> [T]he Bun project lead can do whatever the hell he wants with his own project. There is no objectively "right" path here, in a moral sense.

I think this is the exact point that the article was getting at in the last section. It is okay to not be very good at software engineering or people management! It is useful to know these things if you want to understand why the Bun project made specific technical decisions, but they don't make the people involved "bad people" in a more nebulous moral sense.

The lead developer of Zig is discussing these factors because the main technical decision was moving away from Zig.

I agree with the spirit of what you're saying: that many aspects of this post seem unnecessary. But I do think there are reasonable answers to your (admittedly probably rhetorical) questions.

Zig is a relatively young language with a small community, and Oven/Bun is one of few places that someone could previously have written Zig code professionally. It's therefore Zig's business to make sure that either it's a good place to refer community members for work, or that they don't explicitly encourage people to work there. Likewise, as one of the highest-profile Zig projects, the community's leaders were understandably invested in making sure it represented the language well.

I feel like I am exactly the target audience for this post: someone who uses Zig regularly, but hasn't touched Bun, despite being aware of it. While I would have proceeded differently than Andrew Kelley here in terms of framing and phrasing (and leaving out some parts entirely), I do think reading this gave me new information about Zig's relationship to Bun. The specific dry, professional post you suggest wouldn't have given me any new information at all.

It explicitly praised zig and then spent a long time implicitly damning it. The whole blog post said in short, "zig is awesome, but it's use led to endless memory related bugs in the bun code that we couldn't stay on top of, so we rewrote in Rust."

If you didn't catch that then I'm not sure we read the same article. I haven't gone past basic tutorials in either language and I was really starting to believe that zig must be worse than C or C++! After thinking about it for a minute I wondered if maybe the developer was actually, well, not very good. Andrew's blog post did a lot to explain to me the background behind this all. I really appreciated it.

> There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.

Nobody is conflating anything, you're just misinterpreting the same words with different meanings.

A professional criticism can, in fact, be unprofessional, and even a personal attack. These are not mutually exclusive.

> Those are not personal criticisms

You're using "personal" to mean "regarding non-professional matters", whereas others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves".

> those are all professional criticisms

You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional".

"a stinky manager ... Just a total shit show" are examples I would reach for to demonstrate someone is not being professional.

That's true, claims of professional dishonesty is a kind of professional criticism. Shall we begin discussing whether Jarred is the kind of person who makes up fake conversations about Andrew?

As fellow professionals in this field, shall we engage in this very professional debate about Jarred's honesty as a moral human being?

I think that meme is dangerous precisely because the shallow interpretation is the opposite of the one the scene intends to convey.

Draper sabotages Ginsburg because he's threatened by him. In the elevator Don is masking his insecurities, as he deeply fears Ginsburg's talent. His own creativity, and confidence, has been crumbling. It's all ego.

This is true to some extend, but you may confuse runaway technical arguments (Rust in Linux?) with spitting vitriol over somebody.

I'm as anti-AI as they come and I mostly think everyone involved in this is making their respective projects and ecosystems look worse for it here.

Andrew was still way out of line in making many of the points included in this post, you don't have to be pro-AI to feel that way.

How is pasting an article into an LLM going to get you a neutral opinion? It'll be at best an 'opinion' that aligns towards the fine tune dataset used by the org that made the LLM. I'd rather people own their own bias and bring something into the conversation rather than act as a mouthpiece for a statistical median.

i think only if you contrast it with your own assessment. just using LLM to get an opinion is bad. eg: after reading the article i felt this X. LLM says it's Y. then draw conclusions from that.

myself i found the article contained a bit to much personal criticism. the kind that eg. on hackernews would not be welcome. so i guess i mostly agree with the LLM assessment.

They are saying that someone who will summarize an article with AI is already implicitly biased. It's not about the AI, it's about the user.

which they very much are not

Using an LLM as a proxy for an 'unbiased' source of personal confirmation bias is perhaps the most common 'use-case' for an LLM.

Not very different, mind you.

I don't really agree with using LLMs to do this but it correctly identified the attempt to soften the ending, which is to my mind significant in the whole piece; this person wants to repeat and frame unkind things he's heard, say unkind things, and then assert that he wasn't doing either.

Personally I don't think that matters, because the article is problematic enough when it can be read like ad hominem. Assuming that the question was phrased reasonably neutrally (but not necessarily free of hidden biases), the fact that LLM concluded so is an enough evidence here. Also as a non-LLM data point, I felt roughly same (especially the "softening" bit).

this is what worries me. I have friends that love what AI tells them about their personal pet 'thing' and how awesome it is. Yet not one of them has even tried once to get the AI to criticise it's own answers, and hence learn that you can trivially get an AI to make a convincing-_sounding case for any point of view.

I tell them to try, and they laugh at me as they roll their eyes and waffle on about 'tricking' the AI like its some kind of hacking.