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It is actually more difficult because superpowers are not willing to spend unlimited money just to get ahead (like during Cold War). You can brute force a lot of technical problems by just using money (for example just one big expensive engine like Apollo 11). Nowadays nobody is willing to spend that kind of money for just one mission.

Both lead and lead free solder use the same chemical flux in their core. So you have the same problem with leaded flux cored solder. With the additional problem of lead.

Of course syntax matters in any programming language. That is like saying the alphabet and grammar does not really matter in English.


with LLMs? syntax doesn't really matter anymore exactly because of what you mentioned in your last sentence.


Some people are actually interested in programming, coming and bleating about LLMs making all the finer points of it unimportant is as clueless as a manager coming here and telling us that syntax is unimportant because he has programmers for that crap.

If you don't care, don't go around in programming threads telling you how it doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter to you, because you prefer to be ignorant about the details of programming, and you have found tools that let you live in ignorance, good for you. But some of us do care, and are going to continue to do so.


My point isn't that what you are doing is pointless or that you shouldn't enjoy what you do but that it ultimately holds very little economic value especially as someone in charge of hiring developers, their experience is more valuable in the sphere of architectural design than expertise over syntax.

LLMs compile english to whatever code you want and it can write it better, faster and more efficiently than a human can over the long run. You might have an edge in shorter sprints but that gap is quickly reduced when LLMs simply learn and apply whatever optimization they find and it can continue to output without any diminishing returns and at fraction of what it takes to pay a human to do it.


If you do not even read code (the fact that you don't write any is clear), then what do you do?


With LLMs you pay per token, so if you can express the same code in 1 / 10th the tokens that absolutely matters. Moreover they have a finite context window, so more concise syntax can make that more economical.


Sure but how many devs can sustain that level of efficiency around the clock and how much thought do you think their employers will give when the LLM tokens pay 1/100~1/1000th of the wage paid


Wdym, the LLM is writing it either way? My point is all else being equal, you’d prefer the code that’s shorter for the reasons stated.


I want code that is efficient, secure and cheap to produce. There is no way a human can compete with a network of agents doing that. Whatever edge you think exists is on a downward trend. Look at where we were in the days of GPT 4o vs now in terms of coding capability. Look at the marketplace for overseas contractors and the impact AI has had.

To ship what I do now would've cost a few million dollars per year in terms of the team needed to maintain it now its 1000x cheaper


I'm not making that argument are you responding to the right person?

My argument was that syntax still matters because LLMs communicate in syntax, and they pay for that per token, therefore LLMs make syntax more relevent as you can actually calculate cost to write in one language versus another.

I'm not arguing that humans can compete with a network of agents.


It does if you actually want to understand what the slop-bot is doing.


Because all these things require a grid, unlike on-site generators. Most grid equipment (specially high voltage transformers) are backordered and all companies have empty inventories. Unlike traditional companies these AI companies are deathly afraid of not getting to AGI first, so they can't wait.


This is a static website running on Cloudflare infra. What on earth costs $90 per month? First optimize your infra before throwing up rules in front of your visitors. I have several websites on Cloudflare too and I don't even check how many million requests I get. Because it does not cost me anything.

> And yes, my site gets its data by scraping those public documents. So I'm a scraper writing a blog post complaining about scrapers. I'm aware of how that sounds.

Being self aware does not make it okey. Either you are okey with scraping (like me) or against it. Don't use it yourself and block your site at the same time.

These same people will be crying about how Cloudflare ruins the internet because they get these captchas.


> My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke".

What a sh*tshow. When I look up a programming language on Wikipedia I am trying to learn about the programming language only. What does the political views of the creator of the language has to do with this at all?


He’s not saying that’s why the article was deleted.

He’s saying that to say that’s why Bill is acting like he is. Saying he doesn’t care while making a lot of noise like he cares. Complaining about rules he hasn’t looked up. Then accusing the mods of bias simply due to their deletion of the article, despite the mod nominating being more ideologically aligned than not.


> You don't lose half a million people from an ethnic group in just ten years without some kind of war or genocide.

