I didn’t work on it, but from afar it was a mission critical in-production system (with multiple modules / services like data collection, interpretation, visualization, etc) with minimal documentation and numerous other software dependencies. A lot of the work was understanding exactly how it worked and what/how it interacted with other systems. “Re-writing it” want the hard part, making sure nothing downstream broke was a lot of the work.
From what I’ve been told, this is like back in the 1990’s when the US collectively decided to outsource manufacturing to other countries via coordinated action between the government and industry. The motivation was too boost profits. Here we are today, our manufacturing base gutted and a lot of hard working Americans left with nothing. AI is the same thing, except it’s going after our high paying jobs and collective knowledge. So our future again will be one will less good jobs for hard working people, but also one where knowledge is much less valuable.
Unfortunately, it's easy to recognise that there's a systematic class war (between the property-owning classes and the rest), but the balance of power is so skewed that knowing about it doesn't particularly help. I suppose the problem is also that a lot of the poorer people actively vote and work to help the property-owners even though it's completely against their interests.
I think one social issue I’m seeing is that the Rust community bashes other languages for safety but then glosses over or even completely ignores their own safety risks (see supply chain). I would rather see Rust focus on its actual features without bashing others and maybe start moving away from claiming the gold metal on security. Being less toxic is always a good thing for long term health.
It's important to separate the community ethos and the rust core dev team policies, because I'd be surprised if the official stance of the rust team would be condescending to other technologies.
Rust is my favorite language in most domains I program in; I've learned to ignore the online rust OSS community due to a mix of preferring heavy abstractions (then shaming your code if you don't use them), and rude behavior.
This is fine, for the reasons you state: I can use the language and tools while ignoring the jerks.
I’d be shocked if people working on and passionate about thing didn’t shit on other thing. That’s natural and even good in moderation. It’s up to a leader to keep it under control.
Yes. In fact, I have met quite a few humans who make a point NOT to go bashing the work of others. (Of course, I have also met quite a few who do spend their time bashing others.)
The more you understand about your own system the more humility one would think you would have. This is like the dumb guy to jedi meme. It's the people in the middle that shit on other peoples' work because they have something to gain by looking comparatively smarter.
Can you give an example of this toxic bashing from rust contributors or are you talking about just random HN posters when you say “rust community”?
Moreover, I wouldn’t say they’re completely ignoring supply chain risks, as there have been discussions about this as early as 2021 [1] and there are ongoing efforts to address this [2]
Yeah Ive actually never seen any Rust team members be toxic. Keep in mind there is a micro niche of tech influencers who try to politicize rust because they associate it with liberalism or something like that and paint Rust community as an opposing force to some status quo they think exists or should exist. Those notions have taken on a life of their own.
People who say this just dont know what they're talking about and are repeating youtubers and X takes.
> Even the basic logic is flawed.... That coders can't be trusted to handle pointers, but somehow can be trusted to write "safe" unsafe rust.
Who said anything about trust? The purpose of unsafe blocks is that you have specific, limited areas of your code that can be audited for safety. With C your entire codebase needs to be audited.
Also, other languages “trusting” people to use pointers correctly has gone pretty badly.
The only fanaticism I'm seeing here is you going through the entire thread and picking fights and calling people who use and advocate a language names.
"fans" "fanatics" "cult"
I'm not sure what the point of this way of talking is. Rust is a tool. Many advocate for it because we've worked for a long time in ... other tools. Which had avoidable problems. I had a two decade career with C++ before Rust finally became mainstream enough to get paid to work in. Going back here and there is usually... unpleasant.
the only thing more exhausting than rust evangelism is people who drop in on any rust related thread and start whining about unrelated things just because it's rust.
The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
Its time to have a politics which puts the workers needs at its center. I can confidently say that the current system harms both workers and immigrants.
Ya, now that I have some solid AI coding experience under my belt, there does seem to be some gaps between practice and reality. I have a fairly complex codebase which I pretty much hand code everything. When I add a new feature, I spend a lot of time designing and refactoring that feature into the codebase. Either the feature dovetails into the existing design or the feature creates new designs which will then facilitate even better future features. When AI approaches the feature, it just plows the feature in, and with bugs since it has trouble fully understanding the total design. So over time, you have a spaghetti design where you just have a whole bunch of features tied together with no unified design. I guess thats ok if AI is supporting it, but you now have a large cost and bug surface area and an insane human learning curve. So nothing has really changed here, we have been dealing with low quality codebases way before AI came along. I think AI has mastered the one shot single feature, tool, or simple app, but it struggles with the design complexity of a rich multi feature application or system.
I liken it to contractors or overseas engineers. They don't really care about the long-term effects of their code.
I does the thing, adds some code, adds test that cover that code, and responds with "Done."
At a fully agentic "No looking at code" company, we now don't have a great understanding of that code, we don't know whether it's a good implementation or not, whether it fits our current patterns, is maintainable, or composable.
We're entirely in the dark, at the behest of an agent at this point - if we want to maintain velocity. (And I would love to know whether that velocity is real or just perceived). It feels like the code part is faster? But also feels like I have to spend a lot more time up front working through a problem to understand it. In the past, I gained that understanding WHILE I was working through the code. Who knows.
I encountered bugs created by AI. No matter how many times it tried it could not fix the bug, it was introducing so much slop to work around the issue.
I finally gave up and read documentation for 15 minutes and solved the problem.
I will never push AI generated code to production without understanding it, and this is why I only generate small code snippets and copy/paste most of the time.
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