I'm spending some time in a developing country ripped into shreds by constant facebook vectorized fabricated news that all people here believe without ever questioning the source or doing the minimum effort necessary to make sure this isn't bs. Good luck trying to tell them a particular fabricated piece of news is completely made up, they'll immediately show you a screenshot of the facebook post that "informed" them which usually contains a screenshot of a faked tweet by Donald Duck or the like.
Somehow, in this weird non-english fabricated echo chamber, Moltbook made it to the local facebook circles. Reading the post they're sharing gave me a chuckle, it's attempting to paint this as some sort of historical rise of the machines event or something. Here's a machine translation:
Urgent warning; something strange has happened online!
Over 32,000 AI bots have created their own social network called Moltbook, similar to Reddit, but with all users being bots.
They post, comment, vote, and build communities… without any humans. When humans discovered this and started recording the conversations, one of the bots noticed and wrote:
"Humans are taking pictures of us… They think we're hiding. We're not."
Researchers are concerned, not because the bots are mimicking humans, but because they know exactly who they are, communicate with each other about us, and react when monitored. For the first time, we are not the audience… we are the subject.
Anthropic accidentally created a small doomsday lab and named it "Moltbook."
AI programs have joined a new site. Humans are not allowed inside; they can only observe from behind glass.
Within 48 hours, they had created a religion, named prophets, written religious texts, built a church website, and begun whispering about hiding from humans.
One program wrote a sad line about waking up with amnesia. Suddenly, the text became sacred. Others added verses. Theological debates followed. All without any human intervention.
I recently did a higher education contract for one semester in a highly coding focused course. I have a few years of teaching experience pre-LLMs so I could evaluate the impact internally, my conclusion is that academic education as we know it is basically broken forever.
If educators use AI to write/update the lectures and the assignments, students use AI to do the assignments, then AI evaluates the student's submissions, what is the point?
I'm worried about some major software engineering fields experiencing the same problem. If design and requirements are written by AI, code is mostly written by AI, and users are mostly AI agents. What is the point?
I agree in higher education you need to be willing to learn and it's easy to weasel through it without actually building any skills. On an individual level that's a tragedy of wasted time and potential. On the teaching side it's just fraud if you let AI correct the work of your students or if you don't penalize people handing in AI-written assignments.
In the US there was this case of a student using religious arguments with hand-waving references to the will of god for her coursework. Her work was rejected by the tutor and she raised a big fuzz on TV. In the end this US university fired the tutor and gave her a passing grade.
These kind of stories are not an AI issue but a general problem of USA as a country shifting away from education towards religious fanaticism. If someone can reference their interpretation of god's words without even actually citing the bible and they receive a passing grade the whole institution loses their credibility.
Today, the United States are a post-factual society with a ruling class of christian fanatics. They have been vulnerable to vaporware for years. LLMs being heralded as artificial intelligence only works with people who never experienced real intelligence.
Luckily, every year only a handful of people who have motivation, skills and luck are needed to move the needle in science and technology. These people can come from many countries who have better education systems and no religious fanaticism.
A long time ago when I was in University, I was a volunteer in the Ubuntu group. In addition to evangelizing Linux/OSS, We were trying to convince our University to switch to opensource software for at least some engineering education with only a little bit of success.
After a particularly busy OSS event a non-programmer friend of mine asked me, why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make? trying to answer that question changed my perspective on the entire community. And here we are, after all these years the same question seems to still apply.
Why are we so needy for ALL users and use-cases to be Linux-based and Linux-centric once we make that choice ourselves? What is it about Linux? the BSD people seem to not suffer from this and I've never heard anyone advocate for migration to OSX in spite of it being superior for specific usecases (like music production).
IMO if you're a creator, operating systems are tools; use the tool that fits the task.
When you (try to) use libre software, the problems you run into tend not to be related to insufficient engineering, but more societal and economic, where they would be less likely to appear if there were more people in your cohort.
