If I threw you into a lion cage, you would be a lot safer with a gun.

If I threw 10 people in a lion cage, some of which cannot be trusted, they would probably be most safe if only the most moral and trustworthy person had a gun, rather than everyone. But how do you know who is trustworthy and moral? What if two untrustworthy people obtained a gun some other way? Maybe it's better if everyone had a gun? Which side of the fence one falls on hinges on how far ones' trust of others, authority, and the system goes.

There's no obvious right or wrong answer here.

Personally I wouldn't want an exclusive club of private individuals with access to "dangerous" LLMs consisting mainly of the likes of Elon, Dario and Sam fucking Altman, but that's just me.

Weren't these more about "human population planning"?

> the idea of planning your family is relatively modern

The term "family planning" is. The general concept is not, which is why we have two thousand year old papyrus talking about birth control.

Note that at no point I used the word "family" - because just our modern understanding of a family will muddy any attempt to compare to historical fact.

Where did I ever claim this? I said they don't even have the Zig build script in their repo anymore - they're clearly not intending to make any more changes to it, even if the code is still lying there next to the Rust code.

> If the userbase is as miniscule as you imagine then your criticisms are essentially meaningless.

They're not criticisms, they're observations. The point is that the challenge is not comparable - because TypeScript's existing ecosystem is part of their challenge.

What's taken 1:1, deliberately, was the compiler core. That was almost perfectly 50% of the non-test code. A close translation of that was a starting point, but open CHANGES.md or it's history and you'll see it's quickly diverging even on its surface.

The closest matching, interesting large area of it is probably the checker. Easily recognizable on a function level, even if not being a single file anymore:

https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/tree/main/interna...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/TypeScript/refs/... (The TS file is 3MB and github won't display it inline)

You'll find a lot of the same data structures (as far as that's possible in a TS-to-Go translation + ripples from areas that were more heavily changed) and functions lying around, just in slightly different places. Because of the AST changes and TS/Go differences on a line-level each function might look different, but where there is a loop in the TS one, there's probably one in Go.

The other half of the project is heavily changed or completely new/different (like concurrency, less weird language service).

It's not.

Passing an existing test suite just moves the optimistic lower bound to incidental compatibility, it doesn't move it to intentional - "regard" implies you gave it thought.

Plus, it's not just about code: it's also about giving the ecosystem a migration path. Dumping 500k LOC on people and discontinuing development of the zig version effective immediately (there hasn't been a release since and the zig tree is only a reference - the build script is removed afaik) is the opposite of what TypeScript did. If you broke someone's N-API module because of a regression not caught by your suite they're now between a rock and a hard place.

The good news is that there's nobody there to notice. The bun userbase is miniscule* compared to TypeScript's.

* negligible? irrelevant? laughably small? I'm struggling to find an adjective that does the difference justice.

These are not comparable at all. The bun "rewrite" really is more of a translation of a software that is mainly dogfooded, created with an at best loose regard for a wider ecosystem.

TypeScript 7.0. by comparison is not just a translation from one language to another. It's a true rewrite that at the same time has to consider a massive existing ecosystem (which needs to catch up first or you risk fragmenting it). Plus you might as well consider 6.x part of the effort, since that was the stepping-stone.

Also where bun really is just a runtime implemented with a bunch of glue code plus supporting tooling, TypeScript is much more complex. Change one part of TypeScript and you can get cascading issues somewhere else in the compiler easily. Change something in Bun and you'll likely just break some discrete part.

There's correlation, and your language network likely augments your intelligence, but as proven by millions of animals, unfortunate humans and also some less-unfortunate human infants, you really don't need language for intelligence.

Where language helps most strongly is metacognition: evidence suggests that it is severely limited without language, and I suppose that is where the common belief that thought is language comes from: the moment you try to think about your thoughts, you use language!

My theory (and this with literally no evidence) is that we use the language network for metacognition precisely because it is not that involved in primary thought. Important to note that "we" here means humans: animals appear to demonstrate metacognition even without language.

Ways to have fun without coitus aren't a recent invention either.

Human reproduction and raising children is an unusually taxing, time-, and resource-intensive process, which is why we've applied our considerable intellect to plan for that since forever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control

Many modern societies are structured in a way that makes children an economic negative to their parents. From an individuals' POV, the "smart" play is not having children and hope others do.

Individuals believe that they do not need children because they have saved up for retirement, not accounting for the fact that if everyone did this and there was nobody left to do any work once they reach retirement age, that money will be worthless and they'll be unable to retire. The alternative is mass-scale immigration, and that's becoming unpopular. For an example of what happens if a society has neither enough children, nor immigration, see South Korea. Poverty among the elderly is rampant and they are increasingly being forced back into the labor market.

Many western societies needed to start applying a large multiplier to parental benefits decades ago.

But that's because they're either too smart to try or we have altered their genetic makeup by culling anyone who strayed too close.

It was rewarded for this during training for some reason.

Alternative theory:

The LLMs only way to "think" about abstract concepts is through language, and this leaks into into conversation it has with humans.

But humans generally prefer to communicate on low levels of abstraction, through a back and forth, until the hard-to-express higher abstraction exists in the head of everyone involved - without ever being directly communicated. This is because we don't think using language. Language is merely a lossy translation of our thought into something expressible, happening after the fact or alongside it.

So when the LLM starts speaking to us using patterns and terms it created for itself during training to encode abstract thought in language, communicating with it becomes painful.

Claude gives you something like $5000 of tokens on a $200 plan.

Roughly a hundred servers on 100 GbE ports each could handle one small UDP packet per human every second, and would have a plenty of cycles and RAM per human left to actually do some work.

That fits in a shipping container.

Illustrative of course: the point is that "for every human" is not far out there given how crazy powerful hardware has become.

At least two models (GPT-5.6, Kimi K3) match its score (~1-2% diff) for half the cost.

To be fair, that seems like a bit of an odd detail to obsess over.

A service could be bright pink for all I care* as long as it just works without me having to worry about checking their blog for the latest decrees being handed down on a daily basis.

* Take that with a grain of salt because my - in some people's eyes - questionable stylistic choices are the direct cause of a couple hundred userstyles and scripts out there.

Yes. Let me stop you right there: Yes, absolutely. Whatever they claim their reasons are, it's not my problem. I don't care.

The last Codeberg story that popped up here just this week was something about them banning Bitcoin. At that pace you should worry whether you're next.

Which is why my advice is: Avoid the headache. Go somewhere else.