What a word of wisdom right there, the bit about internet is beautiful because it's ok to be weird - this is often the opposite on twitter, fb, reddit and many discords where if you have a different opinion you get mobbed by angry comments making one feel worse about their own weirdness.
It is increasingly important to be able to see that many things are true. There is no single "truth". Many things are true at the same time, and in all aspects of life. Each brain is like a band pass filter, and the effort we should make is to try to imagine the points of view of others, which are just different slices of the same world. Then embrace the slices we like, and just ignore the ones we don't, but don't argue or fight for our slice as it if was the only one.
To clarify, there are formal truths: widely-accepted hard science, e.g. “2 + 2 = 4”. Technically, there’s a point where we can’t fundamentally prove anything (“if a tree falls and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?”), and rarely we get things wrong (e.g. classical physics)….but in practice, these are true, end of discussion.
Then there are informal truths: e.g. “the Earth is round”, “the sky is blue”, “Gala apples are red”. You can nitpick them (the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, the sky is only blue during the day in areas without high pollution, Gala apples may be pinkish or have yellow blotches, or exceptional discoloration), endlessly or until they become formal (possibly by becoming self-referential). But in practice, these are also true (like formal truths; although it’s important to know the difference because…)
The problem is, there’s no line between an informal truth and uncertainty/opinion that isn’t true. Like you know ##FF0000 is red and ##00FF00 is not, but there’s no exact color that separates “red” and “not red” (it depends on person, mood, surroundings…) Consequently, unlike formal truths, informal truths have false implications (“fuzzy logic”). An informal truth can be phrased in a “misleading way”, priming the reader for a false implication (a formal truth can be phrased in a convoluted or unintuitive way, but interpreted formally, never leads to a false implication).
The vast majority of discussion is not formal. Even the smartest people constantly fall for false implications. And this isn’t completely solvable, because we fundamentally can’t formally define everything (too much detail): we tried with GOFAI, it failed and its successor, neural networks, informally defines things like us (by forming a lossy model of the world, then generalizing it).
> rarely we get things wrong (e.g. classical physics)
Curious, do you think quantum physics is the end of the line? I wouldn't claim to have a good understanding of anything beyond classical physics, but I've just assumed it's turtles all the way down and at some point we'll find serious issues with the quantum model
The fundamental physics that underlie everyday life are known. We know that general relativity and the standard model of particle physics aren't fully compatible, but that's only at very short scales or very high gravity, those aren't relevant to everyday life. We're able to model single-particle and even few-particle systems on an astonishing degree of accuracy (1 part in 1e9, I believe down to measurement error). We can't model the 1e25 particles because in the brain to explain consciousness it's an exponential problem but in principle with unlimited time and memory we could turn the crank on the equations.
2+2=4 is only a formal truth up to the axioms of arithmetic and how we denote numbers. The statement is not statement with regards to objective reality.
You're being pendantic. Choose whatever symbol you want for "2" and "4". The point is that if you have symbol apples and someone gives you symbol more, than you have an agreed-upon number in total.
It's not being pedantic. With different assumptions you can make a system where 2 + 2 = 0 and it turns out to be extremely useful. You can also build a system where 2 + 2 = 22 like the other commenter lampoons and the free monoid that corresponds to is again useful.
If we had a radically different perspective (like Borges' Funes the memorious), you can imagine how adding wholly distinct objects might seem ridiculous and derive some other wacky system of arithmetic instead.
Of course, you could alternatively derive it from set theory, but you might also end up with something fundamentally different than what the grandparent intended like presburger or skolem arithmetic.
If you define a system where “2 + 2 = 5”, but also “a square has 5 corners”, “carbon has 5 covalent bonding positions”, etc. your system is coherent, but you actually are stating the abstract property “2 + 2 = 4” in common math, just using the symbol “5” to represent what’s commonly represented as “4”. A bit confusing, a less confusing example is common math, substituting “2” with “B” and “4” with “D”, so “B + B = D, a square has D corners, …”
If you define a system where “2 + 2 = 5, a line segment has 2 ends, a square has 4 corners, 4 < 5”, you’re objectively wrong (unless you’re taking common math and substituting more than digits)…if you extend this system you’ll find contradictions (what happens if you combine 2 parallel line segments of the same length at that length distance?), especially if you try to apply it to the real world.
You are not objectively wrong. You have simply defined an incoherent abstract system in language. The claim you have made simply does not compute in the system in question. Regardless, that claim is not a claim about the objective world, however that may be defined.
Except we live in a world where people do argue 2+2 could also be 22 ( Because they use Javascript /s ) Which is basically people believe what they want to believe in. Rationale rarely works.
I think the biggest problem is not that there may be many truths, but that people don't even bother seeking out the best evidence or reasoning against their truths.
Especially in tech, for which there are basically only tradeoffs.
I use Zig in most things lately, and I use AI. I have a high quality standard (that AI honestly sometimes makes difficult to meet), but my github has never been more active:
I also have a pretty neat (although arguably janky) way for LLM agents in different tmux terminals to talk to each other: https://github.com/pmarreck/llmsend
The problem arises when there are contradictory truths, and defenders of one or both sides refuse to dig deeper to both self-reflect on what they believe to be true, and perhaps come to a deeper more correct understanding.
There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality. Maybe you agree with that, but your wording is messy. It's true that different perspectives can yield their own particular bits of truth, if that's what you're saying.
"Objective reality" is only the source for the least interesting truth. The truths that really get people fighting over concern best courses of action, moral matters, aesthetic issues, and things like that, where there isn't some singular objective truth (and even if there was, nobody has access to it).
These aren’t truths. It’s cases like “is the earth flat?” that have an answer in objective reality and people still argue about it where some people are simply wrong.
The English language has multiple independent definitions of the same word. You’re misusing that ambiguity here.
“sincerity in action, character, and utterance” is different than “the body of real things, events, and facts”
This distinction very much exists in how people talk about such things. You don’t need to “have faith” that something like gravity exists such that when you trip you can fall down. “We hold these truths to be self evident” isn’t how you talk about the distance between NYC and Boston.
>“sincerity in action, character, and utterance” is different than “the body of real things, events, and facts”
So? I didn't refer to truth in the former sense.
I said there are several kinds of meanings of the term "truth", and that the one that's about mere facts about things that can be measured objectively (the stricter version of your second definition) is the least interesting one.
The truths of the "We hold these truths to be self evident” variety, the truths of "this proposal is really bad", "this behavior is wrong", "this person is guilty", and many others even more nuanced varieties, are the ones that matter, and for those objective reality is nowhere near the "single source of truth", if it even applies at all.
By acknowledging that nobody considers these objective truths, there’s nothing interesting to say on the topic.
You were playing around with the linguistic ambiguity for whatever reason using a different definition than was used by “There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality.” and I called you out on it. Thus the subject dies.
>By acknowledging that nobody considers these objective truths, there’s nothing interesting to say on the topic
On the contrary, that's where most interesting things to say happen in the real social world. From relationships all the way to wars.
>You were playing around with the linguistic ambiguity for whatever reason using a different definition than was used by “There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality.” and I called you out on it.
Nope, you were limited by the one definition you had in mind, unable to understand that real world, real people, don't constraint themselves to it, and argue regarding the truth or falsehood in all kinds of things that are not bound to "objective reality".
In other words, you pedantically erased most of human life and discource on the truth (not to mention the incovenient other philosophical and dictionary definitions of it) with "well, ahchtually".
“There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.”
— Nietzsche:On the Genealogy of Morals III
It's a target. Objectivity does not appear in nature in a stable form. Nothing is fixed and certain. Some things just appear that way from our point of view.
> nternet is beautiful because it's ok to be weird - this is often the opposite on twitter, fb, reddit and many discords where if you have a different opinion you get mobbed by angry comments making one feel worse about their own weirdness
which is ‘funny’ because by offline standards the average redditor will probably be seen as weird
I think it makes perfect sense for Zig to have their stand against LLM contributions while consumers of the compiler/Zig project overall use whatever code aids they like. Building a language is not a matter of churning out as much greenfield code as possible, but in careful consideration of whether or not some feature and its implementation fits coherently into the entire overall language. It's upstream of so much, and we now have decades and decades of examples where just letting rip with new additions renders a language schizoid and unergonomic. An LLM's tendency to "yes, of course, and," to any suggestion is not what a healthy language project needs, but it can be tremendously useful for someone employing a balanced and ergonomic language to generate products. I'm glad to see Mitchell keeping a cool head as the unfortunate tendency in so many devs to take sides and get dogmatic plays out yet again.
If you're unsure about spending the time to learn Zig, I really recommend watching the following interview with the creator of Zig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ convinced me more than any design doc or blogpost could
It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty
I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.
> Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.
Among the "GPU rendered terminal" options, afaik Ghostty is the only one that has proper search/context menus, tabs, and scroll bars. I'm sure it's easy to get by without, but compared to the overall value-add of these terminals (which exists indeed but isn't tremendous either) I find it quite a significant downgrade, so I appreciate that Ghostty has both.
Agreed, though it hasn’t been excessive in my experience. Just that the devs are better at marketing than others. Really shows how important that side of the equation is. Wish I was better at it myself.
input latency. the time from pressing a key to showing on-screen is much lower with ghostty (I can't find exact number, but it seems to handle input 2-4x quicker. So around 15ms instead of 60ms).
Also just the general render pipeline is way faster in ghostty. There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow. Ghostty is attempting to improve the experience to allow for more things to be built in the terminal.
This doesn't seem like a particularly compelling feature to me, but iTerm can do this too (since the person you replied to mentioned iTerm, this seems relevant).
I'd love to hear what made you settle on ghostty. There is not dearth of terminal emulators out there, each claiming performance or batteries included.
I'm not the commenter, but for me ghostty was good for being a Very Good terminal experience with almost no config required.
Just checked and the config file for my daily use terminal setup is 3 lines long. 3! That means I know I can chuck it on any system, any clean re-install, and it'll be Fine. That counts for a lot when you've grown tired of endless config tweaking.
My config is a couple lines longer, but other than font-family, font-size, color theme and a couple of other settings I didn't need to change anything else.
I definitely spent way less time configuring it to suit my needs that I did with any other terminal I used before.
Seconded. I keep hearing about ghostty but I have yet to see a strong enough justification about how it is _that_ better. I use konsole and has significantly more user friendly screen to manage settings. I heard about ghostty's performance so I did some timing tests and ghostty was faster than konsole but not that much - not in any perceptibly significant measurable sense.
I went from Alacritty to Ghostty for ligatures and some other small goodies. I could probably get those same goodies with Kitty, but I didn't want to try nor have the desire to try. I may go back to Alacritty if I grow tired of Ghostty.
i switched from iTerm 2 on macOS because it would get bogged down sometimes or occasionally lag. it’s been noticeably faster and i appreciate the file-based config as well as the defaults, leading to my config being under 5 lines.
on linux i use the default terminal in gnome which is ptyxis now iirc and haven’t felt any need to switch.
the craziest thing i did with its config was to swap the profile being used based on the pattern of the instance’s hostname the terminal was logged into. The idea was to make the terminal background red on production hosts to give a visual indicator to avoid running anything destructive on prod hosts.
