Merging tech and politics like this is insufferable, and most of us are tired of it.

Omacom foundation is funding good open source dev work. I see nothing wrong with that, and their response was perfectly reasonable.

If you think you can do better, start a competing foundation. Whinging about it just makes you lose all objectivity; now your opinions on actual technology are less relevant as your personal bias is on full display.

False: "most of us" is just vibes based on chatter in your chosen social circles. Rest assured this is not actually the case.

I could say the same to you. Rest assured, your echo-chamber is a minority. (Omarchy's popularity is proof of that)

Small related anecdote:

Was just testing latest gen LLM capabilities, and decided to give it goal of rewriting a small opensource project in Rust. (Should be noted: was not some tiny library, but an actually useful network service).

It completed the entire rewrite from typescript to rust in about 2 hours, ~600k tokens used. Worked perfectly on first try with no follow up changes required. Memory and CPU usage now a tiny fraction of TS version (obviously). Rust code was simple, easy to read, accurate test suite, etc.

I was pleasantly surprised.

Obviously bigger code bases with more complex business logic will likely struggle here, but there are some advantages to "RIIR" when performance matters, even security benefits aside. Rust can help squeeze more juice out of old hardware; reduced memory footprint especially helpful with current RAM prices.

For small services where operational cost matters, having LLMs "rewrite it in rust" might be worth the spend.

I’ve seen people do this and I’m always confused, do they believe they will never have to reason about the code ever again.

I suppose if it is like the Zig Rewrite where essentially all development is being done by Claude, I can imagine this making sense.

But in any other case, you had a codebase that presumably you wrote, you could reason about, you could refactor etc. and then you made it into a completely unintelligible code base, which even if written cleanly will take a long time to reason about. Typescript to Rust is not just syntax changes. It doesn’t make sense to me, unless you believe you will be completely out of the loop in managing this code in the future.

A small typescript util rewritten into rust is going to look so similar that I don't think this will be a problem. As the parent commenter said, maybe not for a larger project. But rust semantics are really close to typescript for the most part, at least the bits you'd use for a simple tool.

This wasn't a codebase I originally wrote or cared to reason about deeply. It's fairly straight-forward rust, so not hard to understand or follow. Again, this was originally just a test to see how well it would work (better than I expected).

Not something I need to maintain much going forward, so I have no reason to manage the code manually ever.

It's made my life way better. I love it, it's incredible boost on my ability to learn and produce.

Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.

Remember when people said open-sourcing GPT2 would cause world destruction? They keep saying this with every new model release? And it keeps not happening? Hmm.

This is all FUD. All evidence suggests more AI is better, and all claims to the contrary keep being proven wrong, and all predictions of doom keep refusing to manifest.

> Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.

I do: students who use it to do their thinking for them.

And everyone who uses it to do their thinking for them, for that matter.

Like calculators do math for you?

It’s a tool like any other. If that’s how they use it, those students weren’t doing much thinking before either.

Once you grok a process, like addition, then the calculator is not a loss.

So once you grok programming, debugging, and software engineering, then using the AI is not a loss.

But students aren't doing that for the latter if they just punt to AI.

> Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.

Have you tried using a search engine lately, or visiting a social media platform, or buying a computer/smartphone?

I have and, Microsoft aside, it all works great. Don't need search engines anymore, AI does all my research now and produces better information anyway.

Are you living with your head under a rock. AI has absolutely made my life worse, and is set to do so further. I know very few people who are seriously enthusiastic about it.

"All evidence suggests more AI is better" is ignoring an awful lot of the evidence, and the doom is already happening all around you and you just can't see it.

Really don't understand this sentiment. Whatever you imagine you can now build; whatever you wish to learn you can learn; all for virtually nothing. How does that make life worse?

I think pessimism clouds your judgment and AI is the scapegoat. Doomerism is just yet another dogmatic religion predicting ends times, with all the usual associated dogma.

What you imagine is what you manifest. Better to be optimistic and wrong then pessimistic and right.

Better to envision a positive future and help make it happen; ignore the doomers who can only envision destruction, as that is all they are capable of.

Compared to what? All the comments seem to agree, but I curious if people here have actually used Grok.

I rotate between major models frequently. Grok has been up there in accuracy and research for some time, trading places with Gemini IMO. Latest 4.3 release has been solid.

Composer is pretty good and now they own Cursor. Don’t count them out yet.

So.. it’s bad, compared to what? Claude from 2 months ago?

i jump about a lot, for coding gemini and grok are definitely not as strong as gpt 5.5/opus/sonnet/composer.

composer 2.5 is actually very good and use it for a good chunk of tasks.

Gemini has been atrocious, in my experience. Not sure if it's the harness or the model, but it hallucinates much, much more than GPT (via ChatGPT) or Claude, and weirdly assumes it can just answer complex, knowledge-heavy domain questions without doing a web search.

> All the comments seem to agree, but I curious if people here have actually used Grok.

you got your answer already. Nobody actually uses Grok.

I still stick with btrfs for this reason

Rust on embedded is fun to play with.

Few years ago I made a custom RGB LED rope light controller using ESP32 C3 DevKit and Rust embedded, connecting light to homeassistant via MQTT auto discovery. Was surprisingly easy to get started as someone who had limited experience with embedded programming, and only hobby Rust experience.

But the supported hardware in Rust crates was limited at the time and C3 dev kits weren’t widely available, so I never used it for anything. HAL support has only gotten better since then.

I may try to resurrect that project now with Pico 2 and Matter.

I was playing with the official Espressif Rust Board, which is ESP32C3, but I didn't try Matter on it. It would be on the same boat as Pico W because it only supports Matter over Wifi. https://github.com/melastmohican/esp-rust-board-discovery Now I would try something like ESP32C6 with Thread support: https://github.com/melastmohican/adafruit-feather-esp32c6-em...

Strike on Venezuela?

There was one, yes. And supposedly Maduro has been taken hostage by American forces and flown out of Venezuela.

Steam machine so close to perfect, but 1x USBC and 1GB Ethernet are huge misses for a 2026 device. Also needs more VRAM. May be better to just do custom SFF build.

I'm confused about language, as "loans" to me do not equal "bailout". The equating of the two seems odd, as many government incentives use loans that pay back with high interest, so governments MAKE money on those kinds of deals.

Also clear that the 1.4T figure includes some accounting for spend that does not come directly from OpenAI (grid/power/data infra for example). Obviously some government involvement is needed, but more at EPA/State/Local level to fast track construction permits, more-so than financial help from Treasury.

I'm confused why this generates such sensational headlines.

I'm with you on that - people use the wrong terms. Bailouts are supporting things like GM or failing banks because the government is worried about GM workers losing jobs or bank depositors losing money.

Altman's 1.4T isn't like that - it's a proposed new investment in stuff that doesn't exist yet and there would be no job losses or the like if it fails to exist. They have been talking about potential government support for the new ventures, partly to keep up with China which uses similar government support. I'm not sure if it's a good idea but it would not be a bailout, more a subsidy.

Those are typically structured as loans no?

This is the same kind of bullshit rationalization they used to say that the bank bailouts of 2009 weren't really bank bailouts.

They were bank bailouts.

Unsecured government loans are either bailouts, entitlements in disguise, or (usually misguided) attempts at broad economic stimulus. This definitely isn't either of the latter two.

Unsecured government loan to a successful company to fund acceleration and growth is a "handout".

A "bailout" is what happened in 2009, in the sense the banks would literally have collapsed without it (and they probably should have).

OpenAI is not going to collapse without these loans. Huge difference.

Also for the record, not rationalizing, because I'm not in favor of either handouts or bailouts.