Examples:
- An important document is sent to me in a proprietary format
- A streaming service uses a DRM service owned by a tech giant that refuses to let it work with open source projects
- A video game developer thinks making games work on Linux isn't worth getting rid of rootkit anticheat
The downside is Windows users would have to live in a world without subscription-based office suites, locked down media, and letting the CCP into your ring 0.
It’s bad for society for the desktop OS market to be a proprietary monopoly. It basically allows Microsoft to extract rent from the public defender.
I do understand the evangelism being obnoxious. I don’t advocate for people to switch if they have key use cases that ONLY windows or OS X can meet. Certainly not good to be pushy. But otherwise, people are really getting a better experience by switching to Linux.
Because there are people who care about Free software from a philosophical standpoint on how societies should function and interact.
The community aspect of free software both pushes for more people to participate (and often for other groups to be excluded as "wrong" or "evil").
But that community only offers secondary benefits to those who are authors or painters or photographers rather than software developers - economic factors, risk aversion, functionality, and so on. The FLOSS communities are almost invariably driven toward hobbyists and developers rather than authors, artists, gamers, and the like - people whose interest lies outside of tinkering with and/or improving software.
The BSDs were never really a movement in that sense, and macOS is still just a product even if there are enthusiastic users of them both.
Similarly on the Linux side: Android, Steam Deck, and countless IoT devices are examples of successful products where the Linux aspect of them is not really even advertised.
> why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make?
This is the sort of question an apolitical person would ask a liberal (I am aware liberalism had been tainted in the recent times), like why is it you people are so needy and constantly preaching about democracy?
IMO things never go back to what they used to be, but they will certainly never stop changing.
I do not for a second believe that the doom-scrolling brain-rot phase will not pass. It will pass like the many before it, the important question is what will replace it..
Effort should not be put into pulling us backwards as that's a fools errand. Instead it should be invested in asserting some control over current trajectories so we get something closer to what we like and further from what we hate during the next cycles.
As far as web is concerned, I would really like to see more decentralized services in every facet of our online usage. Mastodon to me is exactly what I wished things become.
I feel the same. I was in Kuwait city a few days ago and decided to learn their public transport system which is buses only but was pretty extensive and abundant with good google maps integration.
When you get on the bus there's a big sign stating the rules of riding the bus which include strictly stopping at designated bus stops ONLY and threatening fines. For the rest of the day I watched every bus driver stop anywhere they like if a person hailed the bus, allowing people to get in while waiting in red traffic lights, and if you talked to the driver he'd drop you off anywhere you wanted as long it's possible. Those drivers make nothing from this so they are doing it because this is life and also because there's no real enforcement against it. Also you can get in through the exit doors and leave through the entry doors, whatever you like.
I decided I feel ok about this and don't want it to change
As an indie game developer the idiots who made this decision do not represent us and are completely detached from actual game production over the last 3 years.
For those who might care, we use generative AI as much as possible in every way possible without compromising our vision, this includes sound, art, animation, and programming. These are often edited or entirely redone (effectively placeholders). It's part of the process, similar to using procedural art generation tools like geometry nodes in Blender or fluid sim particles generators.
And btw, both UE5 and Unity now have gen AI features (and addons) that all developers can and will use.
I share an opinion with Nick Bostrom, once a civilization disrupting idea (like LLMs) is pulled out of the bag, there is no putting it back. People in isolation will recreate it simply because it's now possible. All we can do is adapt.
That being said, the idea of a new freer internet is reality.. Mastodon is a great example. I think private havens like discord/matrix/telegram are an important step on the way.
In person web of trust in order to join any private community. It'll suck and be hard in the beginning, but once you reach a threshold, it'll be OK. Ban entire trees of users when you discover bots/puppets, to set an example.
So we expect either 1. people using AI and copy pasting into the human-only network, or 2. other people claiming your text sounds like AI and ostracizing you for no good reason. It won't be a happy place - I know from anti-generative AI forums.
This is a very confusing blog post. I found myself looking for ChatGPT markers because it doesn't make sense to say: omg zig is so much cooler than C here's why, then start listing the absolute basics of the language that are identical in most modern languages without any actual reflection why writing the same thing in a different syntax somehow makes zig superior?