The ctrl-tab tab switching behaviour being round-robin instead of stack[1] is what is keeping me on Konsole. None of the newer consoles (for Linux) seem to have this.
> however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty
Is that meant as an argument in favor of "another $400k for Zig" or against it?
I like Ghostty, but investing $800k to develop a programming language that is primarily known for producing a terminal emulator doesn't sound like a particularly strong argument in its favor.
> I use AI heavily. I've written about my AI adoption journey and shipping real features with AI assistance. I'm also quite vocal about remaining rational about its capabilities and frustrated with its negative impacts on open source.
> The point is that I have opinions. Those opinions don't fully align with ZSF's approach. And yet, I have nothing but respect for ZSF: the people, the policies, and the project. Part of what makes the internet and open source great is that projects can be weird and different. They can set unusual boundaries, build their own culture, and pursue quality in ways that won't make sense to everyone.
Mitchell does feel like the adult in the room when other people are having chain-saws and acting irrationally for a lack of better term (for example jared/bun controversy which the post just somewhat touches on)
(Mitchell's tweet about AI psychosis is genuinely influential and is now a pointer to what this phenomenon might be)
I really think him and simon's opinions are somehow decently nuanced opinions on AI that the internet has to offer.
Now glazing of mitchell aside, I am happy that zig foundation gets such amount of money and I am really excited that Zig an independent language is able to get the level of love that it does.
There is a famous talk by the creator of Elm on the economics of independent programming languages and how its hard for them to get sponsored if they aren't already working at a company (Rust was created at Mozilla, Golang was created by Google)
This is a real issue that is true for most of open-source and I am just happy that we are atleast moving slowly towards some good as well. Its an uphill battle with multiple lows but I am happy for the positive changes as it gets as open source does have a special place in my heart as it taught me about privacy and many of your hearts as well.
As things are right now, I see this as a respectable way of operating.
Michael has made his views and usage of AI known. The Ghostty project has a detailed AI policy for users to see and the team is willing to devote resources to enforcing a middle ground policy. The Zig project has a detailed policy taking a strict stance and as a result I expect they do not have expend as much resources when a contribution is suspected of being AI assisted.
A strict policy on either side is easier to enforce based on finite resources (mostly people). I'm sure many projects would like to have a middle ground policy but cannot currently devote the resources it would require long term. We might never see a shift in moderation abilities and this remains for the longer term, or there could be advanced in moderation that allows projects to adopt a more nuisanced policy that's right for them.
$400k is serious money and will certainly help keeping the Zig team funded. I must gratulate Andrew and the team on their ability to create a product that is creating this kind of enthusiasm from its users.
One thing that’s sometimes overlooked though is that all donations are something that we’re grateful for, regardless of amount. If you have little to spend then even $1 a month is an investment that rivals $10000 by someone rich.
Also worth remembering is that the vast majority of language projects aren’t operating at Zig’s scale. For smaller projects such as C3, even modest recurring support can have a meaningful impact on long-term sustainability.
It doesn’t need to be $100000s a month to make a huge difference.
One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking
I started using zig more heavily for some edge device ML inference projects lately after watching Andrews jetbrains interview and it really really resonating with me on a personal level.
Am also really overall enjoying the language, it def has some rough spots regarding documentation and the stdlib but overall has been very nice to work with in neovim.
I can't throw 400k but I'll go ahead and pledge some dollars towards it as well.
Donations to the Zig Software Foundation largely go to contributors to the language. Meanwhile, donations to the Rust Foundation largely go into pockets unknown.
The key difference is that the Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.
Seems obvious the parent comment was making a point about how much money it is and not just whether it feels nice to donate money. 400k can go a long way
If you assume Hashimotos net worth is one billion dollars, a $400k donation is equivalent to a $400 donation if your net worth is one million dollars.
I don’t believe donating $400 really feels that satisfying, the impact is fairly negligible in most contexts whereas donating $400k can very visibly improve a lot of lives.
I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society.
> If you assume Hashimotos net worth is one billion dollars, a $400k donation is equivalent to a $400 donation if your net worth is one million dollars.
1. Net worth is significantly less than that (taxes + heavy philanthropy)
2. $400K donation is orders (plural) of magnitude off our actual philanthropic giving in total. This is just one donation.
While we have you here, I would like to say thanks, I disagree with you on a bunch of stuff in terms of opinions, perhaps less than I would expect, but I appreciate people who can and do put effort in supporting things they care about. And building things one can just feel good about, rather than always chasing a financial end game.
I am personally just tired of it, and it's brilliant to see someone thriving outside of the zone to working for work's sake. Even if the realities are different.
Hope we had more people like you whom we all could disagree with but mutually respect.
Cheers to a better future. (hope it wasn't too much waxing poetic but I feel like we are just too damn trapped in this tech bubble to value good moments these days)
Thank you for your donations. I didn’t mean to belittle your contribution, only the fact that people like you can make a much larger difference than people like me.
> wasn't the accrued billion dollars the remainder after being taxed at a much higher rate (around 50% federal and state, if California) as it was being accrued?
Most capital owned by billionaires is not taxed until it is sold, so in the case of Hashimoto and others they most likely have not paid tax on the majority of their wealth.
> How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?
In the same way we calculate income tax, we make it up. Most numbers I see are between 1-3%. We could just start at 1% as that is the most conservative number.
He has this wealth as a function of having sold the equity in the company he co-founded, so in fact virtually all his wealth has already gone through a tax event at the federal and state levels.
50%? No, that’s for high wages. And previous taxation is irrelevant: we as a society get to choose what is taxed, and there’s no inherent reason why only a single tax should apply to someone. Sales taxes, for example (which disproportionately burden those with less wealth) are paid out of one’s already-taxed income.
> How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?
It is possible to tax unrealized assets. We already do. For example, a property owner pays property tax based on the value of their property, even when they are not selling it.
It is possible for billionaires to borrow against their held assets. It is therefore also possible to calculate a tax on them.
It's possible to do so, but also makes a hostile environment for investment, which is why America hasn't done so yet.
If the idea of taxing unrealised gains and investments excites you, there is the EU... which here on HN is constantly being decried as unable to innovate in the startup space, get good startups going, accomplish anything with AI, and so forth.
The small wealth tax will be spent not on people but on growing the government’s bureaucracy. Take highly taxed states (eg CA) and no tax/low tax states (eg TX). You pay more for in state tuition for your children in the UC system as opposed to in state tuition in Texas.
There are some advantages to tax. But most of it is not spent on making lives of citizens easier.
>>If you assume Hashimotos net worth is one billion dollars, a $400k donation is equivalent to a $400 donation if your net worth is one million dollars.
It's not an equivalent. It's proportionally the same but it's completely different.
>>I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society.
If anything it illustrates taxes should be lower for people like Hashimoto. Giving even more money to the government instead of leaving it with people like Hashimoto will result in a huge net loss.
taxes should be lower for milioners and bilioners period. If we had regressive tax system where your tax rate is in negative correlation to your income, that would incentivise poor people to try to earn more and jump into higher bracket.
People with that much wealth should keep their money and use it where they see fit. A "wealth tax" forces some people to sell stock since not everyone has liquid assets. The CA "wealth" tax was written in a way that they could instantly turn $1B -> $1M or $100K overnight without a vote.
So many reasons why it's not a good idea to have a wealth tax. But the biggest reason is that nearly all our tax money is going to fraud. This is why our economy would BOOM if we got rid of a lot of taxes and reduced our fed/state governments a LOT. I just want roads, military and police. There is no reason why we should allow our government to be weaponized or turned into a nanny state when SO much of they money they collect is wasted.
Corporations that provide money for causes is often looked at because it's an investment. The world can learn a lot of free market capitalism, but it keeps pretending that half the people won't just DIE in communism.
While I agree that tax money gets wasted by the government, I must note that there exist other countries, explicitly not free market capitalist, where getting ultra reach is not the aim (crazy, eh?) and in the last 40 years they have come a long way in creating prosperity for everyone.
How is it out of touch? I donated much more than Hashimoto did relative to our net worths, but I cannot deny that I would have felt much more satisfied making a 1000x impact if I was a billionaire.
I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
> How is it out of touch? I donated much more than Hashimoto did relative to our net worths, but I cannot deny that I would have felt much more satisfied making a 1000x impact if I was a billionaire.
You have no way of possibly knowing this. And I bet you its not true.
I'm no longer a billionaire, partially because I paid an astronomical amount in taxes (I don't play the tax avoidance games). And partially because we're donating a whole lot more than $400K per year. This is ONE donation. We don't publicize most of our giving because it attracts armchair critics like you, and its distracting from the goals.
(I make an exception for Zig and technical things because my influence for better and worse usually is net positive for the initiative)
But, more importantly, I don't think playing these "my donation is worth more than yours" games is productive. If you want to think that way thats fine, I won't defend myself or my family any further than this post.
> You have no way of possibly knowing this. And I bet you its not true.
I do know this for a fact because my income has 10x over the course of my career and as I have made larger donations to match my increased income I do feel more satisfaction.
I’m not trying to belittle what you are doing, I am replying to someone who said to the order of “you can just be like mitchelh by donating as well” which I don’t think is true due to the orders of magnitude more impact that large donations can result in.
The problem is that when government spends $1,000,000 on your halfway house, it provides instant relief. It creates beds. The next year the government does it, the number of employees has doubled and it creates 20% more beds instead of the original amount. The third year it creates no beds and we find that 10% of the beds are gone, and the number of employees is now 1000. The government didn't care how well the money was invested.
Now if you invest $6000 and no one else was doing it, they would probably have created some percentage of 1 bed out of it. And if 18 other people invest $100 each maybe that's enough to complete the bed for a year. And if those altogether 19 people hear that the money went to good use, they donate again and they tell their friends. Maybe the halfway house in 10 years starts earning $25k per year and they keep costs low and the beds start increasing, they rent more space.
The government forced funding breaks it and turns it into a fake jobs program, the community funding it actually makes the service accountable.
Public spending on things that require (a) maintainance (as almost all things do) (b) are massively less functional if the investment is not sustained (as many things are) is inherently going to lead to suboptimal results. It's equally bad if private entities do this, but for one reason or another, people seem to bitch about this less, because, well "freedom" etc.
Public spending (private too!) is also bad if it creates unnecessary bureaucracies and unnecessary obstacles. This can be tricky because defining "unnecessary" requires a set of values and these may not be universally accepted.
So, if you have a government program that behaves as in your hypothetical example, then the problem is inefficiency, corruption and waste, not government.
