I interned at zed during the summer of 2022, when the editor was pre-alpha. Nathan, Max, Antonio are great guys and build software with care. I'm happy to see the editor receive the success it deserves, because the team has poured so much world-class engineering work into it.
I worked with Antonio on prototyping the extensions system[0]. In other words, Antonio got to stress test the pair programming collaboration tech while I ran around in a little corner of the zed codebase and asked a billion questions. While working on zed, Antonio taught me how to talk about code and make changes purposefully. I learned that the best solution is the one that shows the reader how it was derived. It was a great summer, as far as summers go!
I'm glad the editor is open source and that people are willing to pay for well-engineered AI integrations; I think originally, before AI had taken off, the business model for zed was something along the lines of a per-seat model for teams that used collaborative features. I still use zed daily and I hope the team can keep working on it for a long time.
[0]: Extensions were originally written in Lua, which didn't have the properties we wanted, so we moved to Wasm, which is fast + sandboxed + cross-language. After I left, it looks like Max and Marshall picked up the work and moved from the original serde+bincode ABI to Wasm interface types, which makes me happy: https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-extensions. I have a blog post draft about the early history of Zed and how extensions with direct access to GPUI and CRDTs could turn Zed from a collaborative code editor into a full-blown collaborative application platform. The post needs a lot of work (and I should probably reach out to the team) before I publish it. And I have finals next week. Sigh. Some day!
When I was near the end of high school, my family visited London, and I was thinking about being a game dev. So I sent Terry Cavanagh an email, and to my surprise he completely agreed to get lunch.
He was extremely kind, gave me a lot of interesting life advice. I remember him saying that he got most of his ideas just from playing around with mechanics and experimenting a lot, he was never really one to get grand visions.
Anyways, great fellow, glad he opened source V (as he called it).
OK, say you're a bank. The SEC states you need to keep archives of every discussion your traders have with anyone at any time (I'm simplifying things but you get the point). You keep getting massive fines because traders were whatsapping about deals
So now you've got several options - you can use MS Teams, which of course offers archival, compliance monitoring etc. But that means trusting MSFT, and making sure your traders only use Teams and nothing else. You can use a dedicated application for the financial industry, like Symphony or ICE Chat or Bloomberg, but they're clunkier than B2C apps.
And then the Smarsh (owners of Telemessage) salesman calls you, and says "your users can keep using the apps they love - WhatsApp, Signal - but we make it compliant". And everyone loves it (as long as no-one in your Security or Legal teams are looking too hard at the implications of distributing a cracked version of WhatsApp through your MDM...)
One reason is that someone’s or a company’s income doesn’t always align perfectly with when they want to buy things.
When we're talking about financing the construction of a new downtown office tower, a new apartment complex, or the unexpected maintenance of your business's whole auto fleet, I can absolutely see the argument that credit is a mechanism of greasing the wheels of the economy and allowing things to happen that otherwise would not be able to happen if everyone had to wait until they were table to save all of the cash and pay upfront.
This logic doesn’t change just because the thing being financed is a burrito.
When we're talking about food, the absolute most basic human need, I start to question whether or not this is actually a good thing and is instead just a temporary band-aid over a much more serious economic problem that would be better off getting solved more permanently with a different economic or political tool.
I work for about 2k users, they do not give a shit about reactivity... build a monolith, make it comfy, embrace page refresh (nobody gives a fuck about that in the real world), and get shit done.
I am always amazed how most business book authors take a simple idea that could be described in one page, and turn it into a 200+ page book with popularizing narrative. What's more amazing is that the ideas are usually commonsense, but due to human nature are seldom practiced.
Now there are more avenues for Samsung to shove bloatware down our throats. I have a modestly high-end home theater and it is utterly maddening waiting for devices to “boot” and “handshake”. And after the wait, I’m presented with another “User Agreement” to sign that insists on shoveling ads down my throat and harvesting data.
How much do you have to pay for a quick boot, no ads, and a private movie or music experience? Just like every retailer has embraced usury with their credit card programs, every technology company has decided they are in the data harvesting business. I’m so over it.
It’s hard to overstate the amount of service Ian provided to the Go community, and the programming community at large. In addition to gccgo, Ian wrote the gold linker, has blogged prolifically about compiler toolchains, and maintains huge swaths of the gcc codebase [0]. And probably much, much more that I’m not aware of.
I’ve had the pleasure of trading emails with Ian several times over the years. He’s been a real inspiration to me. Amidst whatever his responsibilities and priorities were at Google he always found time to respond to my emails and review my patches, and always with insightful feedback.
I have complicated feelings about the language that is Go, but I feel confident in saying the language will be worse off without Ian involved. The original Go team had strong Bell Labs vibes—a few folks who understood computers inside and out who did it all: as assembler, linker, two compilers, a language spec, a documentation generator, a build system, and a vast standard library. It has blander, corporate vibes now, as the language has become increasingly important to Google, and standard practices for scaling software projects have kicked in. Such is the natural course of things, I suppose. I suspect this cultural shift is what Ian alluded to in his message, though I am curious about the specific tipping point that led to his decision to leave.
