Why does this person owe you "professional writing" on their personal blog?

Treat it as a data point and make your own decisions (he does back it up with several sources that indicate a workaholic mentality with that expectation for others). Hiding it ends up perpetuating the behavior unseen.

*Below is an aside that explains why I think it's better to air these things even if it seems like "rumors and gossip."

I know first hand how toxic some people are irl compared to their public persona. There was a professor in my department during my PhD who was known to be a slave driver, but there are no accounts of it outside of the department. We would have to warn incoming students about working with her, though sometimes they wouldn't believe it could be as bad as we said. I spoke with one of her students after she left the lab due to being hospitalized for exhaustion from overwork: the professor contacted her while she was still hospitalized and asked her to complete a task ffs!

It's also a language of distancing from personal experience and honesty.

Not saying you're wrong. Professionalism is an important tool for maintaining professional relationships. Lack of professionalism is dangerous to the point where it is reasonable for certain kinds of societies to begin to shun people who don't engage with it.

And, at the same time, a certain amount of emotional honesty can be really important to share, too. And that includes some amount of judgement and criticism.

It sounds like Zig's relationship with Bun is over. While Anthropic/Jason/Bun did not write a personal narrative about the end of that relationship, they absolutely were the initiators and could not have done this in a more aggressive way. It feels to me to be approximately the equivalent of moving out in secret and serving the divorce documents through your lawyer.

Nah, corpo-speak is the original slop. The result of too many comms/legal inputs to a conversation.

Professional communication is direct, clear, and ideally courteous (but only to a point).

If he's so relieved that Bun/Anthropic are off Zig, then why trash Jarred? He should say thank you and move on.

What this looks like to me is Jarred sinned by selling to Anthropic (as opposed to setting up a 501c3 or whatever Andrew deems righteous) and now must be discredited.

At the end of the day our personal feelings matter very little unless we happen to be the authoritarian dictator or we are the type of personality that gets other people to follow our cause.

In a more just society we setup the rule of law so when you pick a license you have the ability to enforce it without being completely destroyed by a larger entity. When you set your license to 'do whatever you want' then this is causality. You cannot interact with the world and expect it not to affect you, both positive or negative.

What does this mean for the future of the open source world? Not really sure there is a lot up in the air right now. Maybe more 'fuck you' licenses that scare corporations from using your software in the first place. Who knows.

Surveys show that 60% of US adults don't like it which means 40% either don't care or do. I'd advise not getting your ideas about sentiment towards it from places like HN which are very biased and unrepresentative places of anything.

I find the anti crowd increasingly to be hateful and close-minded and it is disappointing because I have a lot of friends in it. There's a moral puritanism which gives people feelings that they are on the "right" side and thus any level of rudeness or hatred is justified and it only hurts their side.

Or perhaps it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations and the people with anti-AI sentiment are called "laggards". If so, their amount will likely be near zero soon.

This has happened thousands of times in human history.

Is popular sentiment a good measure for a decision? Anti lots of things have been growing at some points in history, including bad things.

It's ubiquitous among dinosaurs. Don't worry. They will be left behind.

No one cares enough of zig to do it, people will just continue moving to Rust and similar.

People are doing the simpler thing: moving ecosystems more suppotive of their goal.

I think the article kind of gives you the energy you enter the reading with.

My take away was closer to "This is what we tried, this is the sentiment they gave back, then this is what happened, here's what I think of Jarred's way of working, glad they now use Rust, good riddance", but then I also apply this slightly unholy strategy of applying charitable reading when reading personal blog posts, and I worship neither of these people, so might be why we got slightly different takeaways.

The people who steal with AI and give no credit to the actual creative forces (that they are stamping out) are the fucking rude ones.

I just return to them the kindness they show me when they say, "You made this?? I made this!!"

It's all about tone. The original bad behavior is done without overt "bad tone" but if the response to it is spicy then the former is ignored and the latter is condemned despite being of lesser severity.

I can buy that it can be good corporate politics to not upset the superficial crowd that will immediately lash out on tone, but I will not judge someone rightfully reacting on bad behavior that they've been on the receiving end of.

Also, I didn't say being rude is a sign of honesty, that's you extrapolating.

What you are asking for is a slippery slope.

The history of humanity is full of biting polemics and attacks on the character of others, just read Voltaire. Sometimes, attacks are deserved.

Yes, a world in which everyone is professional and "plays nice" sounds great but it also quickly becomes a mechanism for suppression of the truth. Not the situation here, but "decorum" expectations are sometimes precisely one of the functions that help bad people maintain power (consider how difficult it can be for minorities or marginalized people to speak truthfully about what's happened to them). Sometimes one person being blunt, honest, and a little rude is a necessary step in clearing ground for others to be more upfront about the bad behavior of individuals.

I'm sorry but I honestly think this is just being superficial wanting to push it through some kind of corporate speak filter to be able to stomach it.

> Using phrases like "stinky manager"

I would've used a worse adjective given the WLB tweet etc. Is it just because stinky itself has a childish tone to it rather than something like shitty? Or do one need to reach to somewhat open-ended terms like "questionable" to be palatable?