It seems reasonable, though, to observe that some areas of government spending seem to largely get funnelled into contracts with the private sector where a great deal of money is spent, yet the actual problem is seemingly never fixed. An example of this is L.A.'s "homeless industry"; billions of dollars are spent, yet the problem gets worse and worse. Eventually, one considers that the purpose of the system is what it does - create cushy jobs for those administering the private-sector agencies that receive the lion's share of this government spending, away from any public accountability.
We still don't have a working model of a government doing a good job in the real world when it comes to carte blanch giving groups money. It does work really well when it's on the private side. The crux of the issue is that I pay too much in Taxes for 30% of it to be spent on downright fraud. Whether that is daycare scams, military spending scams, hospice scams, etc...
Since about 30% of my lifetime pay goes to taxes, and I am estimated over my entire life to make about $7m in salary. $1M of that is taxed, so potentially 300k of money is going to SCAMS.
Think about it, what if the government just decided tomorrow to give back all this money. I could finally afford to buy a house! But instead of me being able to buy a house, let's put another million bucks in a suitcase to fly to Mogadishu.
Hashimoto did more valuable work than you and then he is in position to do more impact wherever he pleases.
>>I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
We need some mechanism to select people who makes the choice. Popularity/lying contest (politics) ain't it. People making money conducting honest business is the best mechanism we have.
Why would I believe for one moment that someone who is successful at selling widgets should be deciding what resources to allocate to a homeless shelter?
A few things to note. 1 billion isn't a thousand times a million. If you make a conservative 5% let's say out of your net worth, you still need to work with a million, whereas you don't with a billion. So, technically, $400 with a million is some amount of work hours, whereas $400k with a billion is just pocket change taken out of more than most people lifetime's of earnings that is just 1 year of your interest.
Also, a lot more people (more than 1000x) have $400 to give than $400k so in a sense if people with $400 to give were all being very generous, they could amount to a lot more than what billionnaires could give.
The point they were trying to make was that if you take appreciation of assets into account, if your billion is appreciating by a relatively modest 5% per year, you are passively earning 50 million/year. Whereas someone with one million passively earns 50 thousand/year. One is enough to live in luxury anywhere in the world for several lifetimes, the other is enough to live comfortably in some parts of the US (or like a king in many parts of the world) but not enough to throw 6 figures at a programming language foundation for fun.
This is a common but silly claim; there is, generally speaking, no such thing as a safe rate of return that overcomes the inherent losses due to inflation. If you're getting a 5% rate of return on cash, that comes with both risk (someone with a billion dollars isn't going to benefit from FDIC insurance) and doesn't even overcome basic inflation.
That $50 million a year is also subject to income taxation and cannot be easily avoided. $50 million a year in interest on returns from cash will be hit at the 37% marginal rate, plus whatever the state assesses, so north of 50% in California.
Or to take an intermediate value, $10 million is 500k a year and most people will find it difficult to spend that much on themselves, so it’s going to grow on its own and compound. It will grow more rapidly if some is invested in the stock market.
Also, donating appreciated stock avoids taxes. This donation may have come out of a donor-advised fund.
Rich people can make substantial charitable donations rather easily and make a big difference. I suggest we encourage them.
Ah there is liquidity too, but your brother comment makes my point clearer.
About liquidity, yes most people with a million net worth actually have more than half in their house, so technically it is much harder for them to throw cash than somebody with a billion and a much smaller % of their worth in illiquid assets such as property or unlisted companies. I wish I had made this point too.
A salary of $400,000 is approximately 40 times the world median salary, which is estimated to be around $10,000 per year.
~400–800 million people (top 5–10% of global earners) could easily pay $833/month without major struggle, assuming they earn >$100,000/year.
So 90% people couldn’t even afford to pay a whole month of salary to a median earner without major struggle.
~3.6 billion people (45% of the global population) can likely afford to drop a $0.25 coin in a hat for a street artist without financial struggle. But that might not feel exactly the same as giving a whole month of median salary, let alone 40 years of it.
Pledge what you can. If everyone does this, it adds up. I have a $100/month slush fund I have set aside for Patreon/OS projects I like and use. It's a drop in the bucket, but something. Even $5/month can go to VPS hosting or something.
Somehow I feel it’s probably less satisfying if your contribution pays for a couple hours of developer time compared with the annual salary for an entire team. It’s probably more satisfying to be able to move the needle than not.
Your bank might ask you why you want 400K in cash versus a wire transfer or some other mechanism, but it's not "to approve of your reasoning". They might require some time to physically bring $400,000 in cash to the branch you're at.
I could, perhaps, see them wanting to be cautious if you appear to be having an obvious mental health crisis (but even then, as a paramedic I've heard more than one tale of families ruined by the spending of someone who was unmedicated and bipolar).
I could even potentially see there being a law enforcement issue of creating a panic or riot, exaggerated for example: "I'm going to take this money and throw it on the tracks at a train station and people can see how much risk they're willing to take to get it".
But "you have to give us an acceptable reason"? No. I am of comfortable but not exorbitant means (lower six digit salary), and my cash withdrawal limit, by default, is $15K/day. And the one time I asked for that to be raised temporarily, the only questions I got were for an additional piece of identification, and that they were able to call the contact numbers they had for me on my account to verify that it was me who picked up the call. Not "for what purpose, sir?"
i guarantee you it was a stock transfer, that's where the real tax write-offs come in.
you give a $200k donation, get a $200k writeoff, saves you about 50% (100K) in taxes you owe, so it's like the government is kicking in $100k and you are kicking in $100k and whatever the govt would otherwise spend the $100K on goes unfunded.
It's the norm in the US (and pretty much everywhere else with well-implemented developed financial infrastructure) for banks to apply extra scrutiny and roadblocks to large withdrawals. There's a patio11 article going over some of the reasons [0], but it notably generates paperwork for the bank reporting the withdrawal to the government and enables a lot of fraud to allow immediate access.
Banks try to avoid holding excessive amounts of cash in suburban branches because it makes them attractive armed robbery targets. If you have a need for a large amount of cash, you can let them know (my bank says 24-48 hours in advance), go to multiple branches, or to a large city branch. Inconvenient, perhaps, though temporary. If it's for a business or a recurring need your bank is generally happy to make that part of their regular logistics, "Monday's cash delivery needs X because asimovDev regularly wants $50,000 in cash every Wednesday".
> it has to be approved
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I don't think it's "approved" in the sense of the bank deciding if you're allowed to do so. But hmm: multiple ID checks, or a specific seniority of bank employee doing the check. Or if you decide you want to take out $250,000 and you have to do it in cash, they might a) want a day or two to physically acquire the cash, and/or b) have additional security due to their insurance policy. They certainly might try to suggest you look at a cashier's check or wire transfer or other instrument to do so. There's going to be a CAR for any transaction involving more than $10,000 in cash.
But I'd challenge the assertion that the bank tells you you're "not allowed" to withdraw "large amounts of cash" from an otherwise unencumbered bank account.
Last time I needed a couple thousand in cash, I had to fill out a paper form stating what I will do with the money. One time I told them "I will party in my home country" and they denied
Also, "the bank likes to make sure elderly people are not being scammed/abused", which is a common problem when someone suddenly wants to take all their cash out. The bank indeed has a duty to advise its clients if a wire transfer, etc. might be a more suitable way to do what they need.
People I know who have $250k in cash or cash like assets generally keep it in a mix of dollars, euros (one paranoid guy I know has a bunch of Canadian dollars - no idea why), junk silver, gold / silver bars (for the former, you're talking about $150k just for a 1kg bar), a collection of watches that appreciate in value, and so on. To quote one guy, "I want to make sure we can wear my family's wealth", which they indeed did (for no good reason, they're just from a cultural background that leads to them being paranoid about banks) when they moved from Scandinavia to Australia - watches, gold bars, etc. on them and their children's persons, valued easily north of $300k in current money.
I don't feel the parent post is about bad envy. There is also good envy, when you feel happy for someone's blessings. But you also would like to have it for yourself.
In a working society, nobody should be able to throw away life changing money. Being rich is poisonous to society. Most of us suffer due to people hoarding money and humanity needs to overcome the concept of money generally.
“Life changing” money is relative. We take some family friends and their kids on a vacation every two years. Sometimes the bill is split, sometimes we cover most or all of the cost. We’re not rich, we just have extra money they don’t because of different life circumstances. But as a result we can help give them and their kids experiences they never would have had. Likewise some friends who are better off than we are were able to take us on a trip we could not have afforded on our own. Again they’re not rich, just a different set of life circumstances.
Now you might argue that “vacations” aren’t “life changing”, but I would certainly argue that if you never would have had the experience or seen the place then they absolutely can be. But even if not, I refer you back to the original thesis which is that “life changing” is relative. Because the sums of money we’re talking about would have been “pay my rent for a year”, “buy a reliable (used) car”, “reduce my student loan balance by nearly a third” sort of money. And those I think could all be reasonably said to be life changing sorts of things.
Finally I would suggest that if you are “throwing away” this sort of money on actually changing someone’s life, then you are by definition not “hoarding money” and can hardly be said to be poisoning society with your relative wealth.
Hoarding money is not economically prudent in a system designed with mild inflation. Money loses value sitting still, to grow wealth there has to be some action with a positive return. The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours...
I've spent a lot of time in communities trying to grow past 'money' and decided that the usual replacement is allegiance to some other ideology that aligns everyone's incentives to a common cause or cult. I'd rather have diverse incentives with a common language of cash.
If we cant grow past money as a species we are pretty much doomed. I'd rather have allegiance or community based incentives over monetary gain, given that most people on earth can't really afford life anymore and rack up debt so rich people can get richer.
The problem is that the same people who say this also argue in favor of optimal extinction.
There is clearly something broken about the neoclassical market economy where it is optimal to not have children and to collapse the ecosystem with climate change (the economist who got a riksbank price for his climate change work suggested that 4°C warming is economically optimal).
Capitalism also marked the end of humanity and is the single greatest force driving human extinction. But yall money driven brains cant comprehend that :)
And how is it driving human extinction? It’s lifted humans out of endless poverty and bringing a coming age of abundance, what world are you living in?
I guess my question to people that dislike capitalism, is - what do you want to see replace it? Capitalism with changes, Communism?
I don't think Humans can ever do anything other than capitalism because at the end of the day, a farmer making food and delivering it is just going to STOP working when he finds out a daycare owner has made $15 in 3 years without actually taking care of kids. And everyone just bubble wraps the explanation - and then they disallow anger. The farmer then writes up a proposal for starting a daycare and the food stops flowing. Everyone dies in communism.
Everyone dies in capitalism as well though. Everyone dies generally at some point in life.
Reality is, currently most of us are wage slaves and I'd love to work a little less and still be able to afford life. An alternative to capitalism would be socialism and killing corrupt people off.
I never claimed I was against tyranny. Tyranny thats emitted as rightful punishment from the masses is fine in my opinion. Single people having power emitting tyranny is a whole different topic. Its about outweighed consensus for me.
