Most recent criticism is about either: that they switched from selling licenses to subscriptions, that they stopped supporting self-hosting, that they use Electron, or that they financially support Omarchy/DHH.
> You are the owner of a recovered alien spacecraft with tech you have no hope of understanding.
I love this phrase, and I think it captures the difference between the "60 years of legacy code" mentioned elsewhere here, and the vibe-coded monstrosity that we all know we're going to be encountering in the next 5 years. The fact that there were human brains with intent making all the little (short-sighted, myopic, ignorant, etc) changes in the legacy code means that you DO have at least some shot of gaining enough context to make safer changes.
There is no real intent in LLMs and particularly in blind vibe coding, so you'll end up reading stuff that works, or appears to work, but there was no human brain behind the change for you to model and thus predict.
This just means we can't take the (often bad) shortcut of guessing what the code does because we feel we can predict what the author was thinking. Instead, we have to treat existing code as a natural sciences exercise - use the same methods we apply to the world around us, which has its logic and structure, but no human intent behind it.
GP is saying that "the search space" of "the natural world" is much bigger than the search space of "stuff created on purpose by humans". In both cases, there will be guesswork, but in one case less.
I think there is something to this, but am even more concerned by the pure scale. Consider 100k, 1M, and 10M LOC human legacy projects (already a big problem, usually!), and now compare to the likely outcome of 100M, 1B, 10B, etc LOC llm projects. That's where you may start to see the outcomes I reference in my OP.
> GP is saying that "the search space" of "the natural world" is much bigger than the search space of "stuff created on purpose by humans". In both cases, there will be guesswork, but in one case less.
I agree. What I am saying is, we have effective tools and processes for each of these search spaces, so code no longer being "created on purpose by humans" is not the end of the world.
> we have effective tools and processes for each of these search spaces
Do we? Science (the tool for the natural world) is limited and there's so much we don't understand.
The recent superhuman achievements by llms in math are promising, but what we've seen so far isn't enough imo to YOLO building arbitrarily large systems in code and just trust that the llms will be able to handle it. Especially when the stakes are high (human lives, etc).
> Do we? Science (the tool for the natural world) is limited and there's so much we don't understand.
Limited in what way? Its basic structure is sufficient to eventually let us discover anything there is to discover. It's a fully general problem solving framework.
> Limited in what way? Its basic structure is sufficient to eventually let us discover anything there is to discover. It's a fully general problem solving framework.
That "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's limited in the most literal, empirical way. We don't have answers to most things. If we stood in relation to a gargantuan code base as we stand in relation to the natural world, with an equal proportion of known vs unknown, we'd be pretty screwed.
As an aside, even with the "eventually" qualifier, the claim isn't true. The generation of hypotheses, in particular, and even sometimes the experimental setups to test them, happens through an "out of band" process -- namely, human creativity and intuition. Which is effectively a computational process we don't understand, and limited in its own way (despite its incredible productions). The history of scientific breakthroughs is the history of astonishing insights out of nowhere, from the brains of individual people, sometimes literally from dreams. The experimental method provides a reliable way to test the insights more or less "mechanically", but it would be mostly impotent without the other part.
I've learned about several frameworks that are system language + web frontend. The general approach is, ship a small binary compiled for the specific platform, and use the platform's native browser (and whatever html frontend tech you like) for frontend. The whole binary can be 1mb or less.
There's a couple of Rust libraries like this; right now I'm building an app in Tauri+Svelte.
It looks like Wails might be a similar framework in Golang.
On a purely language basis, I'd start with the things the BrighterScript [1] folks have done to clean up the warts and inconveniences of the language.
Personally I'd rather it not exist. Roku would be more pleasant to develop on had they chosen a more popular, existing language as the basis (e.g. Python). Then the task of developing for the platform ~mostly reduces from "learn a new language and a new framework" to just the latter.
I suppose it hasn't inhibited their success, of course.
On hackers news a technology focused platform where custom weird languages thrive. You're complaining about a company who the original developer made their own language.
Isn't this exactly how all of the other languages where created?
> Do they just get paid out with restrictive NDAs?
Yes, that's a very common part of an exit package for executives. Speaking from some first- and second-hand experience, you can get paid a hefty sum (6-12mo of salary worth of cash) for signing an agreement that has some amount of limits on what you can say, to whom.
There's also some kind of what I think of as a LinkedIn effect - there's a disincentive to talk trash about any organization publicly, since that's now attached to your name and might make future employers/organizations leery of hiring someone who might air their dirty laundry.
> Many CTOs, like me, have a strong engineering background, and so I will understand some of the requests you make without needing further explanation.
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