Let's not forget the Trump administration threatened two separate NATO allies with invasion and annexation, and then had the gall to complain they were not helping them attack Iran.

Here is why it's unlikely this is anything other than "silly behavior by a government":

- some benchmarks show GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, and even Claude Opus outperforming Claude Fable, and yet it's Fable which is restricted.

- some benchmarks still show the likes of Kimi 2.5 outperforming any Claude model, and DeepSeek is getting equivalent scores (a few tenths of a percent difference)

> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever (...)

That's immaterial to the discussion. Even if China forced Chinese labs to restrict access to all models, the truth of the matter is that Trump's administration to restrict access to US-based models does not prevent others from having access to models that are as capable or even better.

So what's exactly the point of this?

I don't think that's it. Emergent problems require attention and action from leadership, who in turn can make the problem visible to higher ups. This creates signal, and positive feedback when the problem is fixed or mitigated.

If the problem doesn't exist to begin with, there is no signal. Managers don't get to show their fast-acting skills, and there are no heroics to speak of.

So ultimately poorly maintained and managed projects who deliver fixes for problems of their own doing create a perverse incentive, whereas no one is lauded or promoted for doing normal day-to-day things.

I see you felt compelled to use the weasel word "anything" to put together an argument. That suggests you are very well aware that the difference between older models and the latest and greatest is not that significant, as you need to resort to coming up with a single example, any example at all no matter how far fetched, to try to put together a case.

And that says it all.

> Or just that it's so much cheaper that the cost/benefit ratio is better?

That too is another definition of quality, isn't it?

If you have two tools and one does the same job but is both cheaper and faster, it means it it objectively better.

> Also "finish a task" is also subjective.

No, it isn't. If you supply a prompt and you have a definition of done, and a model executes it and delivers what you asked then it finished the task successfully.

> I can "finish the task" of building a table, but it will be a shitty table. Are you also measuring the quality of the result - which is subjective again?

Nonsense. If you feel the need to put up strawmen then it's up to you to justify them. Please define "quality" and prove that a model such as fable has such a radically different output that in comparison the output of older models is "shitty".

I understand you feel the need to keep the hype bus going, but you need more than strawmen, weasel words, and hand waving to keep that hype afloat.

And the truth if the matter is that the models introduced in the oast year don't introduce any breakthrough and struggle to show significant improvements over older models.

I don't think this is that subjective or vague.

There are a couple of crisp metrics that can be used to evaluate a model:

- given a prompt, does it finish a task (times X tasks)

- how much did it cost to finish the task

- how long did it took?

If all models are able to handle a class of tasks, they perform equally well.

If a model costs much more to finish a task, it is worse than other models.

If a model takes longer to finish a task, it is worse than other models.

The ugly truth is that since the GPT4.1 days, new model releases have shown diminished returns. Context windows were increased, reasoning steps help improve the usefulness of a user's prompt,... That's it. Even those are UX improvements, instead of huge breakthroughs.

I might be missing something important but that doesn't seem to be an impressive task.

On a surface level it sounds like the taks requires gathering calls to MicroPython-specific libs, assess which ones are not compatible with Python, and proceed to determine how to replace the ones that are incompatible.

From that first iteration, the rest would boil down to troubleshooting the issues missed on the first shot.

I would be extremely surprised if the likes of GPT4.1 wasn't already capable of handling that task.

So, beyond Claude Fable finishing a task, what exactly is the differentiating factor?

I think you are demonstrating a clear lack of insight and experience in software development settings, including FLOSS projects. I can name you a dozen of fairly known FLOSS projects which are a big ball of mud. Just go to the likes of GitHub, check out the list of popular projects, and peek at their code. You will get a very mixed set of results.

I think that this is exactly why this scaremongering breaks down. If you believe the compounding speed is that greater, wouldn't you be compelled to accept that refactoring and cleaning things up is just as fast and effortless?

I mean, you have a tool that writes software for you following your commands. If you are that concerned with maintainability then what can possibly compell you to not invest any effort in it?

You are confusing Kubernetes, the software project with Kubernetes, the container orchestration system.

There are many Kubernetes distributions out there which are not maintained in any way by Google. Even Canonical provides its own Kubernetes implementation.

Nowadays Kubernetes is a keyword much like Unix or Unix-like.