> The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours...
There are just purely economic problems caused by wealth inequality too because while money numbers can just keep going up infinitely, there are only so many real assets (and services like education and healthcare) that can be bought with those money numbers, so the higher the wealth of the top relative to everyone else, the easier they price everyone else out of the economy, which we are very much seeing the effects of over the last few years as things get increasingly K-shaped and the middle class vanishes.
All of this said, the last time and place I'm going to be snarky or critical of any one person's wealth is when they are voluntarily redistributing it to improve things for the common good.
Except this inflation is not a direct fee charged to every holder of money. Inflation primarily affects people purchasing consumer goods.
If anything, inflation is the hoarding.
Rich people indirectly hold money by owning shares in companies that hold the money on their behalf. If the money is paid out via stock buy backs, the money is in the hand of the investor. Said money is reinvested into companies, those companies may temporarily pay out salaries, but eventually the money returns back to the investor leading to a dynamic form of hoarding. They started with less money but ended up with more money. The only way dishoarding can happen is if the money is spent on consumption.
Let me repeat:
If you understand the above, then inflation doesn't impact the rich who don't consume anything. If anything the opposite is true. The government/central bank throws just enough money into the system to prevent the economy from collapsing from the hoarding since money is needed as a tool or utility the same way housing is needed. As far as we know the preferred method of giving out that money to cause inflation has never been helicopter money, it's been quantitative easing which historically benefits the capital markets more or basically made the government take on more public debt.
Then there is the fact that any system where income is proportional to ownership basically negates the impact of inflation for said income. If you earn 3% yield at 3% inflation you might say that this nets out to 0%, but it doesn't. In nominal terms that is still a net inflow of money. You might counter that multi billionaires only turn into trillionaires on paper from inflation but they are still just multi billionaires. The point is that despite this real yield of 0%, the total share of money held by said multi billionaires can still go up and increase inequality even if in real terms their actual wealth did not change simply because consumers pay inflation and the billionaires don't.
If you ever bothered doing even a little bit of research the standard solution to "growing past money" is either something like a demurrage currency or the banking version called oeconomia augustana by dieter suhr (the bank charges a liquidity fee on both positive and negative balances to encourage getting to 0 residual balances, the liquidity fee is automatically determined by competition between banks, it is essentially a private implementation of Keynes' bancor proposal).
Not sure about the motivation behind the comment, but small donations help too and provide you with a good feeling. Almost anyone here can probably part with the equivalent sum of money of a mobile phone plan in their country and split it across their most valued open source projects. I've honestly come to the conclusion that if you rely on open source software you simply should.
Many of us have probably been poor at some point (e.g. as a student, young adult), but most of us spend a significant amount of time in their life having means to contribute, even if only small.
I really do not understand how people talk about "Being rich / being a billionaire will make you fundamentally unhappy". Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness. There's diminishing returns, of course, but I'd hazard it looks a bit like ln(n), in that the returns are quite significant in the beginning.
Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money. How much money you need to accomplish that depends though.
Unhappiness and happiness are surprisingly orthogonal. Removing unhappiness does not make you happy, it makes you not unhappy[1]. Being not unhappy is a requirement for happiness, but it's not sufficient.
1: not unhappy is weird phrasing. Substitute not sad or not angry or not hungry or whatever for your particular state of unhappiness.
The person you are replying to agrees that money can get rid of things that cause unhappiness. The point is that removing unhappiness is only part of what creates happiness, and money can’t buy the other part.
> Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money
Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.
Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer?
At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more pathetic.
> Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.
Have you done the math of what life consists of for most people?
It's 9-to-5. Your life is DOMINATED - by large order of magnitude - by involuntary wage slavery.
Where you literally sell away your time for pennies on a dollar to a highest bidder.
That is the most painful thing in life, bar none, there is nothing worse than this. This is what ruins most of your health, ages you the most, causes most of the stress, which seperates you from spending more time with your family and loved ones and being free and doing what you want.
Unless the wage-slavery happens to be of enjoyable type for you. Which is bit of an outlier, lets be honest.
> From having no respect from your peers?
Most people automatically give respect and admiration to people with money, regardless if it's deserved or not.
> Will money save you from heartache? From being lonely?
Being a 9-to-5 wage-slave is ten times worse than heartache or loneliness. Or most other things.
If you're lonely and aren't able to distract yourself from heartache and you have boatloads money, you have SKILL ISSUES of the most severe kind.
Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life.
This, all day long... 9-5 is just the first job of the day if we're lucky.
Then there's the 7 to 2am second job, the 5 to 7 on Saturdays and Every Other Sunday.
Just to not actually have health insurance which is accepted at anything but the worst health care facilities in the region, with a 6 month waitlist for basic check-ups and a 60% fails or cancel for those appointments and reschedule 3 or more months away.
We are all ONE semi-serious illness or injury away from living out of a shopping cart under an overpass.
Money isn't the cure to ALL problems, but if the only problems you have left are the ones that cannot be solved by money, quit whining about being luckier than practically and statistically EVERYONE else. It is unbecoming and makes you look the fool.
Well said. This place has too many people who have never seen true poverty and people with the life drained out of them working shitty jobs just to be able to eat. Money has also directly lead to more happiness in my life.
In fact, it's almost a direct relationship.
The biggest impact isn't in the material objects it has allowed be to buy, but in the freedom it provides to self-actualize, to pursue activities and build skills that would've been near impossible if it weren't for money.
I don’t agree with you. Most of the things you mention are the same level of pain and unhappiness regardless of if you have, or not have money. The one with the peers is misguided because with enough money maybe you don’t need your peers! Freedom of choice.
Money won't cure pain and suffering (although it does make trial lawyers happy) but even there it can buy better care. But pretty much everything else in life is better and more enjoyable with more money. You can live in a nicer house, in a better neighborhood, with better schools, with better goods and services, with more things to do, etc. You can travel more, in a more comfortable style. You can support other projects, artists, charity, etc.
More money absolutely does make it easier to have social life. It absolutely does make it easier to cure curable diseases as well as live the life to the fullest when you have incurable diseases. And increasing your wealth is strongly correlated with gaining respect of people who were born into similar backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions as you were.
More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a romantic partner (fixes loneliness) and harder for them to later leave you (prevents heartache).
So, if you squint a little, money fixes 5 of the 5 listed problems.
Define happiness, but there's a baseline for not being miserable (I have enough to eat etc) and then there's actual satisfaction with your life.
If you doubt the thesis, consider the extreme examples of Musk and Trump. they have infinite wealth and power and are demonstrably, publicly miserable.
The consistently happiest people I've personally met are Buddhist monks of various sects, who have nearly nothing in terms of money or physical possessions.
One of the downsides of arguing over internet is that whenever you provide an argument that precisely counters the point person A has made, there comes person B who makes a completely different point than person A, but still treats my reply to person A as if I was replying to person B instead.
I define happiness as whatever the person before me defined it as. GP defined it as good health, love and respect of others. Thus, my reply to GP was focused on how money can be turned into good health, love and respect of others. Your definition of happiness is completely different. So of course my reply to you is going to be completely different. The definition of happiness we're operating on has changed since my last comment, after all.
You are conflating two diametrically different claims. One is that money makes people inherently happy. Which is so obviously wrong it's not even worth talking about. It's also something nobody in this comment section said. Least of all me.
The other claim is that money can be exchanged for things that indirectly will make some given person happier than without those things. In short - that money can buy happiness. Both "can" and "buy" are extremely important here. "Buy", as in money itself is useless unless it's exchanged for something. It's this something that you exchange money for that's supposed to increase happiness, not money itself. "Can", because everyone has a choice what they do with their money. You can use the same money to buy something that will make you happy, or to buy something that will not. Musk and Trump are extreme cases of people who could buy happiness but chose to buy something else instead, and are therefore deeply unhappy despite their wealth.
What do these "Buddhist monks of various sects" eat? Where do they get food from? Is eating part of what makes them happy, or just something they're forced to do to continue living? If it was somehow possible for them to continue living without eating, do you think they'd stop eating?
What do these Buddhists do when they're not eating? I assume whatever it is, it's what makes them happy. And the more time they dedicate to it, the more happy they become. By not eating, they'd free up time to do even more of the thing that makes them happy.
In real world, these Buddhist could stop growing food by hand and instead ordered catering. They would be exchanging money for more free time, which in turn would increase their happiness. Is that not so?
> One is that money makes people inherently happy. Which is so obviously wrong it's not even worth talking about.
Really. The mere fact of having large chunk of cash and resources, without necessarily even spending it as such - per say, can make people inherently happy-ier.
I'll give you an example: You can say NO whenever you wish. It reduces stress without having spent a single penny of it. It changes your attitude to life by mere fact of having it. Even if don't say NO (because situation doesn't call for it), having the mere option to say it at any given moment - makes you inherently happier and have a healthier attitude to life.
So not even this point stands. Money can make people inherently happy-ier. Without as much as even spending a penny extra as you would have had before you got the "big stash".
> If you doubt the thesis, consider the extreme examples of Musk and Trump. they have infinite wealth and power and are demonstrably, publicly miserable.
Trump/Musk without money would be more miserable I surmise.
Probably yes. If you consider dating to be a numbers game, money moves things into your favor greatly and will give you a chance to move past.
> From the pain of losing a loved one?
Money will help greatly, because for many people getting over loss involves therapy which costs money.
> From being lonely?
Money for many people buys companionship.
> From having no respect from your peers?
Given that people associate respect with money excessively, probably yes as well.
> From losing your health to incurable cancer?
Your chances of surviving cancer greatly scale with money.
Sure, there are limits to it, but absolutely access to money is tremendously pushing things towards happiness. I think it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise, at least in a capitalist society we all live in.
I don't think so. The original comment said reducing unhappiness leads to happiness with diminishing returns. This one said they are two different things.
And the remaining unhappinesses can end up in starker relief, as you continuously try to remove all unhappinesses from your life to nearly impossible and sometimes distorted degrees.
The problem isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s that it can remove your ability to endure the necessary amounts of unhappiness in life.
The terms I've learned to use is rather: Happiness, and Stressors.
If you need your car to earn money, and you don't have the money or other resources to repair it if it breaks - that's a huge uncertainty and a huge source of stress and worry. Liquid funds can remove that source of stress. More drastic examples would include rent or food.
That's why liquid funds can remove impediments and distractions from your life, but once all of those are gone, then what?
I own my home and land, could in a fairly straightforward fashion produce enough food to feed ourselves (although we don't choose to 100% rely on that), and have quality barter type relationships to repair vehicles, and technically could get by just fine with a bicycle for 95% of our transportation needs (although we don't choose to do that either).
Nonetheless, there are more stressors from other things that come along with that... like making personal choices to assist other people with housing, food, and transportation needs, because that's just what you kind of do when you've taken care of that for yourself but you see people around you with various kinds of needs.
