It's the scale that's the problem. I've been saying for a while, the value of any individual piece of work is not terribly valuable for an LLM, but the aggregate value of all human work is obviously very valuable. I think this line of thinking can be the argument for why we should heavily tax these AI companies above and beyond how we tax other industries.
I can't find the reference right now, but I'm certain that Anthropic has been asking for a coordinated slowdown for at least 4 or 5 months. I think it was around their Mythos/Fable releases this spring.
Has the code quality in that repo gotten to a good point then? I haven't followed it much, but last I looked[1] (which was a few years ago) almost every tool I looked at in detail had pretty bad performance or correctness issues.
I’m a huge proponent of Rust and generally lean a lot closer to the RIIR mentality than most, but this effort seems to be such a waste of effort and resources.
There have been a dozen CVEs reported against all of coreutils in the past twenty years. The most recent audit of uutils-coreutils turned up forty-four CVEs.
By all appearances they’re replacing battle-tested and fundamental tooling which hasn’t been a problem with extremely amateurish Rust. The threading highlighted in the linked post above seems pretty egregious.
Yes, these proclamations of Rust devs that 'the future belongs to us', aren't getting any new fans for the language.
Here's my rebuttal:
YOU have proclaimed the language to be as fast as C while being safe. YOU need to prove it. Think of this as an OPPORTUNITY to PROVE that Rust can walk the walk, and you can make Rust coreutils as fast as the C one. Think hard about how you can model low level Linux constructs safely. Fix your libs. Fix the compiler. This is the yardstick you need to meet. You are making free software, and the thing about it is users are free to choose otherwise. YOU need to prove that Rust is just as fast and lightweight as C, and once you do, we'll be happy to adopt.
Right now, dear Rust devs, what you are doing is the same as AI companies are doing - you're trying to usurp power based on extremely nebulous conjured threats. Nobody likes being threatened.
Can vouch for the sentiment, hence why regardless of the ranting, I am quite supportive of whatever helps to improve C and C++ security story.
Also for Rust based rewrites, they could start by bootstraping Rust compiler itself, dependent on C++ to start it.
They don't do it, because even though LLVM and GCC are written in C++, a pure Rust compiler would not scale to the same level of contributions, and existing capabilities.
> The reason for existence of uutils is ideological, not technical.
which ideology? Are people saying that there's an ideology of pushing rust for things without concern for quality? Sincere question, because I'm seeing that on this thread and I wasn't aware that that was a thing beyond the "re-write it in Rust" meme.
As I have told the authors privately, I find it quite difficult to take their claim that they "don't care about licensing" seriously. 13/14 of the projects under uutils are relicensing GNU or GPL'd software. The other one, shadow-rs, is totally vibe-coded, and the README mistakenly says the original shadow is GNU software under the GPL, which is neither true. If 14/14 are relicensing, or in that one case, what is thought to be relicensing, the simple explanation is that it is an explicit goal of the project.
Beside the license thing mentioned, rust folks are obsessed with an idea of memory safety to an extent of discarding every other value in programming. To the extent of considering other choices "immoral". This manifests in their disproportionate initiatives of rewriting otherwise fine programs. Of course this doesn't include copious amounts of unsafe in popular libraries because can't leave any benchmarks defeated. But somehow Go is sinful because multiword data races are theoretically memory unsafe (a property which has led to zero (0) CVEs). This may also be the result of jealousy that something plebian like Go became more popular than their perfectly designed language.
Let's not mention other aspects of security, such as the recent supply chain issue, or the old story of the serde maintainer shipping a binary blob just because...
Lots of GDP entries there. Uh. Like terabytes of it downloaded.
I would quite like to think that GDP references... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn - where "six people involved with the website were charged on counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion".
A little yikes on that card today. Dude was ripping hundreds of videos of assault and coerced rape pornography for training.
Anecdotal, but from my personal usage I found GLM-5.3 was not as capable at performing autonomous tasks as Opus/Sol. Certainly competitive with the Sonnet/Terra level, but not with the Frontier.
I got their lowest subscription tier and burned a week of quota on trialling it.
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