anp

I've never been someone to tell others to rewrite in Rust but I am a huge fan of the language and have in fact rewritten a lot of things in Rust. I'd be happy for another programming language to excite me as much as Rust has for the last 10 years, and then maybe I'd join that evangelism club instead :). Not sure how PL evolution is going to go in an era of coding agents though, very curious how that'll play out.

It’s far from a perfect analogy but I would imagine that people were pretty hyped about the novelty of the first legitimately useful compiled programs where they didn’t have to allocate their own registers. I wonder how long it took for that novelty to wear off?

Or in other words I’d argue novelty is contextual and that these kinds of discoveries’ novelty will eventually wear off too but for right now it’s pretty cool that the “math discovery compiler” works well enough to do this (again imperfect analogy).

I’d be very curious to hear what an online restart approach for sketchy extensions crashing a shared thread per connection process might look like. This is more a question for the author of the project but I’m curious if they have plans in that direction.

I’m not very familiar with the specifics of pass through but IIUC only being able to map 1.5gb of active DMA buffers at a time is pretty limiting.

I feel similarly but IIUC I think that doesn’t strictly require an open source development model. I’ve benefited a huge amount from consuming and contributing to open source projects and I’m a bit worried that the “unit economics” changing might break some of the social dynamics upon which the ecosystem is built.

I read the Hyperion books during a particularly intense period of my life and found them quite powerful. I didn’t know anything about Simmons at the time, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that like Tolkein these stories started with an oral format for children.

> any [] property can be [taken by the state] from its [original] owners simply by [those owners becoming more powerful than the state wants]

When rephrased like the above, I think what you’re describing is pretty common in history. Many industries and assets have been nationalized when it serves the state’s interests.

IMO the moral justification is that there is no ownership or private property except that which is sanctioned by the state (or someone state-like) applying violence in its defense. In this framing, there’s little moral justification for the state letting private actors accrue outsized power that harms consumers/citizens.

I’m not sure I see that assumption in the statement above. The fact that no prompt or alignment work is a perfect safeguard doesn’t change who is responsible for the outcomes. LLMs can’t be held accountable, so it’s the human who deploys them towards a particular task who bears responsibility, including for things that the agent does that may disagree with the prompting. It’s part of the risk of using imperfect probabilistic systems.

FWIW I understood GP to mean that it suddenly makes sense to them, not that there’s been a sudden focus shift at google.

This has mostly been my experience as well although I don’t tend to run yolo mode outside of an isolated VM (I’m setting them up manually still, need to try vagrant for it). That said, it seems like some of the people who are more concerned about isolation are working with more untrusted inputs than I’ve been dealing with on my projects. It’s rare for me to ask an agent to e.g. read text from a random webpage that could bring its own prompt injection, but there are a lot of things one might ask an agent to do that risk exposure to “attack text”.

Anyone who finds this relatable (like me) might benefit from learning more about the last couple of decades of research on emotional regulation, trauma, and the nervous system. I have a great “trauma informed” therapist and over time this tendency of mine feels much less compulsive and more like a choice I can make because I know I’m good at something. At least for me having a calmer internal life has made it way easier to pick my battles and it usually means I end up feeding my desire to be useful on more satisfying and impactful things than I would have chased in more obsessive times in my life.

> Others think someone from the Rust (programming language, not video game) development community was responsible due to how critical René has been of that project, but those claims are entirely unsubstantiated.

I understand that I have a bias, which is why I was disclosing it. I think it strengthens my question since naively I'd expect a self-professed zealot to buy into the narrative in the blog post without questioning the data.

I find a lot of these points persuasive (and I’m a big Rust fan so I haven’t spent much time with Zig myself because of the memory safety point), but I’m a little skeptical about the bug report analysis. I could buy the argument that Zig is more likely to lead to crashy code, but the numbers presented don’t account for the possibility that the relative proportions of bug “flavors” might shift as a project matures. I’d be more persuaded on the reliability point if it were comparing the “crash density” of bug reports at comparable points in those project’s lifetimes.

For example, it would be interesting to compare how many Rust bugs mentioned crashes back when there were only 13k bugs reported, and the same for the JS VM comparison. Don’t get me wrong, as a Rust zealot I have my biases and still expect a memory safe implementation to be less crashy, but I’d be much happier concluding that based on stronger data and analysis.