It will not make you unhappy. It will just not make you happy. Big difference. The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.
The amount of money to get over that hump is small. Many people in poverty are happy. If you are at the very bottom with not enough to eat and such money can buy happiness, but you can be below the poverty line and still be about as happy as everyone.
This is a lie that people with money tell themselves to make themselves feel better about not giving away more of their money (ironically, proving themselves correct).
There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.
Quite a bit indeed. Forbes ran an article a few months ago claiming that a family of four with two incomes needs to be earning a combined $400K to be able to reasonably afford the paid child care needed for both parents to be working.
That hump is slightly above the average income level, so I wouldn't call it small. And it doesn't flatten at the hump -- people with more money are still generally happier, but the correlation does drop a lot.
No it's not. It might vary by country and culture but in the west that amount has consistently been found to be well over the poverty line and more often over double the median household income.
People conflate the ideas of happiness, and comfort. Money buys access to increasing levels of comfort, but comfort becomes normalized very quickly. Once you've become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, the luxury of it wears off and it becomes a new norm. You also have an expectation to, at a minimum, maintain wealth so that you don't lose access to your current level of comfort.
When people with 1X see people with 10X or 100X and go hey! Why aren't you doing more? That gives me hope. When these people succeed, they are exactly the type of people who will give back and derive happiness from it. The right person who acquires wealth can do a lot of good in the world.
> Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I don’t know what to do with it
What a hyper-capitalist statement. You are living a sad life if money and status is all that is driving you.
This person is free to do what they like. Family, friends, hobbies, philanthropy, … But apparently they have been stuck in a hamster wheel, chasing money and status their whole life, without ever stopping to think what they actually want or like, what is important to them.
I mean, the answer is so obviously in front of our faces right now... :-)
Use the free time to learn some Zig! And start a life of happily giving back powerful and useful GPL software to put your own 2 cents on the mountain of society building blocks that allowed you to thrive in such a way to begin with.
It's surprising how few people do this; mitchellh is the exception that proves the rule.
A lot of the really valuable open source software gets written by people who aren't wealthy and have full time jobs doing something other than writing open source software.
"money can't buy happiness" is a poor mans cope. It's a comforting lie for proletariat, the opium for the goycattle.
If you can't buy happiness either one of these is true:
1. You don't have enough money to buy it. Buying happiness isn't cheap.
2. You have skill issues.
Most people simply don't have enough money to test the hypothesis that "money can't buy happiness", for them earning money involves a lot of struggle and selling their time, and all sorts of opportunity costs.
Thus for working class people having more money is intrinsically linked to selling more of their time or "working harder" (having two jobs, overtime).
Therefore it seems unintuitive to them that having more money will bring hapiness. After all they have to work so hard for it and sell a piece of themselves for it.
And then there, of course, people with skill issues.
The more money I have, the happier I become. Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life, it has made me smile more!
Yeah, I think people have the correlation backward. I suspect that driven people are more likely to get rich and less likely to be happy, so there seem to be a lot of angry rich dudes.
Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
People who get rich by accident (e.g. lottery winners) typically spend it all and end up back where they started. Money is hard to hold on to for people who are unsophisticated about money. Predators and grifters come out of the woodwork to take a lot of it, and the rest gets frittered away on trinkets.
Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
I think this is quite defeatist thinking. A thousand people who donate $400 is also $400k and is well within the realm of most people here. A lot of non-profits also want the thousand people that donate $400, because $400 yearly from thousand people is much more robust long-term funding.
Recently a well-known Dutch journalist, who started an organization to critically follow big tag (and take them to court when necessary), raised 1.3 million Euro. Most of it is from people like you and me, who can chip in 10 Euro monthly. It's reliable, because most people just have a recurring donation set up.
Not to detract from mitchellh's pledge, because ideally you get both types of donations.
We're working on a subscription model (well, membership - it's nonprofit) that is in the $3 - $5 range per month per member (or annually for $30 - $50). The main reason for this is simply so members will feel buy-in and will be willing to participate more and sit on advisory committees and so forth, although the extra cash can be useful, but it's not the primary focus.
I think the point that above commentor was making is that mitchellh is likely more than a 1000 times as rich as most commentors here and that being able to out-influence over a 1000 people can be quite personally satisfying.
The kinds of people that become billionaires are not those who are happy, the hole in their sole is why they are billionaires in the first place. Yes there are exceptions, just like with everything.
You should probably have a billion dollars, you would do great things. But you probably shouldn't become a billionaire to get there. Being rich doesn't make one unhappy, but getting there does.
That relentless grind changes a person, much like the ring.
I applaud this, particularly as I view Zig as a viable alternative to rust for many applications. Do I think rust is a positive addition to the Linux kernel. Absolutely. Would I reach for rust or Zig first when I was implementing a real-time audio synthesizer if I had to choose between the two? Unless Rusteze, a Clojure dialect hosted on rust existed, I would choose Zig. I sense a hegemonic power growing behind rust, and I think we need to support a breadth of alternatives in how we invoke computation.
This is great IMO. I like zig as a language and the idea behind it. But boy, it has a syntax issue. I with they figure out better syntax before 1.0, developer ergonomics I think are as important.
Zig has multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but it's one of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
That is an opinion framed as a fact. There's plenty to rub a coder the wrong way, such as the sigil in builtin functions like @import, the dot syntax in structures (.{}, Timestamp{ .seconds = 0, .nanos = 0, };), triple slash comments (///), and multiline strings (beginning each with \\ - good luck grepping for escaped backslashes). However, that is just like any programming language - none is immune to this criticism.
the triple slash is only for doc comments, not normal code comments - those are still double slashes. also, why would you want to grep for escaped backslashes?
Lisps have multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but LISPs are some of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
Zig syntax has been mostly stable since 0.2, it is extremely unlikely it will change beyond tweaks. You have to go to Odin, C3 or (in the future) Jai for an alternative.
I really appreciate the "it's okay to be weird" sentiment. It has never been easier to try out a crazy idea. We may as well embrace it and try to learn something.
I wish Rich people did this more often. Not just rich people but rich companies. Not just rich companies but rich governments. But we are a broken society. People should be paying more to OSS for building digital infrastructure.
Another language that is in a similar space to Zig that I think deserves more attention, particularly for funding is Odin. While I think Zig is a great language, there is a consistency of design and simplicity to Odin that makes low-level programming more ergonomic and enjoyable to me. While Zig boasts a lot of impressive projects, Odin was used to build the JangaFX suite[1].
Ginger Bill, the Odin language developer, is openly hostile against package managers (he wrote a post called "Package Managers Are Evil") so he maintains his own wrappers of popular C libraries in vendor folder next to the compiler. That doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me.
I think zig is also highly opinionated but it always seemed to me that Andrew started from solid pillars and made an excellent job of carefully considering each feature that was added to the language:
- No hidden control flow.
- No hidden memory allocations.
- No preprocessor, no macros.
Odin on the other hand is just some developer's personal taste marketed as "Programming Done Right". So, if you disagree with any choice Bill made, you're not doing programming right.
> Ginger Bill, the Odin language developer, is openly hostile against package managers (he wrote a post called "Package Managers Are Evil") so he maintains his own wrappers of popular C libraries in vendor folder next to the compiler. That doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me.
There are good reasons for this (supply chain attacks, dependency hell), and while Odin doesn't have a package manager it does have a concept of a package. There is nothing stopping anyone from downloading and adding them to a project, in fact Odin developers do this already. The Odin core library is absolutely massive and contains a lot of what you would need for most projects, vendor rounds it out. The purpose is to be batteries included so your project doesn't have to rely on as many dependencies.
> I think zig is also highly opinionated but it always seemed to me that Andrew started from solid pillars
It's funny you say that, because I hold the same stance for how Odin was constructed, and the examples listed hold for Odin too. There is a lot about Odin's design that is consistent with Zig. Check it out, you might be surprised ;)
> Odin on the other hand is just some developer's personal taste marketed as "Programming Done Right". So, if you disagree with any choice Bill made, you're not doing programming right.
What do you think every programming language is trying to do? Solve the issues of the author. Bill has strong opinions about programming, so he made a language and a reasonably successful one at that. Given the swathe of people who would just complain, it's refreshing when people try to instead better the world relative to their values. Say what you will, he does it because he cares.
Appreciate Odin, especially the batteries included approach (simple to use structure of arrays, matrices, array programming, the context system for custom allocators, ...). To be fair though: the heavy lifting in JangaFX is likely done by a ton of C++ code, it being high performance real time graphics programming.
I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).
JangFX is the company I believe. They have many products. One of them, EmberGen (a fluid simulator), is fully written in Odin. No idea what the rest are written in.
I read it as a pledge to continue doing non-AI-LLM-slop work. End result could be interesting for everyone, on one side project with no-LLM policy and on the other side projects which heavily rely on LLMs.
In the short term we might not see the benefits, this pledge reads like: "Please keep doing what you are doing now, I am interested in how far it goes" (not in any negative sense)
Low value comment but obligatory to a superfan: mitchellh is based AF and it just keeps giving back. I switched to `ghostel` in emacs this weekend and it's give or take life changing.
I’m not going to personally donate a little under 0.1% of my net worth, and I may seem a hypocrite, but at some point you have to acknowledge that it’s a maddening, life changing amount of money that in no way would have a noticeable effect on his life. On the other hand, it could hurt most people’s ability to pay rent to give away that money.
Survival is mostly a fixed cost that is unmet by many people, while other people donate those who are less off’s life earnings to their fancies they vibe with. It’s gross. Unfortunately humans are not brave or imaginative enough to realise another system (99% tax on billionaires would be a start), but most people also hate the idea that someone in need would get something for free or at a low cost.
Billionaires have an extraordinary economic footprint and level of influence. They employ teams of people managing their affairs through their family offices [0].
I do not think they should be thought of or spoken of as individuals, they are brand entities. Their true intentions are as unknowable from scale and complexity and opacity as, I don't know, Macy's.
Commenting on if any specific billionaire is a uniformly good or bad person distracts from the more important conversation on what the optimal number of billionaires should be and what the tradeoffs are in recalibrating the system.
1. he's not a billionaire in large part due to giving away large amounts of wealth
2. would you rather allow a small number of people 10x more wealthy than Mitchell dictate our laws and culture, or would you prefer a more democratic approach?
Giving away less than 0.1% of your worth over 6 years doesn't prove anything about anything. It's cool for the Zig project though.
There are billionaires who gave over 99% of their wealth away by the time they died who make for much more debates with much more interesting exchanges.
I guess it depends on exactly what you're talking about, but my impression is that the primary "billionaires are bad" argument is simply that a system that allows billionaires to exist is inherently broken. A system that rewards people based on their actual contributions would not allow billionaires to exist.
The fact that some billionaires use their money to do good does not contradict that argument.
It is very likely that most billionaires are very bad.