> implying by not going to university he was too stupid to think critically about his path forward

I read that as emphasizing the Thiel Fellowship part, not the lack of university education.

> I don't interact with Zig or Bun, but I certainly haven't been enticed to try Zig after this.

I'm so tired of "I've never played [game] & have never had any intention to play [game] whatsoever, but given [newfound-grievance] I wont buy it!"-style dismissals - talking about childishness.

That’s a good attitude to have. Any tips for identifying projects which have leadership which does this?

I also know nothing of the drama, but what I picked up from the first blog post was that even with access to near unlimited funds and unreleased god-tier coding llms from a trillion dollar AI corporation it was apparently impossible to fix a backlog of bugs in Zig code but it was possible to fix them by automatically doing a rewrite in rust.

I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is.

So pointing out that the zig code was full of bugs because the author was doing weird stuff and ignoring advice, couldn't hire/retain any good Zig devs because he mismanaged people and is the kind of guy to do a full rewrite because that's more interesting than fixing bugs or learning the old tools feels like stuff he'd want out there in the public domain.

> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred.

was the cherry on top.

Maybe the only quoted text that I would read as a personal attack is

"already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs" and maybe "low empathy".

Just because the other bits are negative and not so nice pieces of feedback one wouldn't want to hear doesn't necessarily make them attacks.

An attack is often far more personal (making fun of you for aspects of your existence you can't control, touching personal subjects like families, etc). idk, maybe I'm just not soaked enough in the goo goo baby corporate saccharine LLM speak or something but this post felt tame to me, if a bit cheeky. Nothing but a thumb jab at worst.

Anthropic's niche is that they're the preferred model for software development currently. So, the reason for them to care about the rewrite is obviously not because they care about Bun's stability, but because it is the largest real-world demonstration of Claude's capabilities.

Every part of this saga has gotten an exceptional amount of attention on HN. HN is ostensibly filled with many people starting software-related companies, ie potential Anthropic customers.

Unless you're implying that Anthropic is actually threatened by Zig here (???) and perhaps even is working to sabotage it, I could not think of a worse meme to reference. I honestly find your comment confusing.

This entire thread puts me out on devs. I stuns me that there are this many people who either excuse or cheer on being hateful. Wanting to use a project becaues the author was this rude....what?

Just a complete lack of emotional intelligence. You do not treat people like this.

>Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.

Thank you for putting my thoughts in words I can never string together so well.

I too would just stash the letter in my ZFS dropbox and never let it see the light of day again.

The letter reads like a husband who was just served a divorce notice from his wife. The man is angry, and wants everyone to know that he is not angry, and he is very much not bothered by the whole affair even though he has misgivings since the first day of marriage.

The letter would be much more convincing if it has any technical rebuttal against the decision.

Did you have a hard time picking that up from the article itself? I don’t see the point of asking an LLM to tell you what to feel about the article.

I'm glad that you asserted that you do have potential hidden bias and say that you used an LLM to judge the tone of an article partly pertaining to AI usage in coding right after.

I think I have some bias. I like rust. I like using opus, I don't want to use zig, don't see the point for it, but I find it aesthetically pleasing. I don't use JavaScript I wish it would disappear. If I did ise JavaScript I wouldn't run it on bun. Some of those tilt me either way. I agree with the LLMs take on the tone. The result of the two posts is that I think Jarred is a poopyhead, andrew is a bit childish but genuine and I'd probably like him, and I still won't use zig or bun or JavaScript. I plan to keep using rust and opus.

> I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone

That's your brain's job, don't outsource it.

Uhm, I'm very confused by the last part of your comment. You put it into an LLM to...understand the tone? Is that supposed to convince me of something?

Bun is better in rust and they can finally break up their relationship.

It's not a happy breakup, but not a super sad one either.

Please, I'm begging you, and the people that scan across this comment: Finishing mastering reading comprehension; It will help you for the rest of your life.

I'm not snarking, this is a problem affecting 30% or more of the population here in the states, and it's getting worse because of tools like AI. I'm not judging you, I don't think you are bad or deficient people, but this externalsing of comprehension and trust is self-harm.

Worse, it will lead you astray in ways that you won't tie back to this core problem.

To use an LLM safely you must have the discernment to understand when it has fallen into sycophancy, folly, or madness.

> You didn't see K&R publish "so-and-so writes bad C", or Stroustrup decrying the Boost maintainers as hacks.

The world is completely different now. The VC fuelled culture was not as intense and LLMs certainly didn’t exist at all. Andrew calls out these factors explicitly.

> He can't have both "It's their fault because their code was slop" and "it's not my business".

Huh? But it was his business when they had a relationship. Seems he was trying his best to work with them while they were getting funding and Bun was interested in them. That’s the nice thing to do no? Even if you don’t like the partner.

Imagine if the Zig foundation broke the relationship from their side, that would have been much worse.