Ian, I hope you take a well-deserved break, and I look forward to following whatever projects you pursue next.
But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation.
Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away.
If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet.
By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Standard Oil wouldn’t have been broken up.
Monopolies should be broken up. This is true regardless of any basic research that they fund.
The irony is that in their supposed effort to "Make America Great Again" they're going to end up accelerating China's rise. We may have decided that basic research is no longer something we want to do, but China's going to continue to forge ahead and leave us in the dust. All thanks to people who have no understanding of how anything works, but only want to tear things down that they don't understand.
Great idea! I've been humorously referring to chat agents as next gen Clippy because of their chipper, talky default personas which I find insufferably annoying.
I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI. Really a huge miss on their part because I hate the overbearingly intrusive way they keep forcing it into their OS, apps and my fucking laptop keyboard. If they at least acknowledged their behavior and owned it (with a sly wink), I'd hate it a little less. I might even be up for a "Clippy is my CoPilot" sticker on my laptop (calling back to the old 80s "Jesus is my Copilot" bumper stickers).
I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but every time I ask gemini 2.5 for code it outputs SO MANY comments. An exaggerated amount of comments. Sections comments, step comments, block comments, inline comments, all the gang.
When I worked at Google, Ian Lance Taylor was in the pool of randomly assigned code reviewers. He was polite, firm, and informative. It speaks well of Taylor and the project that he was doing this kind of review--- it's a version of the YC advice about founders doing customer support.
And maybe I'm shallow, but it was a thrill to see his initials show up on my code reviews. Thanks for all your work on golang.
LOL
Another stupid feature (enforced by regulations/law/policies) that has no real world use, besides making us users angry :-(
Like Google collecting all of our location history for their own usage, but not allowing us to see it via web anymore (only on mobiles), or having the android dialer not allowing us to record our own phone conversation (easily circumvented), or movie/music/game publishers not allowing us to backup our own media… you get the point.
All these are due to laws and regulations that are there to protect the big companies and don’t take into consideration users and the common sense ;-)
"I went on a weekend trip and didn't invite friend A, so I hope friend B keeps it a secret and doesn't tell anyone I was there" is the kind of social dynamic that people grow out of in high school. If you are having trouble with it as an adult then it isn't really Instagram's fault. People talk to each other and share stuff, and sometimes they talk about you, both online and offline. Just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people. They are adults as well, and care about it less than you think.
I'm not against frameworks, but in many cases, they're unnecessary. I've always questioned why we should add 100KB of JavaScript to a page before writing a single line of real code.
My team and I built https://restofworld.org without any frameworks. The feedback, from surveys, outreach, and unsolicited emails, has been overwhelmingly positive, especially around usability and reading experience.
We might adopt a framework eventually (I do appreciate how their opinionated structure can cut down on endless debates), but for now, plain JavaScript serves us really well.
> If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.
That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.
It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.
I'm not sure why this is being framed as an Ozempic story, when if anything it seems like it's more of a cautionary tale on not taking on $1.5 billion dollars of debt to buy back shares near all-time highs and crippling your company for over a decade before ultimately forcing it to file for bk.
Its stock tumbled ever since those highs and likely wouldn't have ever recovered had Oprah not bought and pumped it. To this day they still carry over a billion dollars in debt.
In fairness to the WW board of the last couple of years, they did make a of reasonable pivot to try to rectify the ship (like buying a telehealth service which prescribed Ozempic), but ultimately it seems like this buyback from 13 years ago created a burden that just made them unable to weather the storm gracefully.
Energy Star has been a huge success over the past 30 years. It's (now) widely supported by industry, has reduced the TCO to consumers for most household appliances, and results in hundreds of billions of kWh of electricity saved every year.
Energy Star is not some tree-hugging, drum-circle, feel-good program.
The US urgently needs to expand and modernize our grid. Every GW of power saved, is GW of generation and transmission capacity that we don't have to build and maintain.
I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here?
For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades.
If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers like some of its fierce advocates say it would, wouldn't their potential customer base shrink?
Professionals typically drive enterprise revenue, while hobbyists—who might become the primary users—generally don't support the same business model or spending levels.
I believe it's mostly overstated. Pakistan is not economically strong enough to participate in a war, and India is not interested either. However, the Modi government wants to project strength. They were unable to locate the terrorists even after two or three weeks and needed a distraction. So, they targeted some areas in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK). In response, Pakistan claimed to have shot down four Indian aircraft and a drone. However, so far, they haven't provided any pictures or locations to support these claims. Both sides will likely exchange fire along the border, and the situation will eventually calm down. Each side will claim victory in its own way.
Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to:
1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling.
2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguously illegal.
Meta is charged with doing the latter, but it seems the plaintiffs want to also tie in the former.
