it's clear that I presented it as a hypothetical dialog, not something you literally said. But I agree that the fairer way to present it would be to say, "Kelley can't say 'It appears to be an outright fabrication'," to match the original language in your blog post.

> I think you are earnestly trying to untangle the facts from two parties for whom you have no bias one way or the other, which is commendable.

Honestly, my bias is to support Zig. I personally like the Zig project and you as a person (this blog post notwithstanding) enough that I've contributed a small monthly financial amount for the last 2.5 years. You've never sucked up all my code and then tried to sell it back to me.

So, despite the fact that I have many reasons to favor you and Zig over Sumner and Anthropic, when I read both blog posts, the impression I walk away with is that your blog post is needlessly critical of Sumner as a person and that you made unsubstantiated accusations against him.

> To do this, they need to make this rewrite appear successful, so they need to retcon this idea that they were doing good engineering practices in their zig codebase the whole time, including fuzzing, even though that is not the case.

I don't get that from their blog post.

Both you and Loris seem to be saying that Sumner's "We've been fuzzing Bun" claim implies to everyone that they've been fuzzing it for a long time as much as they possibly can, but I think it just means what it says. They've been fuzzing it some, and some bugs fell out of it, not that they fuzzed it perfectly or followed every software engineering practice perfectly.

[ModernMech]

Dude just stop. This has been embarrassing and damaging enough to your reputation, you should just give it a rest for now. Your friends have made you self-aware enough to realize you have unprocessed emotions about this — process them. Best to get out of the comment section, and your head. The saying is if you’re explaining you’re losing. I’m not a fan of Bun or Jarred but of your Zig work. Stick to that, it’s where you serve the community best. In the future, just present the verifiable facts and you’ll be okay.