rahen

A lot of mistakes in this article, although it's well-intentioned.

There is a direct lineage from the PDP-1 to the PDP-4, and the 18-bit lineage ends with the PDP-15 (missing).

The dual-mode PDP-12 (PDP-8 + LINC) is missing from the 12-bit lineage.

The VAX (VAX-11 initially) was an offspring of the PDP-11 and the VAX-11 could natively run PDP-11 user-mode code. DEC then tried to use the VAX to unify both the 10 and 11 markets.

The PDP-11 and VAX software heritage lives on mostly in C and UNIX (NetBSD being the closest relative), and in VMS / NT. The PDP-10 heritage lives on mostly in Emacs.

"However, even its most powerful configuration wasn’t powerful enough to attract many pdp-10 users." They didn’t serve the same markets.

The PDP-10 was a time-sharing system that shone more for LISP than FORTRAN. For heavy number crunching and matmuls (the FORTRAN playground), 16-bit PDP-11s were usually used, with an auxiliary array processor such as the AP-120B or the CSPI MiniMAP. Those array processors could deliver more than 10 MFLOPS back then, when a minicomputer with a 50-100 KFLOPS FPU was already considered fast (FPUs were an expensive option back then).

Give them time. ML 4.0 was just pretrained. Mistral will certainly use it as the base for distillation and RL for smaller, better, more efficient iterations, just as the competition does.

I’d rather have one European AI lab like Mistral, with the financial firepower and compute to pretrain its own large models, than 20 weak labs that fine-tune Chinese models.

AI needs big bucks, and Mistral is Europe’s Anthropic.

Mistral is the only major non-Chinese contender in the AI race releasing open-weight models. I’d rather trust that French weights haven’t been backdoored than Chinese ones. Heck, I’d even trust Mistral more than Anthropic for sensitive work.

You asked if there was "tangible benefit to end user or developer using ai assisted development". My answer is no, it can be done but has no benefits for this use case. Use Rust here, because its compiler acts as an AI safety net.

Being a code artisan is not gatekeeping. It means if you're used to being close to the metal and sometimes know better than the compiler, Zig is for you. If you're not, use Rust.

Use Rust if you're not writing code yourself.

The borrow checker will catch all kinds of bugs that AI-generated code will happily compile in Zig but will blow up as UB at runtime.

Zig's value prop is different and closer to a modern C: it fits in your head and maps fairly closely to assembly. There is no hidden control flow or hidden allocations, so you can tweak performance at a very low level. You're the pilot, not the compiler.

Rust trades the low-level clarity for compiler-enforced safety. If you're not a code artisan or don't care about being one, then please use Rust.

It definitely is vibe-coded, but yogthos is a competent programmer who has been working on public Clojure projects and repos since 2009, and has maintained a large Clojure framework since well before LLMs were a thing.

I don't think "2k commits in 2 months" is enough to dismiss as slop when it's being developed by a competent Clojure dev.

Four day old repo with 92K lines added per day, okay...

There is basically no evidence of human competence in this repo. This is yet another "rewrite in Rust with Claude" project that brings nothing to the table, but devalues expert work by mimicking competence without the expertise.

This was common back then. The PDP-8 had eight primary instructions, although one of them was multi-purpose. This helped keep the hardware simple when we didn't have ICs.

RISC isn't about having a small ISA but about a regular, orthogonal instruction set.