Technology does not exist in a vacuum, nor does anything that is engineered. It's not this abstract stuff detached from the world.
PEOPLE make stuff, people use stuff, and people are ultimately the ones who are going to pick and choose which stuff gets made, used, adapted, enhanced, and carried into the future.
AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.
Assessed from the perspective of "technology in a vacuum", of course. it's a success. He did the thing that transformed the thing from one kind of stuff to another kind of stuff. It still does all the things it did before, and in many cases with better stats than it did before.
Assessed from the human angle, and especially the angle of Bun as a community, I would bet money that this rewrite -- executed by nobody for nobody, built and maintained by machines, maintainable only by machines -- has killed the entire project.
Maintainable only by machines, because anybody with any knowledge, experience, or investment into Bun as a platform, or who contributed patches themselves, or whoever had a question about how it works and went "Hmm, I'm gonna go into the codebase and take a look at how that happens", they all got slapped in the face and summarily kicked out of the tent with the rewrite.
> AI is an inherently anti-social, anti-human technology, and this rewrite is the perfect example of that.
Not really. LLMs are a tool, and they do possess some interesting properties, but they are, in essence, a very surprising auto-complete.
No, what sucks is the AI companies marketing them as if they are The Holy Grail. And people are assuming that somehow LLM -> AGI -> ASI, even though there isn't really a causal link to be had, and acting like it's The Singularity.
I don't blame autocomplete for fucking up RAM, labor and god knows what else. I blame the idiots (at OpenAI and Anthropic) buying all RAM stocks and pretending this shit is any way good for anyone.
If you think like this - and you are most probably right IMO as well - then you should somehow share GP feelings, because LLMs are made by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Bun was bought by Anthropic and ported to Rust by Anthropic.
TBH in hindsight it seems that the Bun acquisition was also for the PR stunt they just did with the Rust porting.
I don't because I think the GP is blaming the tech, not the actual culprit - a bit like blaming the invention of fridges for people hiding the body. LLMs can be made and hosted independently of OpenAI and Anthropic.
> TBH in hindsight it seems that the Bun acquisition was also for the PR stunt they just did with the Rust porting.
The events went roughly like this:
- Anthropic used Bun. So they acquired it.
- Bun made some LLM derived patches for Zig. They were rejected due to Zig no-LLM stance.
- Bun couldn't get patches in, so they switched to Rust.
Was it a PR stunt, an attempt to pressure Zig maintainers into changing AI stance, or just doing the fastest thing possible? It's difficult to tell. I'm inclined to believe the last option.
As easy as it is to blame Bun for a PR stunt, it's also possible that you can't really associate with someone who rallies against your employer/owner.