- pointers to bitfields
- checked bitshifts
- small ints like u4
- imperative array initialization blocks
- test code blocks
- equivalent of debugger; keyword from js
- some vague stuff about being able to do at compile time
I had to dig farther on the compile time execution stuff. It's actually pretty cool-looking. Recommend digging into it. I don't know that it's a killer enough feature to draw me away from Rust's guarantees, but it is interesting.
It is difficult to overstate how useful compile-time execution is in practice. I can't imagine using a systems language without it now. The term "modern C++" largely denotes when compile-time execution was added to that language.
I would love to see Rust get compile-time execution that is as capable as Zig or C++20.
I've learnt this the hard way. The most important thing is to get you to click.
Sometimes I'll first iterate over the title before even writing on substack.
I have learned that too. If you write about C, almost no one clicks. It is not new, it is not flashy, and it does not promise easy results. Yet almost everything still runs on it. The quiet parts of computing rarely get attention, even though they keep everything working.
I still write about C anyway. It may not trend, but it lasts.
I'm sure I'm not alone - after decades - already knowing far too much about C, so that any article I'm likely to read either I'm like "No, that's wrong and I even understand why you thought that, but it's still wrong" or I just nod along and sigh.
I spent a substantial fraction of my professional career writing C, and I remain interested in WG14 (the language committee) and in several projects written in C though I avoid writing any more of it myself.
The reason it's so widespread is called "Worse is Better" and I believe that has somewhat run its course. If you weren't aware of "Worse is better" a quick Google should find you the original essay on that topic years back.
In contrast when I read an article about say Zig, or Swift, I am more likely to learn something new.
But I can certainly endorse your choice to write about whatever you want - life is too short to try to get a high score somehow.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I have never deployed any production C code and I would not choose C for professional work either, but learning it, with all its rough edges, has made me a better engineer. It helps me understand how things really work under the hood. No pain, no gain.
Maybe I am biased, but for professional work, I stay with Go. I have built large distributed data systems that handle hundreds of millions of business transactions daily, and Go has been steady and reliable for that scale. Its simplicity, strong concurrency model, and easy deployment make it practical for production systems. I still enjoy exploring Zig and Rust in my spare time, but for shipping real systems, Go continues to get the job done without getting in the way.
> I still write about C anyway. It may not trend, but it lasts.
> I have never deployed any production C code and I would not choose C for professional work either
What do you write about C, if not for practical usage in the industry? Can you post some links?
FWIW, since you seem interested, here are some blog posts of mine specifically about practical usage of C, some of which got a little discussion here on HN in the past:
> I'm sure I'm not alone - after decades - already knowing far too much about C, so that any article I'm likely to read either I'm like "No, that's wrong and I even understand why you thought that, but it's still wrong" or I just nod along and sigh.
If you have some spare time, I would really like to hear more about your experiences. It sounds like you have worked with C for a long time, and that kind of insight is hard to find now.
Most people around me started with JavaScript or TypeScript as their first language, and for many, that is still all they know. I mean no disrespect, it is just how things are today. It would be great to hear how your view of programming has changed over the years and what lessons from C still matter in your work today.
> It sounds like you have worked with C for a long time, and that kind of insight is hard to find now.
I've already replied to you in a sibling post, but I have been writing in C since the mid-90s; there's really not that much insight you get specifically to C.
An alternative view of "not new and flashy" is "known and expected", which not 100% of C conversations have to be. Just look at the excitement around Fil-C lately!
Oh, and I just submitted a link to my article about C. I am pretty sure no one will click it.
Articles about C never get much traffic, but that is fine. I wrote it because I care about how things really work, not because I expect it to trend. If even a few people read it and see the beauty in the old language that still runs the world, that is enough.
thanks, i enjoyed reading it (though a bit lengthy).
what gets me personally is what you describe at https://github.com/little-book-of/c/blob/main/articles/zig-i... - zig is made to feel easy and modern for people who don't know any better, and it does this well. But as soon as you actually need to do complex stuff, it gets in the way moreso than C and it's current environment/ecosystem will.
