Keep in mind: the government is very invested logistically in Anthropic.
So no matter what xAI or OpenAI say - if and when they replace that spend - know that they are lying. They would have caved to the DoW’s demands for mass surveillance.
Because if there were some kind of concession, it would have been simplest just to work with Anthropic.
I am incredibly proud to be a customer, both consumer level and as a business, of Anthropic and have canceled my OpenAI subscription and deleted ChatGPT.
Okay, and that depends on an entire economy and infrastructure of privately owned switching, other network equipment, fiber optic, etc, etc, etc, -- not to mention that if GitHub did not have, as a private company, a profit motive, they wouldn't even bother to offer the service you're using.
Sure, yes, rebuild the world but if you want it to be free like open source, you'll also need to make it free like beer -- and that means you'll need to work for free, too.
I support the aim. I acknowledge the problems. I'm just so frustrated by these silly oversimplifications of how to solve it.
The spirit and goal is respectable. How we get there, convincing people to join a new web and making it easy and attractive to replace 30 year old infra is something else.
That’s not a well informed argument. Even if Apple could finance the $1T+ it would cost to buy Anthropic - they’re not making that money back by making the iPhone a little better. The only way to monetize is by selling, as Anthropic does, enterprise services to businesses. And that’s not Apple’s “DNA,” to use their language.
It's fascinating to watch this community react to positively to Google model releases and so negatively toward OpenAI's. You all do understand that an ad revenue model is exactly where Google will go, right?
It's all so astroturfed so its hard to tell. I got the opposite impression though. Seemed like OpenAI had more fake positivity towards the top that i tried to skim, and this had way less and a lot of complaints.
Im biased I dont trust either of them, so perhaps im just hard looking for the hate and attributing all the positive stuff to advertising.
So if your app is 99% elixir but 1% is easier in Python because a lib you should rewrite the whole app? Makes no sense. Do you think Python devs rewrite everything in C if they have a small part that needs to use C instead of Python?
Reading that made me think how much that might be related to Elixir being very similar in syntax to Ruby. Do LLMs really differentiate between the two?
Specific studies, as the one quoted, are a long way from original real world problems.
LLMs absolutely understand and write good Elixir. I've done complex OTP and distributed work in tandem with Sonnet/Opus and they understand it well and happily keep up. All the Elixir constructs distinct from ruby are well applied: pipes, multiple function clauses, pattern matching, etc.
I can say that anecdotally, CC/Codex are significantly more accurate and faster working with our 250K lines of Elixir than our 25K lines of JS (though not typescript).
I suspect this is partly due to the quality of documentation for Elixir, Erlang, and BEAM. The OTP documentation has been around for a long time and has been excellently written. Erlang/Elixer doc gen outputs function signatures, arity, and both Elixir and Erlang handle concepts like function overloading in very explicit, well-defined ways.
* Largely stable and unchanged language through out its whole existance
* Authorship is largely senior engineers so the code you train on is high quality
* Relatively low number of abstractions in comparisson to other languages. Meaning there's less ways to do one thing.
* Functional Programming style pushes down hidden state, which lowers the complexity when understanding how a slice of a system works, and the likelyhood you introduce a bug
I suspect the biggest advantage Elixir has is the relative quality of the publicly available code. Approximately no one has Elixir as their first programming language, which keeps a lot of the absolute trash-tier code that we all make when first learning to program out of the training set. If you look at languages that are often people's first (Python, JavaScript, Java), only Java has an above average score. Of those three, Java's significantly more likely to be taught in a structured learning environment, compared to kids winging it with the other two.
(And Elixir's relationship to Ruby is pretty overstated, IMO. There's definitely inspiration, but the OO-FP jump is a makes the differences pretty extreme)
Agree with the quality level but there are other languages where that is also the case: Erlang for example is probably one of those languages.
> Elixir's relationship to Ruby is pretty overstated
Perhaps I am actually am over thinking this. Elixir has probably diverged enough from Ruby (e.g. defmodule, pipe operators, :atom syntax) for LLMs to notice the difference between the two. But it does open the question, though, how does an LLM actually recognise the difference in code blocks in its training data.
There are probably many more programming languages where similarities exist.
Having written a lot of both languages, I'd be surprised if LLMs don't get tripped up on some of Ruby's semantics and weird stuff people do with monkey patching. I also find Ruby library documentation to be on average pretty poor.
> I also find Ruby library documentation to be on average pretty poor.
That surprises me :)
From my time doing Ruby (admittedly a few years back), I found libraries were very well documented and tested. But put into context of then (not now), documentation and testing weren't that popular amongst other programming languages. Ruby was definitely one of the drivers for the general adaption of TDD principles, for example.
I think they're often very well tested, but the documentation piece has always been lacking compared to Elixir.
I used to frequently find myself reading the source code of popular libraries or prying into them at runtime. There's also no central place or format for documentation in ruby. Yes rubydoc.info exists, but it's sort of an afterthought. Sidekiq uses a github wiki, Nokogiri has a dedicated site, Rails has a dedicated site, Ruby itself has yet another site. Some use RDoc, some don't. Or look at Devise https://rubydoc.info/github/heartcombo/devise/main/frames, there's simply nothing documented for most of the classes, and good luck finding in the docs where `before_action :authenticate_user!` comes from.
If you enjoy it for the sake of it, do more of it. You don’t need society with you.
If, however, your job is to build value for a user, then you or the man or the system are to naturally optimize for what’s productive to that end. Arguing about generics doesn’t create any/enough value. It doesn’t build a product.
These are two different sides of the profession and serve different ends.
So no matter what xAI or OpenAI say - if and when they replace that spend - know that they are lying. They would have caved to the DoW’s demands for mass surveillance.
Because if there were some kind of concession, it would have been simplest just to work with Anthropic.
Delete ChatGPT and Grok.
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