I don’t think Andrew was trying to say it wasn’t his business in that way. But in the end he couldn’t control what Bun did or didn’t do, and now it’s not his business in any way.

Maybe their concept of fuzzing is different?

Jarred commented on the top that they use fuzzilli , which is a javascript engine fuzzer.

But zig has a built in integrated fuzzer!

Andrew must have been talking about the built in fuzzer because that's what is associated with zig.

zig build test --fuzz

I would block you so you don't get exposed to my naivety lol but I don't know how. But take note so you don't comment on me next time.

Don't call Australia uncivilised, kicking against the pricks is a national identity.

The answer is likely some form of different expectations. You expected the behavior not to be the topic. Where as I assume, other people are upset by the behavior of bun et al, and because this reply was somewhat measured, it seemed more polite then they expected.

I think you're assumption that it's 'filled with ad hominem attacks' is good evidence for that. I'd have to go back, and go line by line to be sure, but there are no ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem has a specific meaning: arguing against the person, instead of the argument. If the argument is about the behavior of a person, then unless one of those people is a party to the argument, it's exceptionally unlikely to be an ad hominem attack.

Argument: you can't trust the quality of the code $person produces. They mostly release slop code.

Neither are ad hominem: because words mean things. They're attacks against the code quality, and reputation of the subject. But they're not ad hominem. You may not like the opinion. But that doesn't make it an inappropriate attack against the person, the behavior and decisions they've made and the impact those decisions have had, are the topic of the post.

I guess technically, he takes shots at claude which no doubt wrote large sections of this? But I also would object to calling that ad hominem, and doubt that's what you meant?

Finally, even if I did agree the argument that the language in the blog post targets the speaker, more than it addresses the topic wasn't stupid, (I don't agree, it is a stupid idea). The social responsibility/contract to: never do anything publicly that might be considered an attack; was released when bun decided to comment publicly with disputed facts.

Oh no, someone wrote a blog post as a response and refutation to an otherwise unprovoked public post spreading what the author considers misinformation about something they care about?! Maybe they shouldn't have said anything?

How much politeness do you feel is owed? Why are the critiques enumerated improper? I'm honestly curious if you have reasons that I just can't see? Or if it's just vibes based? You don't like how it feels, and that's your objection? Ideally something like: this specific quote is completely off-topic, and exists not to express an idea important to the author, but near exclusively to insult a person. So that I can understand why you see insults that I can't see. If it's true, I can't consider it an insult.

Last question: would all your objections go mostly/completely away if every paragraph was prefixed by "In my opinion"?

Lmao when I can learn to master speaking like you;;

That said I have positive feelings about Zig as a project, but I do see it is a straight vitality show of a person rather than someone putting broader adoption in front. If Andrew K ever prioritized adoption he would have been a kind and dull leader keen on advertising here and there but he is not, he puts principles first, and people abide with him to see what he could bring to the world, not for being kind, so if people say they know Andrew K they are actually saying well he has that in his personality

Allow me to reframe what I'm trying to say. Depending on how much placation and linguistic sugar you required to tolerate reality; you might need to remember, or think of ark is an asshole, but then so am I. I'm going to speak bluntly and directly, if you shit out shitty code. I'm going to call your code shitty. I will use the word shit. If you're making decisions that follow a clear pattern, especially if I have a problem with that pattern, I'm gonna name it. Naming something by that pattern, might be seen as degrading, or insulting. That's still, not an attack.

It's an uncomfortable observation, wrapped up in an opinion you don't like. I'm sorry reality is uncomfortable for you (rhetorical you), but welcome to the club?

Let me try explaining it with an example: If I wanted to attack someone, I would directly call them, personally an idiot. Or some other clearly directed insult, at who they are as an individual. I wouldn't list, or trash their output, I wouldn't waste time stating I'm grateful for their time or donations.

No, hypothetically, if I wanted to attack someone I'd use the example of the no call no show to the meeting and say: wow Jarred and his team really are shitty people to no call no show on someone like that. I hate a lot of people, but even I wouldn't noshow on them. He sounds like a shitty human.

I wonder if there's something we can all learn about the subject, given everyone is so sure a recounting of facts followed by a conclusion saying literally

"I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred. He has different taste than me, he wants different things out of life than me. But I think he's actually happy and successful exactly where he is. He figured out how to accomplish all the stuff in life that he wants. [...] Honestly, I think he did well for himself, and I don't wish him any ill will."

is so clearly a personal attack? Honestly, if that were me, that would hurt way worse than reading this attack.

Management style and code quality outputs are not criticisms of the person, they are judgements of the person's management skills and coding skills. Are we not allowed to do that? Or do we just need to use nicer language when doing it? I could agree with nicer language, but those were actually very relevant facts that were missing in the original blog post about the rewrite.

Andrew decided to attack the person rather than ideas and positions. It's not a reflexive revulsion, it's an appropriately sized reaction to a blog post in poor taste.

> not having any morals

You don't agree with someone so you claim they have no morals. I don't have words for how stupid this is that anyone can so casually dehumanize someone over something so trivial.