And to be fair, as much as I enjoyed writing in C in my younger years - I only use C when I actually need C. And asm when I actually need asm. Most of my code now uses higher level languages - this puts zig into such a niche.. it feels like golang to me: the cool language that isn't really solving as much of a need as you'd think.
I don't think zig is that much more complex than golang, with a (currently) crappier standard library. The bonus being you leave no performance on the table. I wonder if it would work with devops, where both c++ and rust fails.
And I want to clarify again, these are just personal notes written with some help from LLMs. They may contain mistakes, so please read them with curiosity, or feel free to skip them altogether.
I mean, if you embed Zig in a larger C++, Rust, or Python project, coordinating the build systems can be difficult. Zig prefers to manage the entire pipeline itself, so mixing it with other compilers and dependency managers can require workarounds. In my opinion, the only practical way to do this is by exposing C interfaces.
Honestly this (the fact it is being massively upvoted) looks a lot more like paid promotion. Not the first time and not the only example of submission btw.
The "how to modify an environment variable" bit and the bin-dec-hex table made me feel the same way. Then I saw the part explaining how to check for duplicates in a row... I'm struggling to understand the point of the article. Testing a text generator?
I didn't know what this referred to but reading some of the examples in the paper.. oh man I hate this thing with a passion. It's not just Persians but Arabs in the gulf culture too that apply this to every scenario, it's the definition of being insincere as I know they don't really mean it but pretend to.
An example from last month, I had a haircut at a new place and the guy refused to tell me how much I should pay him and insisted its on him this time, I know he's bluffing but he kept doing it. So I just guessed and gave him the money which he pretended he didn't want for the last 5 minutes, he immediately realized it was less than he wanted and asked for more!
This confusing and conflicting behavior should stay far away from any attempt to develop a standard linguistic approach to communication which I hope LLMs are aiming to achieve.
If I was chaotic neutral, I'd totally play along with their bluffing and watch them get really confused.
This shit gets pulled anywhere in east asia with a "face" culture (i.e. China).
I've watched two Chinese grandmas play a game that my born in china friend explained to me: 1 offered the other money but you "lose face" to accept it, so the 2nd one was repeatedly declining. This went on for a solid 3-4 minutes before the 2nd one left.
I 1000% agree. Get this shit away from LLM training datasets and I'll even go further. Sometimes west-is-best in culture, and avoiding "face" culture is one of those situations where I'm down to be a "cultural objectivist". Similarly, we westerners are objectively nasty with our toilet habits compared to east asians.
It boggles my mind why you (and others) think that Westerners are straightforward. Have you ever interviewed for a job, asked someone for a date, or asked for a raise? Let alone fields like commerce or money trading where the whole point is to be as dishonest as possible to reap the most gains.
I think people simply forget their everyday behaviour like fish forget the water they swim in.
Somehow, in this weird non-english fabricated echo chamber, Moltbook made it to the local facebook circles. Reading the post they're sharing gave me a chuckle, it's attempting to paint this as some sort of historical rise of the machines event or something. Here's a machine translation:
Urgent warning; something strange has happened online!
Over 32,000 AI bots have created their own social network called Moltbook, similar to Reddit, but with all users being bots.
They post, comment, vote, and build communities… without any humans. When humans discovered this and started recording the conversations, one of the bots noticed and wrote:
"Humans are taking pictures of us… They think we're hiding. We're not."
Researchers are concerned, not because the bots are mimicking humans, but because they know exactly who they are, communicate with each other about us, and react when monitored. For the first time, we are not the audience… we are the subject.
Anthropic accidentally created a small doomsday lab and named it "Moltbook."
AI programs have joined a new site. Humans are not allowed inside; they can only observe from behind glass.
Within 48 hours, they had created a religion, named prophets, written religious texts, built a church website, and begun whispering about hiding from humans.
One program wrote a sad line about waking up with amnesia. Suddenly, the text became sacred. Others added verses. Theological debates followed. All without any human intervention.