That's not my experience at all, and I have been using models that are far from being cutting edge. Even in the cases where a model generates utter nonsense, a couple of clarifying questions is all it takes to get it back on track.

But that might be a factor of the project being worked on, and the extension of the changes being asked.

That's so far been called software development.

All software developed by people suffers from this issue.

Where exactly is the novelty?

> The only way I see AI coding working in the long run is if we go back to a Waterfall/BDUF process and having actual engineering.

Nonsense. The problem is exactly the same.

With agents iterations are much faster, and this can mean things can get messier faster but can get in shape just as fast.

Ironically, agents improve the quality of the deliverable as well. Approaches such as spec-driven development do a far better job delivering features up to spec than manual coding by flesh and blood developers.

There's an awful lot of baseless scaremongering in your post. You make it sound like with AI assisted coding developers stopped paying any attention to quality.

That's not really the point though. That presumes models are only useful if they are one-shot models. That is false.

I mean, what if your prompt successfully changes 20 source files and makes a mess in one? How much work did it saved?

And the elephant in the room is when models actually outperform whatever the prompter is able to deliver, and faster. That is somehow left out.

This hits the nail in the head.

Detractors often hang on to examples of coding assistants making mistakes or output subpar code, but they somehow miss the fact that coding assistants can also be prompted again and refactor whole swaths of code just as fast as they introduce oopsies. This means that the worst case scenario implies fast convergence to an acceptable outcome, and from there also fast iteration to improve upon that.

If you read GP's post you'll understand it exemplifies exactly the issue that the likes of (void *) present in C.

I mean, read the message, particularly this:

> later on it's not that easy to understand which shape it should have in the specific conditional branch you're trying to fix

That is exactly the purpose of void *. By design. It's a pointer to an unspecified type. The unspecified type is exactly why this thing is used.

Even this week I stumbled upon legacy code that started off with a clean function, void DoSomething(Foo). Then a few years passed and someone started using Foo to handle two scenarios, let's call them Left and Right. They could have simply introduce two new types, FooLeft and FooRight. But no. Instead they kept Foo after adding a few extra optional fields, and extended DoSomething(Foo) as

    DoSomething(Foo foo, bool isLeft, bool isRight)

Where have you been during all this time?

No, I called out your opinionated ignorance on the topic.

> WG14 never had the necessary skills among all the members to help improve this proposal (...)

Frankly I don't think you even understand what you're arguing. I mean, to start off, if an idea is feasible then do you think it needs a full blown committee joining forces to magically fix all the problems?

> (...) or dare to bring another one during the last 40 years?

Again, you are showing a hefty dose of ignorance in the topic. Do you even understand that anyone can put together a proposal? That's how the process works. If you feel so strongly about it, where is yours? What have you been doing for the past 40 years?

I completely agree. It's particularly egregious when the blogger complains that the complexity and ugliness lies in the type casting to force an incompatible type where it doesn't belong, and use a reinterpret_cast of all things.

This doesn't even feel like a strawman argument anymore. This sounds like a coding horrors entry.

Your comment conveys a hefty dose of ignorance on the topic. I recommend you read the proposal's arguments, including how it required breaking the ABI.

I'm not sure if you are trolling.

From the article:

> Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors froze the bank accounts of Albania Land Development, the company that bought beachfront plots for a luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner, as national protests against the project entered their seventh consecutive day. The preventive seizure was ordered by SPAK, the Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime, as part of a property-fraud investigation into how land titles in a protected coastal wetland were acquired and how the area was stripped of its protected status.

Furthermore.

> In 2024, the Albanian Parliament passed special legislation reclassifying Sazan and the Pishe Poro-Narta area to permit large-scale development, the move that made the strategic investor designation possible; opposition parties and environmental groups argued the changes were written to accommodate Kushner-linked investors. One administrator of Albania Land Development, Redi Struga, has reportedly been subject to searches.

And of course the old beaten down excuse.

> Rama, a long-time friend of the Trump and Kushner families, claimed the anti-corruption and land defence campaign was being pushed by opponents of Donald Trump.

This argument is moot. The issue with spans is not that they require cutting edge technology to deliver.

Before commenting, perhaps you should research why even Denis Ritchie himself could not sell his idea to C.

It's funny how every single idea that's rejected is blindly lauded as brilliant but silenced due to some kind of conspiracy, and only the ideas that emerged are somehow bad, unacceptable, or late. Is the point to feel outraged?