That does not mean that there are no good billionaires. There are even billionaires who have become billionaires by being bad, but who nonetheless have attempted after that to do only good things, perhaps to atone for their past sins.
Mitchell Hashimoto appears to really be one of the good ones.
I have recently discovered the ghostty open-source terminal emulator, written by him in recent years, which appears to have some advantages that I value, over its competitors, and I have switched to it, after using a very large number of other terminal emulators in the past, and switching between them whenever I encountered a better one.
Therefore I am grateful to him for his good programming work, shared with the world.
Most of ghostty is written in Zig, so there is little doubt that he likes the language, thus there is no surprise that he is choosing it for a donation.
Has the Zig team/community warmed up towards other systems-ish languages?
This is speaking from recollection engaging with programming communities years back - I found the Rust community to be interested and respectful of Zig but it didn’t seem to be well reciprocated, if anything much the opposite.
What a word of wisdom right there, the bit about internet is beautiful because it's ok to be weird - this is often the opposite on twitter, fb, reddit and many discords where if you have a different opinion you get mobbed by angry comments making one feel worse about their own weirdness.
It is increasingly important to be able to see that many things are true. There is no single "truth". Many things are true at the same time, and in all aspects of life. Each brain is like a band pass filter, and the effort we should make is to try to imagine the points of view of others, which are just different slices of the same world. Then embrace the slices we like, and just ignore the ones we don't, but don't argue or fight for our slice as it if was the only one.
To clarify, there are formal truths: widely-accepted hard science, e.g. “2 + 2 = 4”. Technically, there’s a point where we can’t fundamentally prove anything (“if a tree falls and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?”), and rarely we get things wrong (e.g. classical physics)….but in practice, these are true, end of discussion.
Then there are informal truths: e.g. “the Earth is round”, “the sky is blue”, “Gala apples are red”. You can nitpick them (the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, the sky is only blue during the day in areas without high pollution, Gala apples may be pinkish or have yellow blotches, or exceptional discoloration), endlessly or until they become formal (possibly by becoming self-referential). But in practice, these are also true (like formal truths; although it’s important to know the difference because…)
The problem is, there’s no line between an informal truth and uncertainty/opinion that isn’t true. Like you know ##FF0000 is red and ##00FF00 is not, but there’s no exact color that separates “red” and “not red” (it depends on person, mood, surroundings…) Consequently, unlike formal truths, informal truths have false implications (“fuzzy logic”). An informal truth can be phrased in a “misleading way”, priming the reader for a false implication (a formal truth can be phrased in a convoluted or unintuitive way, but interpreted formally, never leads to a false implication).
The vast majority of discussion is not formal. Even the smartest people constantly fall for false implications. And this isn’t completely solvable, because we fundamentally can’t formally define everything (too much detail): we tried with GOFAI, it failed and its successor, neural networks, informally defines things like us (by forming a lossy model of the world, then generalizing it).
> rarely we get things wrong (e.g. classical physics)
Curious, do you think quantum physics is the end of the line? I wouldn't claim to have a good understanding of anything beyond classical physics, but I've just assumed it's turtles all the way down and at some point we'll find serious issues with the quantum model
I think you’re right and quantum physics is false in some subtle way. We already found experiments that contradict existing theories in quantum physics, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem
But it’s true enough to detect subtle gravitational waves, build clocks accurate to the nanosecond, and other amazing things.
The fundamental physics that underlie everyday life are known. We know that general relativity and the standard model of particle physics aren't fully compatible, but that's only at very short scales or very high gravity, those aren't relevant to everyday life. We're able to model single-particle and even few-particle systems on an astonishing degree of accuracy (1 part in 1e9, I believe down to measurement error). We can't model the 1e25 particles because in the brain to explain consciousness it's an exponential problem but in principle with unlimited time and memory we could turn the crank on the equations.
2+2=4 is only a formal truth up to the axioms of arithmetic and how we denote numbers. The statement is not statement with regards to objective reality.
The statement is a formal truth exactly because it only exists inside the symbolic universe constructed by humans, not despite.
You are right.
You're being pendantic. Choose whatever symbol you want for "2" and "4". The point is that if you have symbol apples and someone gives you symbol more, than you have an agreed-upon number in total.
It's not being pedantic. With different assumptions you can make a system where 2 + 2 = 0 and it turns out to be extremely useful. You can also build a system where 2 + 2 = 22 like the other commenter lampoons and the free monoid that corresponds to is again useful.
If we had a radically different perspective (like Borges' Funes the memorious), you can imagine how adding wholly distinct objects might seem ridiculous and derive some other wacky system of arithmetic instead.
Of course, you could alternatively derive it from set theory, but you might also end up with something fundamentally different than what the grandparent intended like presburger or skolem arithmetic.
But “2+2=4”, in the specific formal system that is common arithmetic, is true.
Furthermore, you can translate “2+2=4” to any other formal system (your examples, “2+2=10 (base 4)”, “2+2=1 (mod 3)”, etc.), and it’s still true.
“2+2=4” is a universal truth, just expressible in different ways.
What do you mean by universal truth in this context?
Agreed-upon, as in subjective.
The objectivity is in the relations.
If you define a system where “2 + 2 = 5”, but also “a square has 5 corners”, “carbon has 5 covalent bonding positions”, etc. your system is coherent, but you actually are stating the abstract property “2 + 2 = 4” in common math, just using the symbol “5” to represent what’s commonly represented as “4”. A bit confusing, a less confusing example is common math, substituting “2” with “B” and “4” with “D”, so “B + B = D, a square has D corners, …”
If you define a system where “2 + 2 = 5, a line segment has 2 ends, a square has 4 corners, 4 < 5”, you’re objectively wrong (unless you’re taking common math and substituting more than digits)…if you extend this system you’ll find contradictions (what happens if you combine 2 parallel line segments of the same length at that length distance?), especially if you try to apply it to the real world.
You are not objectively wrong. You have simply defined an incoherent abstract system in language. The claim you have made simply does not compute in the system in question. Regardless, that claim is not a claim about the objective world, however that may be defined.
>widely-accepted hard science, e.g. “2 + 2 = 4”.
Except we live in a world where people do argue 2+2 could also be 22 ( Because they use Javascript /s ) Which is basically people believe what they want to believe in. Rationale rarely works.
I think the biggest problem is not that there may be many truths, but that people don't even bother seeking out the best evidence or reasoning against their truths.
Especially in tech, for which there are basically only tradeoffs.
I use Zig in most things lately, and I use AI. I have a high quality standard (that AI honestly sometimes makes difficult to meet), but my github has never been more active:
https://github.com/pmarreck/
I have a really good code-review skill (which I'm actually in the middle of updating, but it's here): https://github.com/pmarreck/llm_skills/blob/yolo/deep-code-r...
I also have a pretty neat (although arguably janky) way for LLM agents in different tmux terminals to talk to each other: https://github.com/pmarreck/llmsend
The problem arises when there are contradictory truths, and defenders of one or both sides refuse to dig deeper to both self-reflect on what they believe to be true, and perhaps come to a deeper more correct understanding.
There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality. Maybe you agree with that, but your wording is messy. It's true that different perspectives can yield their own particular bits of truth, if that's what you're saying.
"Objective reality" is only the source for the least interesting truth. The truths that really get people fighting over concern best courses of action, moral matters, aesthetic issues, and things like that, where there isn't some singular objective truth (and even if there was, nobody has access to it).
> thinks like that
These aren’t truths. It’s cases like “is the earth flat?” that have an answer in objective reality and people still argue about it where some people are simply wrong.
What's addressed as truth is not some holy artifact handed out for us by God, or what some theory of Logic defines as such.
It's what people consider and call a truth. Language terms are defined by use.
And people absolutely argue, fight, unite, or even go to war, for the version of those that they'll consider and call the truth of such matters.
The English language has multiple independent definitions of the same word. You’re misusing that ambiguity here.
“sincerity in action, character, and utterance” is different than “the body of real things, events, and facts”
This distinction very much exists in how people talk about such things. You don’t need to “have faith” that something like gravity exists such that when you trip you can fall down. “We hold these truths to be self evident” isn’t how you talk about the distance between NYC and Boston.
>“sincerity in action, character, and utterance” is different than “the body of real things, events, and facts”
So? I didn't refer to truth in the former sense.
I said there are several kinds of meanings of the term "truth", and that the one that's about mere facts about things that can be measured objectively (the stricter version of your second definition) is the least interesting one.
The truths of the "We hold these truths to be self evident” variety, the truths of "this proposal is really bad", "this behavior is wrong", "this person is guilty", and many others even more nuanced varieties, are the ones that matter, and for those objective reality is nowhere near the "single source of truth", if it even applies at all.
> So
By acknowledging that nobody considers these objective truths, there’s nothing interesting to say on the topic.
You were playing around with the linguistic ambiguity for whatever reason using a different definition than was used by “There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality.” and I called you out on it. Thus the subject dies.
>By acknowledging that nobody considers these objective truths, there’s nothing interesting to say on the topic
On the contrary, that's where most interesting things to say happen in the real social world. From relationships all the way to wars.
>You were playing around with the linguistic ambiguity for whatever reason using a different definition than was used by “There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality.” and I called you out on it.
Nope, you were limited by the one definition you had in mind, unable to understand that real world, real people, don't constraint themselves to it, and argue regarding the truth or falsehood in all kinds of things that are not bound to "objective reality".
In other words, you pedantically erased most of human life and discource on the truth (not to mention the incovenient other philosophical and dictionary definitions of it) with "well, ahchtually".
> you were limited by the one definition you had in mind
Intentionally misunderstanding what someone said is at best wordplay, and wordplay is fucking boring.
Stop being boring.
You say that, but some people really do give you a hard time if you try to assert that there is one, definite, objective reality.
Uh, what is objective reality?
What is objectivity?
“There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.” — Nietzsche:On the Genealogy of Morals III
It's a target. Objectivity does not appear in nature in a stable form. Nothing is fixed and certain. Some things just appear that way from our point of view.
"The universe is made of stories, not atoms."
My own addendum: the atoms are stories, too.
Aspects of reality that are shared by all possible subjects.
What is.
Different opinion != being weird.
Yeah, well, that's just, like...
[flagged]
> nternet is beautiful because it's ok to be weird - this is often the opposite on twitter, fb, reddit and many discords where if you have a different opinion you get mobbed by angry comments making one feel worse about their own weirdness
which is ‘funny’ because by offline standards the average redditor will probably be seen as weird
It's fun when subreddits or Discords are premised on a specific subtype of weirdness. There, you'll get mobbed if you're normal.
