site banner
ZorbaTHut  18hr ago (text post)   907 thread views

Site Backend Changes

Hey there! For complicated reasons, some of which I will explain later, I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase. Right now, this means "fix a bunch of small bugs". Later, other things will be happening.

The immediate goal of this is not to massively transform the site or do a Digg v4/New Reddit thing. Frankly, if the site remained exactly the same (but with fewer bugs) I would be happy.

The long-term goal isn't going to be quite that static, though. The long-term goal is to set things up to allow more subcommunities, similar to how subreddits work. This will be a larger set of changes. These changes will not obsolete The Motte itself; I am absolutely aiming for a site that can comfortably keep holding The Motte. I've talked about this before if you want to go read about it - this is still the same plan, for what it's worth, it's just now being (slowly) executed.

I will be posting more, and asking questions about next steps, when actual site behavioral changes are in the queue. This just isn't that! This is infrastructure work.

 

tl;dr: The site backend may be a little wonky for a bit, sorry about that, please report any bugs.

(and mods, feel free to unsticky this in a few days if I forget)

Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase

Don't tell me you're rewriting it in Rust?

It's probably some AI-coded slop shit. Sadly, the people who, now feeling empowered by AI, rush into updating a bunch of otherwise stable projects are, often, a bit too eager and lack taste and accept absolute horseshit for code. I hope the admins here have better judgment, but I've seen this happen too many times already to have any hope left.

If you can find bugs I will be happy to handle reports!

That said, I'm paying roughly no attention to the quality of the current code because it's about to get completely scrapped anyway.

I've come around somewhat on AI code and have come to accept that while the code is shit slop, it mostly works.

For one-off scripts that just need to work and won't go further, it's amazing. For small applications, it works ok. For larger projects or greenfield development with evolving requirements, it's pretty bad. The one constant of AI driven development though is that the final result will become thoroughly unreadable and unworkable for humans.

I expect that for a reddit clone scale service, it's probably workable, especially if the site doesn't blow up in popularity, but I would expect rough edges and weirdness. (not that human code is free of that either)

A quick oneoff script told me that 42% of the entire lines of code in the motte repo was created or edited in the last week. Make your own predictions on the outcomes of this.

I've come around somewhat on AI code and have come to accept that while the code is shit slop, it mostly works.

Ironically, despite being wildly bullish on LLMs compared to you, I've become more skeptical of AI coding since moving to a team a couple months ago that's extremely AI coding focused (think dozens of people, each contributing many thousands of lines of code daily, all code reviews done via AI, as well as deployments, monitoring, design docs; a guy from OAI came in and is implementing his vision). Fairly sure we're headed toward disaster, though our "velocity" makes leadership very happy.

Yes of course, I still think a slop factory is destined to become a train wreck. But I do begrudgingly admit that small scale vibe coding projects that are driven by a single human can give usable results if the human driving dogfoods the results.

I would be quite interested in people actually making falsifiable predictions.

You can look at the code and judge its quality for yourself.

zorbathut and claude committed N hours ago ×∞

I am, in fact, rewriting it in Rust :V

(Eventually. Right now I'm just doing a cleanup.)

Oh dear. The hivemind got to you.

Why Rust and not Go?

A few answers:

  • Go is a compromise between performance, power, and simplicity, aiming for something that's easy to use even if it's not as capable. Rust basically isn't; it's aiming for absolute performance and power at the expense of being somewhat more complicated. I think this is a bad bargain today, especially because AI is quite good at handling complicated.
  • Rust is much more applicable to me specifically; it's something quite plausibly useful for the game industry while Go just doesn't have much to offer. Also, a minor side project I'm working on is helping with a filesystem being developed, which is also written in Rust. I'd rather be able to triple-dip into the same language than try to diversify (right now all of my projects are limited to C#, Rust, Python, and grudgingly Typescript, and that's already one more than I want.)
  • Rust has a bunch of in-progress formal verification features that I think are pretty cool and it would be nice to be able to apply those.
  • I have some things I want to try out regarding static typing and Rust is much more developed on those fronts than Go (or at least, was in June when I did this research, though I'd be surprised if that's inverted by today.)

helping with a filesystem being developed, which is also written in Rust

Might I ask: bcachefs? Been following it for years, very saddened by the Kent/Linus drama.

Yup.

Kent is definitely abrasive, but he's also really smart, and bcachefs at this point is a surprisingly capable filesystem that does a bunch of stuff no other filesystem can accomplish. With a frankly impressive amount of dedication towards never losing data.

I am, in fact, rewriting it in Rust :V

Are you sure this doesn't go in the CW thread?

My programmer socks arrive tomorrow! :D

Pics or it doesn't count

I'm afraid I was joking, I mostly don't wear socks.

      • honestly kneehigh socks sound terrible, how do people stand those.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats