Especially when the following years once again confirmed that none of the big enterprise customers care enough to cancel any contracts over QA problems.
We live in a world where my laptop is forced to waste tons of computational power on immensely bloated websites even with ad-block, with now even having to worry about agentic bullshit that I didn't ask for, and plenty of others apparently still think throwing computational cycles at cryptocurrency is good for anything.
Complaining about a relatively small performance price for Fil-C in that context honestly feels like that one famous newspaper photo of a smoking pregnant woman drinking a beer with a caption saying she's wbrried about the effects of the loud construction noises next door on her unborn child.
Except even that is wrong, because at least she had a point about the construction noises, while this is more of a "refusing to eat your vegetables" kind of situation.
Using personal websites read by a handful of programmer nerds that work fine if you turn off javascript to justify literally everyone else being forced to navigate bloated, broken company websites isn't particularly convincing as an argument against memory-safe C imo.
A lot of the stability problems come from trying to scale a free product on a still WIP cloud solution without costing too much; the same software running on separate, paid for infra has a lot better odds.
IMO the constraint is that AI is still rather anaemic at sustainable green-field projects: It's good at one-off oneshots, and also at refactoring or fixing bugs or adding features to existing projects, where test suites and significant architectural scaffolding already exists, but the more you move away from that, the more wobbly the results get, and the more the human once again becomes the bottleneck, for all the hard work of coming up with all the conceptual scaffolding in the first place. Typing speed rarely was the bottleneck there anyway.
Reaching into ring -2 or the TPM allows privilege escalations past traditional "root permissions" and lets attackers defeat the sort of tamper protection that's designed to make escalations to local root manageable. Wipe-resistant malware, falsified cryptographic attestations, all sorts of fun.
C doesn't need saving, it will continue to survive on its own and even flourish in niches for decades to come. So will "Java"Script. Worse is Better, respectfully, or at least Old and Simple is Tough as F, living long and prosper. See, C doesn't need you but we need C, apparently for the foreseeable future.
Those are all RPC mechanisms, not an ABI. They exist at a much higher level. You could have an RPC protocol be your only interface to the OS, and that would be a valid design, but would have a performance cost (see the classic Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate)
I'm not sure about the others, but COM is an ABI. There's a bunch of stuff surrounding it that is RPC-like but the core specification is just binary layouts and calling conventions. It's arguably more cross-language than the C ABI since it lets you generate type-safe bindings for any language, unlike in the latter where you need to parse header files.
> You could have an RPC protocol be your only interface to the OS, and that would be a valid design, but would have a performance cost
Maybe it would, but I doubt anybody would notice. The whole "everything is a file" concept on unix is basically just this (also X11/Wayland).
The subset of the list that supports in-process calls and which allows for zero-copy (and, realistically, probably mutually mutable) data sharing of its types is shorter still. I think the useful definition of "ABI" includes more than just API discoverability (aka what D-Bus provides if you take away the RPC system).
I'm always flabbergasted when I see what people pay and how much effort they need to invest to keep their cloud websites from eating them alive.
My allegedly more complicated VPS stack needs an afternoon of attention every two years when a new Debian major release is necessary, and costs have been predictable for 15 years, no matter what happened traffic wise.
The predictability of costs is underrated too. You don't want your hosting solution to automatically scale up to $20,000. You want that if it's overloaded it's simply overloaded.
Another thing to consider is that LLMs have become a premier source of reading for the public. If more of what you read is AI generated, how you write is going to be significantly influenced by that.
One (slightly frightening) possibility is that many people write like LLMs even without assistance from LLMs. AI writing may have just become the norm for some. Maybe that's what's happening here.
LLM style is in many ways "The Atlantic from Temu". Nearly every article in The Atlantic sounds the same - I think we all know the cliches I am talking about. This doesn't mean that every author underwent a lobotomy (I hope). It just means there's a group of editors enforcing a common style.
Joining these editors used to take years of training in order to write like they do. Now we have their wisdom available on the command line.
To put it another way: LLMs write in what was considered pretty good style before their proliferation. There are all these examples of people finding "llm cliches" in well-respected authors' works pre-llm (somewhat obviously, if you think about it).
What made pretty good "taste" pretty good was its novelty. Now that pretty good is common it's no longer stylish.
Magazines’ style is generally good but affected, with some distinct quirks mixed in. These quirks have been also picked up in the training and their automated repetition at scale made it weird and "AI-style"
Yeah if you look back at earlier posts on the same blog, definitely not the same style. I'm guessing the author is either lying to save face or has spent so much time with Claude that they cannot distinguish Claude's voice from their own (we're all vulnerable to this).
Just because LLMs exist does not mean people stopped writing themselves. I mean, some people did, but not everyone. It's a kind of AI psychosis to think or suspect that everything is LLM generated.
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