I think it makes perfect sense for Zig to have their stand against LLM contributions while consumers of the compiler/Zig project overall use whatever code aids they like. Building a language is not a matter of churning out as much greenfield code as possible, but in careful consideration of whether or not some feature and its implementation fits coherently into the entire overall language. It's upstream of so much, and we now have decades and decades of examples where just letting rip with new additions renders a language schizoid and unergonomic. An LLM's tendency to "yes, of course, and," to any suggestion is not what a healthy language project needs, but it can be tremendously useful for someone employing a balanced and ergonomic language to generate products. I'm glad to see Mitchell keeping a cool head as the unfortunate tendency in so many devs to take sides and get dogmatic plays out yet again.
This is not the main reason for the ban. You can read the linked post in the article that explains the AI ban thing in more depth.
If you're unsure about spending the time to learn Zig, I really recommend watching the following interview with the creator of Zig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ convinced me more than any design doc or blogpost could
It's soo good, just watched it before.
Very interesting, but wild to me how much this guy resembles Elon (in not only appearance but also mannerisms and way he speaks)
> this guy resembles Elon
What an awful thing to say about a person.
Finally someone else notices it!
Yeah he's like the light side Elon. Happy with his life, his family, his choices. Content. Zen.
Absolutely
It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty
I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.
I use Ghost TTY coming from iTerm for no other reason than I saw everybody else using and praising it.
Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.
> Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.
Among the "GPU rendered terminal" options, afaik Ghostty is the only one that has proper search/context menus, tabs, and scroll bars. I'm sure it's easy to get by without, but compared to the overall value-add of these terminals (which exists indeed but isn't tremendous either) I find it quite a significant downgrade, so I appreciate that Ghostty has both.
For me,
* available on Linux and macOS
* settings easy to transfer, just a file
* comes with Jetbrains Mono Nerd font built-in, no need to install it separately
* supports ligatures
I personally like how I barely had to configure it, how nerd fonts just worked, and how nicely it renders text
It’s not quite finished, give it time to mature. But pretty good already.
Yeah, it's a good polished piece of software no doubt. I'm not denying that, but the hype it gets is just... I don't know.
Agreed, though it hasn’t been excessive in my experience. Just that the devs are better at marketing than others. Really shows how important that side of the equation is. Wish I was better at it myself.
> Just that the devs are better at marketing than others.
I will "quietly" self-plug Terminal Click [0] because Ghostty and TC have discussed their differences in the past (check out the Media page.)
I'm definitely not ready to do splashes of any kind, because what Ghostty lacks in novelty Terminal Click lacks in polish.
[0] https://terminal.click
input latency. the time from pressing a key to showing on-screen is much lower with ghostty (I can't find exact number, but it seems to handle input 2-4x quicker. So around 15ms instead of 60ms).
Also just the general render pipeline is way faster in ghostty. There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow. Ghostty is attempting to improve the experience to allow for more things to be built in the terminal.
> input latency.
I guess, but I have a hard time caring about 1/22 of a second of additional latency when iTerm works so well overall.
> There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow.
Such as?
Splits can have different font sizes
This doesn't seem like a particularly compelling feature to me, but iTerm can do this too (since the person you replied to mentioned iTerm, this seems relevant).
I'd love to hear what made you settle on ghostty. There is not dearth of terminal emulators out there, each claiming performance or batteries included.
I'm not the commenter, but for me ghostty was good for being a Very Good terminal experience with almost no config required.
Just checked and the config file for my daily use terminal setup is 3 lines long. 3! That means I know I can chuck it on any system, any clean re-install, and it'll be Fine. That counts for a lot when you've grown tired of endless config tweaking.
Same for me.
My config is a couple lines longer, but other than font-family, font-size, color theme and a couple of other settings I didn't need to change anything else.
I definitely spent way less time configuring it to suit my needs that I did with any other terminal I used before.
Same. Almost everything works out of the box, with great defaults.
Seconded. I keep hearing about ghostty but I have yet to see a strong enough justification about how it is _that_ better. I use konsole and has significantly more user friendly screen to manage settings. I heard about ghostty's performance so I did some timing tests and ghostty was faster than konsole but not that much - not in any perceptibly significant measurable sense.
I went from Alacritty to Ghostty for ligatures and some other small goodies. I could probably get those same goodies with Kitty, but I didn't want to try nor have the desire to try. I may go back to Alacritty if I grow tired of Ghostty.
I've always found ligatures (fi, ff, ffi etc) really ugly. Or are you talking about using them for hacked purposes (-> in C)?
Then again I don't put different foods on my fork when eating - which seems relevant.
`==`, `===`, `->`, `-->` are more pleasant to read with ligatures on. It's silly, but nice.
I never got the speed thing. Ghostty at least seems slower on my machine compared to foot(client).
I tested kitty, foot, and ghostty on my machine when picking a terminal and ghostty was the slowest of the 3. I'm using kitty now.
YMMV because this is just one data point (but the most important data point for me)
libghostty is a bigger contribution, it's being embedded left and right.
i switched from iTerm 2 on macOS because it would get bogged down sometimes or occasionally lag. it’s been noticeably faster and i appreciate the file-based config as well as the defaults, leading to my config being under 5 lines.
on linux i use the default terminal in gnome which is ptyxis now iirc and haven’t felt any need to switch.
Don't you miss the crazy configuration options that iterm2 has?
the craziest thing i did with its config was to swap the profile being used based on the pattern of the instance’s hostname the terminal was logged into. The idea was to make the terminal background red on production hosts to give a visual indicator to avoid running anything destructive on prod hosts.
Splits can have different font sizes
The ctrl-tab tab switching behaviour being round-robin instead of stack[1] is what is keeping me on Konsole. None of the newer consoles (for Linux) seem to have this.
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2393
I can see that both styles could be useful to different types of users. Why not make it an option?
> however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty
Is that meant as an argument in favor of "another $400k for Zig" or against it?
I like Ghostty, but investing $800k to develop a programming language that is primarily known for producing a terminal emulator doesn't sound like a particularly strong argument in its favor.
Genuine question. I’m not trolling.
It's just a recognition of things done.
If there is a greater message, most people could probably put a similar amount of work on a project for the community.
Not many can write a lege cheque for a cause. Many who can, do so and consider their job done.
It's a credit for someone to be able to do one but choose to do both.
> I use AI heavily. I've written about my AI adoption journey and shipping real features with AI assistance. I'm also quite vocal about remaining rational about its capabilities and frustrated with its negative impacts on open source.
> The point is that I have opinions. Those opinions don't fully align with ZSF's approach. And yet, I have nothing but respect for ZSF: the people, the policies, and the project. Part of what makes the internet and open source great is that projects can be weird and different. They can set unusual boundaries, build their own culture, and pursue quality in ways that won't make sense to everyone.
Mitchell does feel like the adult in the room when other people are having chain-saws and acting irrationally for a lack of better term (for example jared/bun controversy which the post just somewhat touches on)
(Mitchell's tweet about AI psychosis is genuinely influential and is now a pointer to what this phenomenon might be)
I really think him and simon's opinions are somehow decently nuanced opinions on AI that the internet has to offer.
Now glazing of mitchell aside, I am happy that zig foundation gets such amount of money and I am really excited that Zig an independent language is able to get the level of love that it does.
There is a famous talk by the creator of Elm on the economics of independent programming languages and how its hard for them to get sponsored if they aren't already working at a company (Rust was created at Mozilla, Golang was created by Google)
This is a real issue that is true for most of open-source and I am just happy that we are atleast moving slowly towards some good as well. Its an uphill battle with multiple lows but I am happy for the positive changes as it gets as open source does have a special place in my heart as it taught me about privacy and many of your hearts as well.
As things are right now, I see this as a respectable way of operating.
Michael has made his views and usage of AI known. The Ghostty project has a detailed AI policy for users to see and the team is willing to devote resources to enforcing a middle ground policy. The Zig project has a detailed policy taking a strict stance and as a result I expect they do not have expend as much resources when a contribution is suspected of being AI assisted.
A strict policy on either side is easier to enforce based on finite resources (mostly people). I'm sure many projects would like to have a middle ground policy but cannot currently devote the resources it would require long term. We might never see a shift in moderation abilities and this remains for the longer term, or there could be advanced in moderation that allows projects to adopt a more nuisanced policy that's right for them.
> Michael has made his views
Assume you meant Mitchell?
Yes. I think autocorrect got me on mobile keyboard.
$400k is serious money and will certainly help keeping the Zig team funded. I must gratulate Andrew and the team on their ability to create a product that is creating this kind of enthusiasm from its users.
One thing that’s sometimes overlooked though is that all donations are something that we’re grateful for, regardless of amount. If you have little to spend then even $1 a month is an investment that rivals $10000 by someone rich.
Also worth remembering is that the vast majority of language projects aren’t operating at Zig’s scale. For smaller projects such as C3, even modest recurring support can have a meaningful impact on long-term sustainability.
It doesn’t need to be $100000s a month to make a huge difference.
I have been experimenting with modifying Ghostty lately. It's a well attended codebase and a pleasure to work with, props to Mitchell.
Since Ghostty is written in Zig, I ended up adding native Zig AST support in Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/...)
One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking
Mitchell Hashimoto, talk about putting your money where your mouth is. What a cool dude. Much respect!
Zig is really nice. I enjoy using it a lot. Glad to hear that it is getting a little more funding.
Adults responding in adult ways. Respect.
I started using zig more heavily for some edge device ML inference projects lately after watching Andrews jetbrains interview and it really really resonating with me on a personal level.
Am also really overall enjoying the language, it def has some rough spots regarding documentation and the stdlib but overall has been very nice to work with in neovim.
I can't throw 400k but I'll go ahead and pledge some dollars towards it as well.
Donations to the Zig Software Foundation largely go to contributors to the language. Meanwhile, donations to the Rust Foundation largely go into pockets unknown.
The key difference is that the Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.
Major props to Mitchell (and his family) for these donations.
It must be pretty satisfying to be able to throw that kind of money at stuff you admire.
You can 'throw' what you can afford and it will feel as satisfying. Just try it.
Seems obvious the parent comment was making a point about how much money it is and not just whether it feels nice to donate money. 400k can go a long way
If you assume Hashimotos net worth is one billion dollars, a $400k donation is equivalent to a $400 donation if your net worth is one million dollars.
I don’t believe donating $400 really feels that satisfying, the impact is fairly negligible in most contexts whereas donating $400k can very visibly improve a lot of lives.
I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society.
> If you assume Hashimotos net worth is one billion dollars, a $400k donation is equivalent to a $400 donation if your net worth is one million dollars.
1. Net worth is significantly less than that (taxes + heavy philanthropy)
2. $400K donation is orders (plural) of magnitude off our actual philanthropic giving in total. This is just one donation.
While we have you here, I would like to say thanks, I disagree with you on a bunch of stuff in terms of opinions, perhaps less than I would expect, but I appreciate people who can and do put effort in supporting things they care about. And building things one can just feel good about, rather than always chasing a financial end game.
I am personally just tired of it, and it's brilliant to see someone thriving outside of the zone to working for work's sake. Even if the realities are different.
Hope we had more people like you whom we all could disagree with but mutually respect.
