

Nowhere did I say there’s no reasonable architecture. Please don’t put words in my mouth. What I said, is that I haven’t found a good way to get quick compiles end to end. And already I don’t have any files more than 3-4k loc, most are under 1k.


Nowhere did I say there’s no reasonable architecture. Please don’t put words in my mouth. What I said, is that I haven’t found a good way to get quick compiles end to end. And already I don’t have any files more than 3-4k loc, most are under 1k.


thanks will see what happens


I’ve tried looking before and couldn’t get a significant improvement. I’ll have to investigate it again I guess.


No, I’m not using --release every time of course. And sometimes it’s minutes even with the cache.


I should really revisit this. I know I looked at it again. The compiling crops up I you actually want to run the app and test drive the changes live.


Yes, I move things around.


Yeah, not gonna miss app servers. I do find the JVM was kind of made for a different era though. It’s basically designed to act like a VM on top of which all your apps run. So, startup time isn’t really a problem, and it wants to grab as much memory as it can by default. But nowadays everybody just makes small self contained apps that you can scale horizontally, so this whole model the JVM is tailored for isn’t really used outside big enterprise. And Jenkins was alight, I used to use it back in the day too. For the most part, I do find GitHub actions are an improvement though. You just make a script and magic happens.


I recall looking at mold, but it didn’t end up helping much in my case. And haven’t looked at sccache, that might actually help if it can cache compilation incrementally in an intelligent way.


It’s around 100k loc sized project, so from what I’ve seen that’s about what you can expect with Rust.


Right, you basically have to start building a rube goldberg machine for compiling your app just so you don’t have to wait for minutes on end. And to me it is absolutely bananas that you can make a compiler this slow on modern hardware. Coming from largely working with Clojure where I have a live application I can interactively load code into as I edit it, this whole process feels insane.


haha this reminds me of my days working with websphere :)


I’ve got a non trivial project in Rust, and it takes like 5 min to compile on my machine. Personally, I don’t know how anybody can call this fun. I find it insane to have to wait minutes to see the changes and to iterate. And like sure you can break shit up into crates to speed up compilation, but to do that you already have to have a design you’re happy with and that’s stable.


The energy consumption trope in particular hasn’t been true for a while now. You can literally run models on your laptop for most tasks, and these are models that have capability that needed a data centre literally less than a year go. Meanwhile, the whole notion of people offloading their cognitive capacity to models is based on a handful of studies with tiny samples. So yes, you are wrong, and you just run around uncritically repeating nonsense thinking you’re being really profound.


I am talking about interrogating the implications of the present world we live in. What I was pointing out is that the author makes a shallow analysis of the symptoms without following the threads to identify the root causes. You don’t need to be a philosopher to do that.
I’m also not talking about an alternative history where AI might’ve emerged in a different form. I was pointing out the underlying causes of the negative effects associated with how this technology is used, and we need to be clear on that in order to do anything about the problem. The issue is capitalist control, and the solution is to develop this technology under public ownership the same way other open source technology is developed. Open alternatives from China are already the biggest threat to the whole model, so this is already starting to happen.
I think people who are opposed to the way this tech is used should be thinking of how to wrestle it away from corporations, and to build it in the open. This is the whole concept behind having ownership of the means of production. In my opinion, that’s the only realistic solution to the problem in the long term.


The analysis in the post remains firmly at the level of phenomena, failing to address the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. The blog post correctly points out that tools are not neutral since they shape people and social relations. All tools are material manifestations of specific production relations. However, the blog post treats AI as a tool or technology itself, failing to question why AI exists in this specific form at the current historical stage. The reason there is a tendency towards large scale models which are centralized and commercialized is that they are an inevitable product of the logic of capitalist accumulation.
From the perspective of the base and the superstructure, after the highly developed capitalist productive forces, capital urgently needs a new means to accelerate circulation, reduce labor costs, and open up new areas of accumulation. So, the inefficiency and high energy consumption of AI are not technological defects, but rather a price that capital is forced to pay under specific historical conditions because true efficiency in form of distributed, open-source, and democratized AI cannot serve the maximization of monopoly profits. The waste, environmental damage, and ethical crisis of the AI industry are essentially inherent contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. The problem stems directly from the contradiction between social production and private ownership.
The post also discusses the idea of tools shaping people, but fails to clearly distinguish the different shaping forces of use value and exchange value on technological development. Under capitalism, AI primarily serves the needs of capital accumulation rather than the comprehensive development of a society. The whole AI makes humans stop thinking and stop creating argument is just describing the deepening of capitalist labor alienation in the digital age where workers are alienated from creative labour. The push to replace rather than enhance human capabilities is driven by the need for replaceable, standardized labor, rather than independent thinking subjects.
Merely demanding rational use or ethical norms without addressing the private ownership of the means of production can only alleviate symptoms while doing nothing to address the root cause. The laws and ethics of capitalist society are themselves part of the superstructure and their fundamental function is to safeguard the interests of the bourgeoisie. As long as the means of production remain in the hands of a few monopolistic capitalists, any calls for ethical use are just empty moralizing.
Finally, it’s worth noting that there is little room for letting us do what machines cannot do like appreciating predecessors and fighting for policy within the capitalist framework because such behaviors are systematically marginalized. True liberation lies in breaking down the social relations that determine the direction of technological development. The goal has to be to move the development of AI from serving capital accumulation to serving the free and comprehensive development of humanity.
The core problem with the critique in the blog post is that while it is emotionally charged, it fails to rise to the level of a systematic analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Merely calling for critical use or humanistic concern is insufficient because it is essential to understand the relations of production in order to see past the illusion of tools controlling people.


As strong a rebuttal as a parrot requires. I also love how you lump together a whole bunch of issues inherent in capitalism in your complaint further illustrating that you’re not able to put together a coherent argument.


best of luck with that
Or maybe your architecture evolves over time as it actually does in real world large projects. Sounds like somebody’s never worked on a large long running project before.