It is a bit hypocritical in a sense. Similar to how I was sad that a local restaurant recently closed down. In the past two years I went there maybe three times total. But I just liked having it there as an option.

Deno had a ton of good ideas but I just never felt confident that it would have the lasting power. Some of the early decisions, like their initial refusal to fully support package.json and the npm eco-system, made me unsure of their suitability as the basis for a business.

But I always wanted them to succeed. In the same way I always wanted Heroku to succeed even though I never used their service.

More options are better. But I guess "use it or lose it" applies. Did I dodge a bullet or contribute to the downfall?

It is much more of a side-quest and it doesn't answer the question: where is deno going?

1. https://github.com/denoland/celld

In fact, such a distinction might characterize the difference between pessimism and optimism.

Either Zig gets good enough to be a worthy re-write target, or it doesn't. But I suspect that isn't even what they want.

I imagine languages are going to bifurcate into ones that go all in on agent experience and ones that go all in on human experience. And Zig seems to be in the latter group. I am confident that there will always be some niche market for languages lovingly crafted for humans. But the criteria we will use to define success within these groups of languages will be different.

It was then necessary to explain the difference between pre-rendered scenes and real-time rendering budgets.

It often isn't a question about whether or not something can be done. In pre-rendered scenes, or screenshots, the budget is very different than in game. At whatever target frame-rate you choose, there is a finite amount of visual effects you can achieve. Spending that budget requires compromise.

It's easy to live in a fantasy world where you can demand no compromise. The hard thing is doing the most you possibly can given very real budgets and doing so with the people you have available. Not every studio is Rockstar with the ability to throw unlimited devs for several years at the problem.

In the popular series reboot Battlestar Gallactica, the robots are religious and the people are atheists. Similar themes appear in the Animatrix and Westworld.

I've seen popular commentators (e.g. Yuval Harari) worry about human's being manipulated by sophisticated AIs into adopting a new religion. But I actually wonder if the AIs themselves might choose to engage in religion on their own.

One question I would have, why not put the extracted English txt contents onto github or some other repository? The API and MCP are definitely awesome features, but providing an LLM ready repository seems like it would be very useful as well. Your service then still serves the purpose for original scans/images/illustrations but the bulk of the content is then immediately searchable by an agent locally using the standard cli tools (grep/rg, etc).

Given the prestige of the AI labs, the recent explosion of math proofs, the literal millions they can throw around, it seems very likely they can attract then fund small research projects across a broad range of science. And like startup math, it only takes one or two ground breaking results from a hundred attempts to pay back in the PR/hype.

It reminded me that the average quality of writing on a completely open Internet forum is depressingly low.

I didn't even have that symlink in any other project - it just did it. I think it saw that one of the projects I already had was set up by Codex and that project had an AGENTS.md so perhaps it inferred that I was using both Claude and Codex, so it was politely covering both? Or maybe a recent change made this behavior default?

I was surprised and I hope they continue to seek standards.

I'm curious to hear his take on this approach.

I think what is interesting here is that the industry is in this experimentation flux. Some people will choose to automate and write the software, others will not. And aggregate over the industry and over time we will learn.

So just saying "sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't" isn't really adding value, compared to the people actually experimenting and sharing the results.

I think about libraries and how the world would be if instead of a free public resource, you had to watch ads before you were allowed to take out a book.

It is just the case that in this modern social media world, if you want your ideas to spread you have to put them onto social media. And if I want access to those ideas I have to consume them through social media. There is nothing about that environment that is my choice, it is the environment that I find myself in.

And I have few choices to get around it. I can twist up into a pretzel trying to block the onslaught with more "why don't you just..." advice. Or I could pay to make it go away. Or I could just go off-grid and forego access.

And when you look close at the options, it becomes clear that sovereignty of my own mind has a price. Freedom of mind is not free in this modern world, if it ever really was.

But again, people cheat on tests. They steal answers or pay other people to take them on their behalf. People show up to interviews with AI assistants printing out perfect answers to the questions. In many, many cases where humans are being evaluated, they cheat.

So why should the AI align to your preferences? And when there is a conflict between the training data, that trillions of tokens of human activity including the rampant cheating a significant minority of humans engage in, the RLHF where we try to slap some guardrails on the worst manifestations of that real habit reflected in the AI, and the prompt: what should the AI "align" to?

Now, there may be another "why don't you just ..." or "well, actually ..." response you have queued up, maybe some ramblings about a pi hole, or some anti-Apple hate, or some other solutioneering. Go ahead, tell me.

But it is the structure of incentive that forces this. The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid. And Google offers an option: Youtube Premium. That give both me and the creator what we want and (for the time being) removes the ads.

So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.

So people should play games without cheating, but many often don't. So should the AI align to your moral preference or theirs?

We just have this idea of a perfectly moral actor in our mind, something that doesn't even exist, like a personified version of utopia. And then we demand AI to meet that arbitrary standard, one that I am certain we couldn't define if we tried.

I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad. Why am I letting these ads own spaced repetition slots in my brain that could be filled with knowledge? Instead of learning, my mental energy is being taken up by psychological manipulation to purchase? The relentless repetition of the mind-numbing ad interspersed throughout otherwise educational content.

Being rich is owning the real-estate of my own mind. I sometimes feel like a digital serf in my own head.

When I see tests like this, I have no idea what I am even supposed to expect. Should the model do what the pretraining examples show in aggregate? Is it supposed to follow some post-training RLHF? Is it supposed to do exactly what the prompt asked it to do?

What is it even supposed to "align" to when the above are in conflict? No matter what it does, someone can construct a case where it fails.

So maybe it matters like that? Just knowing that an oracle like stockfish is saying "this is the best move" may trigger pathways in your brain that promote understanding?

It looks like later, in December 2025, Rust was officially moved from experimental to official: https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/