Nothing happened to the people, they are growing year on year. But languages can die very easily if governments don't put efforts on teaching it to children. That is exactly what happened to the Ho language. There is no advantage on learning these small regional languages so children put their effort on more popular languages like Hindi, Odia and English.

Here is a good article on this topic:

https://www.vogue.in/content/when-languages-in-india-disappe...


I'm familiar with the phenomenon, as my wife is a linguist who did her master's thesis on the phonology of a small language spoken by about 7000 people: many of the kids don't want to learn it, and just want to learn the majority language of the country since that's what they have to use in school. But I didn't think that could be the explanation for a 25% decline in ten years: new people may not be learning the language, but the only way people stop speaking their mother tongue is if they immigrate to a new country and fully adapt to it (happens to a few people, usually who immigrated as children) or if they die (by far the most common reason for language-use decline: the old people are dying and the young people aren't learning it). If the decline was a couple hundred thousand that would be the outside limit of probability, as far as I know.

More likely, in my opinion, is that both are happening: yes, the language is declining, but either the earlier census overcounted speakers (e.g. counting children as speaking it when they weren't actually learning it) or else the later census undercounted speakers; either way the language decline would look larger than it actually is. Given that Ethnologue (https://www.ethnologue.com/language/hoc/) rates the language vitality as "Stable" — "The language is not being sustained by formal institutions, but it is still the norm in the home and community that all children learn and use the language" — and they usually know what they're talking about, I suspect the language decline isn't that fast and a census counting mistake is a more likely explanation for the discrepancy over ten years.


Apple stock is down more than 4% right now. That is a big dump for such a blue chip stock. IDK if it is due to this EU ban or Apple choice of going with Gemini (instead of making their own models).


Apple stock rises leading up to WWDC and then drops following the keynote every single year. People keep betting that this is the year that they're going to announce the next iPhone and the stock is going to 10x.


The whole market is down


But AAPL has a big weight on the market/indices.


They always go down after a keynote.


If the market is reacting to the Gemini news now, something is wrong. This has been a known fact for months.


Is there any proposed timeline for a stable release? Big features like the recent async IO shows the language is very unstable right now.


Andrew's take is "it's ready when it's ready but we hope it's good enough before it's fully ready that you want to use it anyway".

It's different and I like it. You get one shot at it and may just as well get it right in as many areas as possible.


Yep. He mentioned recently in his JetBrains interview he wants Zig to be a language for the next 50 years. Rushing 1.0 for the sake of signaling to the wider industry today would be actively harmful to that goal.


Yes. And this kind of mentality is a near extinct in modern software development.


Too bad it will not be adopted for anything serious in the next 50 years. There is no reasonable value proposition from a business standpoint for picking zig over rust. It is already the reality in much of the tech industry that Rust is filling the space previously occupied by C++. The fact that there now exists a safe low level language is legitimately a paradigm shift. It doesn't matter how many shiny cool things zig adds, being unsafe means it a technology stuck in the past.


There is no ETA on 1.0, but breakage has followed the pattern of it not really being hard to upgrade to a newer version, as it is very well documented on the version release notes.


writergate was not smooth, a lot of things that moved over to writer (Writer.Allocating for instance) had no documentation and I had to go read the zig source code to figure it out. the docs were just "instead of That use This"


nitpick: The language is pretty stable, what changes is the standard library.


> Is 1.1 Tflop/s good? Theoretically, the GPU on my M3 Max is capable of around 15 Tflop/s. But the real ceiling for this kind of task is going to be 3-5 Tflop/s

This is so true. And also why people should not take basic GPU benchmarks so seriously. Getting peak performance out of a GPU is much more complex than it is with a CPU.

And it is one of the reasons why Nvidia still has a software moat compared to other GPU companies. CUDA has so many small kernels tuned for getting peak performance for your dataset.


I keep this link in my favorites and refer to it every now and again. Still one of the best write-ups I've seen on just have vast the difference is between a naive and well tuned kernel

https://siboehm.com/articles/22/CUDA-MMM


This is an amazing article, thanks for sharing! Will also bookmark it.


> Getting peak performance out of a GPU is much more complex than it is with a CPU.

I don’t really think it’s significantly more challenging


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