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I looked it up:

  The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities — that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future — will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.

Letter dated Feb 28th 2000, NASDAQ would hit the peak of the bubble March 10th.

We all want to sell the top and buy the bottom.

Not if choosing statically checked memory safety sacrifices for correctness where it is a local optimum

If you sacrifice memory safety for correctness, that just means it's not correct. If safety is crucial, it must be safe under all inputs, and if there are data races.

It's a bit like saying, "Yeah, our system is safe, but if there are two threads racing or use after free somewhere, then all bets are off."


you do not sacrifice memory safety. you sacrifice a compiler ensuring that code is memory safe by it enforcing one quite opinionated approach to it: RAII and lifetime analysis.

you seem to think there is one path to memory safety. there is not. unsurprisingly, some programmers may need different tools when working with a different set of requirements.


If you're using Zig to write correct by design code you do.

Or at least you have to add memory safety as another extra step on your road to correct by design.

I'm aware of paths to memory safety, but they boil down to: pervasive GC, annoying compiler, and praying you got it right.

If you write your proof in GC language than translate it to C, that's just a mix of pervasive GC and praying.


  No ___, no ____. Just _____
or using "honest" to describe an approach.


Honest, straight, genuine, actual, real are all words that paper over a weak claim to me. Im thinking about a hook that injects a subagent fact checking in an "are you sure" style here because it's so bad.

Also the false not X it's Y is used in a similar way for faux distinctions like a sov cit claiming "it's not driving, it's traveling in a car"


Jab, jab, thrust is how I think about that pattern. Or tap tap whack, if you prefer. And it shows up for for positives too:

"Smooth. Effortless. A perfect fit for your needs".

In any style of informal or persuasive writing this shows up , as if it has to drive the point in.

I kind of wish we'd stop talking openly about what the tells are. It's nice to be able to determine with fair accuracy - but it couldn't last forever.


> I kind of wish we'd stop talking openly about what the tells are.

Least this way it’s out in the open perhaps, since enough users have training enabled labs will naturally learn what annoys us.

Had the same thought though


Yeah, I think in this case, pointing out what’s obviously llm is genuinely useful since it will lead to more diversity in websites and a better tool. I mean I don’t usually care if a website is LLM generated as long as the copy is human written


Ironically, your entire post can be read as such, almost perfectly!

Labeling each sentence (J)ab and (T)hrust, and using colon ":" to indicate arguments, one gets:

```

J: J. J. T.

J: "J. J. T".

T: T.

T: J. J. T.

```


I call it "I'm not like other girls" writing.


Imagine a world where everyone talks like an Apple product page.


I think that's been a tired marketing trope for many years before LLMs, and they just picked it up from the training data.


Don't forget the uncomfortable truth


Quality over quantity


I aim for both.

My blog is a combination of different content types. "Entries" are the ones I spend the most time on - https://simonwillison.net/entries/

Links and notes are more short form - I try to keep the quality high (especially with regards to accuracy) but they're also much higher volume than entries: https://simonwillison.net/blogmarks/ and https://simonwillison.net/notes/


I have no idea why I am responding to someone who flippantly uses a phrase like "dilittante mindset", but here we go

there is definitely a tendency for noobs and amateurs in any hobby or industry to obsess over expensive gear and things that don't matter (I love the term "buyhard" for it). you're out of your mind if you think the professionals in literally any industry do not discuss the specific technical tradeoffs of tools they are using among themselves.


When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

-- Pablo Picasso


Miyazaki once commented in an interview that the most important selection criteria for him when he chose his watercolours and brushes, was that they were available in his local supermarket and lasted a long time.


His art is bad


They don't discuss tradeoffs of every tool, just the ones that offer the most leverage


"some of the newer ideas happening in this space are in the GNOME OS project and the KDE Linux project"


My Gentoo box is immutable. Right up until I run emerge.


If I am remembering correctly, there was a moment where Garry was seriously considering using Squirrel instead of Lua. I think he experimented with JavaScript too.

I’m not sure it’s still the case but he modified Lua to be zero indexed and some other tweaks because they annoyed him so much, so it’s possible if you learned GMod Lua you learned Garry’s Lua.

Of course his heart has been with C# for many years now.


Don't engage with this guy, he shows up in every one of these threads to pattern match back to his heyday without considering any of the nuance of what is actually different this time.


Look an admirer!


It’s hard to see this article as being written in good faith. We’re at the point that we are responding to low quality LLM outputs with low quality LLM retorts and voting them both to the front page because of feelings.


I'm at the point now where I simply stop reading the article once it has too many red flags, something that is happening increasingly often.

I don't enjoy reading AI slop but it feels worse when users of AI tools have chosen not to disclose the authors of these articles as Claude/ChatGPT/etc. Rather than being honest upfront, they choose to hide this fact.


I added some sentences at the top, so it wont waste people's time:

Some parts of this article were refined with help from LLMs to improve clarity and technical accuracy. These are just personal notes, but I would really appreciate feedback: feel free to share your thoughts, open an issue, or send a pull request!

If you prefer to read only fully human-written articles, feel free to skip this one.


It clearly wasn't "refined" using LLMs when it contained commands that plainly don't work. Don't lie.


We've flagged it. Please don't waste our time in the future.


> but I would really appreciate feedback

very well

> Some parts of this article were refined with help from LLMs to improve clarity and technical accuracy

Perhaps you should stick to writing about things you can write with clarity and and accuracy yourself instead of relying on an LLM to do it for you. Alternatively, properly cite and highlight what portions you used AI on/for from the outset as failure to do so reads at best as lazy slop and more often as intentional duplicity


the entire github organization looks to be ai slop books... why even do this?


As a fan and user of Zig I found the original post embarrassing, but chalked it up to the enthusiasm of a new user discovering the joy of something that clicked for them

Taking offense to that enthusiasm and generating this weirdly defensive and uninformed take is something else, though


Edit: Apologies, it looks like I misunderstood. Original response left below for posterity.

It's not "weirdly defensive and uninformed" to question the value of posting a bunch of inaccurate LLM slop, especially without any disclosures.

If you're pro-AI, you should be against this too, before these errors get used as training data.


I think you are misunderstanding, they are calling TFA a defensive and uninformed reply to the pro-Zig post from yesterday.


Ohhhh, my apologies, then.


I can see how you would have read it that way, now, but yes — I meant this article is defensive for no reason while being uninformed


I stopped using Rust because of this. I spent more time learning and cursing at other people’s abstractions versus thinking about what the computer is doing.

> the ones who’d use Zig if it weren’t allergic to syntactic sugar

You’re very close to understanding why some people prefer Zig. There is a correlation between language design and how things are built with it.


> There is a correlation

Precisely, same for Go. Incentives decide outcomes.


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