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)
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Notes -
Well, if you're not writing the code yourself, why NOT just let the AI agent write it in Rust (without "unsafe")? It's like providing a Lean proof certificate alongside a paper - it builds the safety guarantees in. And the human gets to offload the process of begging Rust to please let them do something every other language lets them do.
Rust is fine I'm mostly just making a near-term bet that the agents don't benefit that much from the type system's proofs because they increasingly write superhumanly good code.
There are some minor reasons to tell your agents to write C instead of Rust. The agents might box (ha!) themselves in unnecessarily because
unsafeand dropping to asm to get around missing features from C (likesetjmp/longjmp, or computed gotos) are implicitly proscribed if you're asking for Rust in the first place. Additionally there's some ecosystem risk from yanking in hundreds of crates that you wouldn't hit with C because the package management ecosystem fucking sucks and your agents will just DIY most of what it needs instead.You can also iterate a little faster compiling C than you would Rust, so long as your agents don't talk you into running fuzzers and tsan/asan
These are not actually earth shattering differences and Rust is fine.
So long as you don't mind people thinking you're a homo.More options
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