Absolutely nothing. Too bad he revealed who he really is and turned out to be not a good dude. And yet his company runs the majority of his niche of the web. Ugh.

I think all this drama shows that Automattic is not going to last as far as their future business prospects.

I can’t think of a good reason to use Wordpress in a world where AI can whip up a completely custom site in minutes.

And if we think about things like “oh well websites AI creates aren’t that good,” well, that’s as of right now, which is the worst it’ll ever be moving forward.

This is also considering the fact that Wordpress is mostly a good option due to the ecosystem and relatively low cost. It’s not particularly easy to use or “good” in a lot of other measures.

I’ve set two small businesses up on Claude design and GitHub pages (though they don’t need to know about git or GitHub).

I tried Wordpress. I don’t know how most people use their admin interface.

AI websites don't even need to be great.

They just need to be better than the average Wordpress site to beat Wordpress, which shouldn't be too hard.

There’s some physics-y Shannon entropy data or black hole joke in there somewhere I just am not mart enough to find it.

I mean it looks kinda dope.

As long as they can keep the Corolla ethos of it being built like a tank in that it was nearly indestructible in terms of reliability and practical and affordable, then we are good.

Leaning into what it cost to train is hilarious and an obvious shot at US frontier labs spending tens to hundreds of millions or more to train their models.

except when people have no shame, i.e the entirety of the trump admin

I’m glad this was posted. I’ve always wondered about this but was either too lazy or too afraid to look it up.

Any parent here who has known this loss can relate. Didn’t think I’d see this on HN but yeah this is heartbreaking.

I’m sorry, my thoughts go out to you.

Ahh I appreciate that but I’ve not experienced it personally though I know friends who have.

“ The language is different from Rust (who could’ve thought that, yeah), but it left a genuinely good impression. It’s straightforward, modern, and blazingly fast. I believe it has real potential to become the true successor to C. On the other hand, it’s still young, and it shows: the shape of the language itself feels unfinished in places, and I suspect it’ll pick up more of the cooler quality-of-life features and syntax sugar as it matures.

As for me, I’d like to keep contributing to the ecosystem, and I will, whenever I come across a project worth building.”

Idk I don’t write either well enough to have a hand in this but losing out all of this for more Imperative stuff seems like a step back.

“ No functional paradigm

Rust is technically an imperative language, but it draws heavily on functional concepts: zero-cost iterators, lazy evaluation, ADTs, pattern matching, monadic types, traits, closures, and so on. Having also spent time with Haskell and Erlang, I’ve become fairly inclined toward the functional style, and it shows in this library. It leans heavily on FP idioms:

Monadic error control via combinators like Queryable and related types Monadic-style data types like Data<T> with map, flat_map, reduce, and friends Pure, immutable transformations Combinators over iterators instead of loops Closures for local abstraction Declarative macros as a small embedded DSL Sum types and product types”

I’m more than a bit out of my depth discussing the topic, but I’m not sure than imperative-dominant languages will ever really go away or that functional-dominant languages will ever become as popular as C and C++. Ugly as they may be, imperative languages seem to be grokked by humans more readily and are more often than not “good enough” for the most part so it’s difficult to see them losing substantial momentum.

Until there is a machine that is natively functional, there is always going to an incentive to go lower level for more performance.

Even hardware (GPUs) that functional language could trivially exploit, it’s still higher performance to write low level code and manages all the memory imperatively

I think you’re right about people, but by volume, 99% of all future code will be written by machines. So there’s ample opportunity for other languages to flourish; if humans can’t get past imperative programming, machines can.

In my mind this hinges on whether LLMs become capable of actual comprehension of the code they’re writing. If not, for serious projects (especially those which are mission-critical), it still makes sense to optimize for human understanding when selecting languages so the code can reasonably be verified.

Modern and blazing fast, what we lost leaving behind languages like Modula-2 and Object Pascal, having newer generations to think C and C++ were the only compiled languages alternatives to scripting languages.

I miss the years of writing CLI tools, web servers and clients, in Ada (and of course, real-time complex distributed system...). Felt so simple and right and fast and robust. The code is still readable today and maintaining it is a zero effort today. Clean Java without the enterprise BS was a close second in ease of programming - boilerplate be damned.

I'm glad NVIDIA found a way to make GPUs programmable and got us out of the shaders tarpit, but did it have to be C++...

Also a good one.

You repeating this weird strawman take a million times doesn't make it true. Why don't you finally just put out some genuinely interesting projects demonstrating how everybody was doing it wrong, so people can make up their own mind and finally be convinced. There must be some true magic in those languages and platforms you mention, that should offset the pain of writing in upper case and with super long KEYWORDs everywhere, and to offset the cost of switching to a culture that has way less mindshare and way less of a software ecosystem around it.

FWIW I've actually worked for 6 months on a large old Delphi project. It was some performance work that, as almost always, mainly required getting the language crap out of the way. In the end I got the job done (100x-1000x speedup) but I wouldn't want to switch back to this ecosystem: Licensing costs, weird language warts there too. A slow moving ecosystem. Ultimately, I just need something that does what I tell it to do, reliably and fast, and that doesn't get in the way.

If you don't like, press PgDn.

People should reply on Hacker News. If you disagree with someone's opinion and you have reasons for doing so then the right thing to do is share them.

Sure, except there is a bit of history here, this isn't the first exchange, and I am not bothering to reply back as we aren't going to change opinion on C vs safer languages until we leave this realm.

Thus we can keep filling HN with pointless comments or move on.

There is plenty history of you repeating the same strawmans literally thousands of times. I've just never seen _anyone_ on HN (or elsewhere for that matter) make such claims?

Here goes again, better improve your Algolia search skills if you cannot find anyone else.

I don't even have to search. Given the frequency of you repeating the same old tired stories, one is bound to stumble over your comments every other day.

Apparently it is not tiring enough, given that you keep replying.

Here is an hint, I won't stop having my opinion, so you can keep replying every time I do them, and we will repeat similar discussion threads, or move on and touch grass or something.

If I was a governor and my state had the resources (land, power, water, people etc) to build a few of these I’d let them. With a few caveats:

They’d have to be grid neutral. So generate your own power or pay for new generation whatever it is but your data center can’t raise electricity prices.

Power generation can’t be loud or otherwise environmentally annoying. No extra noise. Smells. Pollution. You gotta find a way to get power without harming the environment.

Property taxes for the building and such are 5x what they are for any other such building and are binding for 10 years. If you build it in year one and the bust happens and it’s dormant idk the taxes are in escrow and are due us for the next ten years.

All infra necessary or impacts of it developers have to build and pay for. If you need roads or are gonna impact them to build it then you gotta build alternatives.

And the water used must be recycled and self sustaining. If you need a million gallons fine but that’s all we can’t have data centers sucking up all the water.

Do that and you get my blessing.

I realize these requirements are tall orders but there’s basically infinite money and they’re still far cheaper than space data centers.

> And the water used must be recycled and self sustaining. If you need a million gallons fine but that’s all we can’t have data centers sucking up all the water.

They can have a closed loop cooling system, but it costs more energy to run and would eat into their profits. so they use evaporative cooling, cheaper, but consumes entire towns worth of water. If this is pumped from the ground, round water levels dry up in all around and peoples wells dry up.

Then the former approach is going to be the only allowed one in this hypothetical where I’m in charge

> free cooling

Vacuum is an insulator. I think you may have been mislead.

Perhaps you've heard of radiant cooling?

SpaceX has already deployed thousands of functioning computers in space. I think if the vacuum were an issue, we would have heard about it.

it's not a trivial engineering challenge to scale that into space. we're not talking a single sattelite we're talking 100k GPUs and servers

Mislead or … work at an Elon company. Shudder.

Why are we arguing about whether a bunch of keyboard warriors understands how LLMs work exactly and instead we aren’t flipping out how we almost went to war over a hallucination?! Why is the government especially the intelligence community outsourcing this stuff to AI?!