Cheers to a better future. (hope it wasn't too much waxing poetic but I feel like we are just too damn trapped in this tech bubble to value good moments these days)
Thank you for your donations. I didn’t mean to belittle your contribution, only the fact that people like you can make a much larger difference than people like me.
> I think this illustrates ... why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society.
isn't the accrued billion dollars what remains after a much larger amount was taxed at roughly 50%?
(of course could be spread across multiple years, but the essence remains)
How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?
> wasn't the accrued billion dollars the remainder after being taxed at a much higher rate (around 50% federal and state, if California) as it was being accrued?
Most capital owned by billionaires is not taxed until it is sold, so in the case of Hashimoto and others they most likely have not paid tax on the majority of their wealth.
> How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?
In the same way we calculate income tax, we make it up. Most numbers I see are between 1-3%. We could just start at 1% as that is the most conservative number.
He has this wealth as a function of having sold the equity in the company he co-founded, so in fact virtually all his wealth has already gone through a tax event at the federal and state levels.
50%? No, that’s for high wages. And previous taxation is irrelevant: we as a society get to choose what is taxed, and there’s no inherent reason why only a single tax should apply to someone. Sales taxes, for example (which disproportionately burden those with less wealth) are paid out of one’s already-taxed income.
> How would the "very small wealth tax" be calculated, that you propose?
It is possible to tax unrealized assets. We already do. For example, a property owner pays property tax based on the value of their property, even when they are not selling it.
It is possible for billionaires to borrow against their held assets. It is therefore also possible to calculate a tax on them.
It's possible to do so, but also makes a hostile environment for investment, which is why America hasn't done so yet.
If the idea of taxing unrealised gains and investments excites you, there is the EU... which here on HN is constantly being decried as unable to innovate in the startup space, get good startups going, accomplish anything with AI, and so forth.
The small wealth tax will be spent not on people but on growing the government’s bureaucracy. Take highly taxed states (eg CA) and no tax/low tax states (eg TX). You pay more for in state tuition for your children in the UC system as opposed to in state tuition in Texas.
There are some advantages to tax. But most of it is not spent on making lives of citizens easier.
I spent $120 on an alternator for someone and it made a very big difference in his life. So it can be meaningful.
> why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society
How? It'll just go to the gov. budget which will be mostly used to pay for bloated healthcare, military and interest.
>>If you assume Hashimotos net worth is one billion dollars, a $400k donation is equivalent to a $400 donation if your net worth is one million dollars.
It's not an equivalent. It's proportionally the same but it's completely different.
>>I think this illustrates just how much a billion dollars is and maybe why a very small wealth tax can be used for a lot of good in society.
If anything it illustrates taxes should be lower for people like Hashimoto. Giving even more money to the government instead of leaving it with people like Hashimoto will result in a huge net loss.
taxes should be lower for milioners and bilioners period. If we had regressive tax system where your tax rate is in negative correlation to your income, that would incentivise poor people to try to earn more and jump into higher bracket.
> If anything it illustrates taxes should be lower for people like Hashimoto
Billionaires who do good are the exception, which Hashimoto is.
People with that much wealth should keep their money and use it where they see fit. A "wealth tax" forces some people to sell stock since not everyone has liquid assets. The CA "wealth" tax was written in a way that they could instantly turn $1B -> $1M or $100K overnight without a vote.
So many reasons why it's not a good idea to have a wealth tax. But the biggest reason is that nearly all our tax money is going to fraud. This is why our economy would BOOM if we got rid of a lot of taxes and reduced our fed/state governments a LOT. I just want roads, military and police. There is no reason why we should allow our government to be weaponized or turned into a nanny state when SO much of they money they collect is wasted.
Corporations that provide money for causes is often looked at because it's an investment. The world can learn a lot of free market capitalism, but it keeps pretending that half the people won't just DIE in communism.
> nearly all our tax money is going to fraud
This is your brain on X.com.
While I agree that tax money gets wasted by the government, I must note that there exist other countries, explicitly not free market capitalist, where getting ultra reach is not the aim (crazy, eh?) and in the last 40 years they have come a long way in creating prosperity for everyone.
That is a very privileged out of touch comment to make, no offense.
In many(most?) parts of the world, $400 is the equivalent of months of good salary.
How is it out of touch? I donated much more than Hashimoto did relative to our net worths, but I cannot deny that I would have felt much more satisfied making a 1000x impact if I was a billionaire.
I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
> How is it out of touch? I donated much more than Hashimoto did relative to our net worths, but I cannot deny that I would have felt much more satisfied making a 1000x impact if I was a billionaire.
You have no way of possibly knowing this. And I bet you its not true.
I'm no longer a billionaire, partially because I paid an astronomical amount in taxes (I don't play the tax avoidance games). And partially because we're donating a whole lot more than $400K per year. This is ONE donation. We don't publicize most of our giving because it attracts armchair critics like you, and its distracting from the goals.
(I make an exception for Zig and technical things because my influence for better and worse usually is net positive for the initiative)
But, more importantly, I don't think playing these "my donation is worth more than yours" games is productive. If you want to think that way thats fine, I won't defend myself or my family any further than this post.
> You have no way of possibly knowing this. And I bet you its not true.
I do know this for a fact because my income has 10x over the course of my career and as I have made larger donations to match my increased income I do feel more satisfaction.
I’m not trying to belittle what you are doing, I am replying to someone who said to the order of “you can just be like mitchelh by donating as well” which I don’t think is true due to the orders of magnitude more impact that large donations can result in.
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The problem is that when government spends $1,000,000 on your halfway house, it provides instant relief. It creates beds. The next year the government does it, the number of employees has doubled and it creates 20% more beds instead of the original amount. The third year it creates no beds and we find that 10% of the beds are gone, and the number of employees is now 1000. The government didn't care how well the money was invested.
Now if you invest $6000 and no one else was doing it, they would probably have created some percentage of 1 bed out of it. And if 18 other people invest $100 each maybe that's enough to complete the bed for a year. And if those altogether 19 people hear that the money went to good use, they donate again and they tell their friends. Maybe the halfway house in 10 years starts earning $25k per year and they keep costs low and the beds start increasing, they rent more space.
The government forced funding breaks it and turns it into a fake jobs program, the community funding it actually makes the service accountable.
This is just bad government, not government.
Public spending on things that require (a) maintainance (as almost all things do) (b) are massively less functional if the investment is not sustained (as many things are) is inherently going to lead to suboptimal results. It's equally bad if private entities do this, but for one reason or another, people seem to bitch about this less, because, well "freedom" etc.
Public spending (private too!) is also bad if it creates unnecessary bureaucracies and unnecessary obstacles. This can be tricky because defining "unnecessary" requires a set of values and these may not be universally accepted.
So, if you have a government program that behaves as in your hypothetical example, then the problem is inefficiency, corruption and waste, not government.
It seems reasonable, though, to observe that some areas of government spending seem to largely get funnelled into contracts with the private sector where a great deal of money is spent, yet the actual problem is seemingly never fixed. An example of this is L.A.'s "homeless industry"; billions of dollars are spent, yet the problem gets worse and worse. Eventually, one considers that the purpose of the system is what it does - create cushy jobs for those administering the private-sector agencies that receive the lion's share of this government spending, away from any public accountability.
This is a bit tautological or something ... I acknowledged that there is waste, inefficiency and corruption in government.
The problem is when people identify government as the problem, rather than those 3 attributes.
I think the private contractors getting government funding are more of the problem.
Only if that process involves waste, inefficiency or corruption. Which it might, or it might not.
We still don't have a working model of a government doing a good job in the real world when it comes to carte blanch giving groups money. It does work really well when it's on the private side. The crux of the issue is that I pay too much in Taxes for 30% of it to be spent on downright fraud. Whether that is daycare scams, military spending scams, hospice scams, etc...
Since about 30% of my lifetime pay goes to taxes, and I am estimated over my entire life to make about $7m in salary. $1M of that is taxed, so potentially 300k of money is going to SCAMS.
Think about it, what if the government just decided tomorrow to give back all this money. I could finally afford to buy a house! But instead of me being able to buy a house, let's put another million bucks in a suitcase to fly to Mogadishu.
Hashimoto did more valuable work than you and then he is in position to do more impact wherever he pleases.
>>I donated $6000 to a halfway house last year and that doesn’t even come close to covering a single bed for a year. If I was a billionaire I could have built an entire halfway house.
We need some mechanism to select people who makes the choice. Popularity/lying contest (politics) ain't it. People making money conducting honest business is the best mechanism we have.
Why would I believe for one moment that someone who is successful at selling widgets should be deciding what resources to allocate to a homeless shelter?
So far, nobody has come up with something better than democracy.
> People making money conducting honest business is the best mechanism we have.
What percent of billionaires have made it through “honest business”?
I’m sure glad Zucc stole all my personal info to sell to advertisers so he can decide where society allocates its capital.
I for one am glad that "let's just all follow bluecalm's hackernews comments" isn't how we select people who make "the choice".
A few things to note. 1 billion isn't a thousand times a million. If you make a conservative 5% let's say out of your net worth, you still need to work with a million, whereas you don't with a billion. So, technically, $400 with a million is some amount of work hours, whereas $400k with a billion is just pocket change taken out of more than most people lifetime's of earnings that is just 1 year of your interest.
Also, a lot more people (more than 1000x) have $400 to give than $400k so in a sense if people with $400 to give were all being very generous, they could amount to a lot more than what billionnaires could give.
> 1 billion isn't a thousand times a million.
What?
The point they were trying to make was that if you take appreciation of assets into account, if your billion is appreciating by a relatively modest 5% per year, you are passively earning 50 million/year. Whereas someone with one million passively earns 50 thousand/year. One is enough to live in luxury anywhere in the world for several lifetimes, the other is enough to live comfortably in some parts of the US (or like a king in many parts of the world) but not enough to throw 6 figures at a programming language foundation for fun.
This is a common but silly claim; there is, generally speaking, no such thing as a safe rate of return that overcomes the inherent losses due to inflation. If you're getting a 5% rate of return on cash, that comes with both risk (someone with a billion dollars isn't going to benefit from FDIC insurance) and doesn't even overcome basic inflation.
That $50 million a year is also subject to income taxation and cannot be easily avoided. $50 million a year in interest on returns from cash will be hit at the 37% marginal rate, plus whatever the state assesses, so north of 50% in California.
Or to take an intermediate value, $10 million is 500k a year and most people will find it difficult to spend that much on themselves, so it’s going to grow on its own and compound. It will grow more rapidly if some is invested in the stock market.
Also, donating appreciated stock avoids taxes. This donation may have come out of a donor-advised fund.
Rich people can make substantial charitable donations rather easily and make a big difference. I suggest we encourage them.
Thanks, that is much clearer than my wording.
Perhaps he was making a subtle point about liquidity.
Ah there is liquidity too, but your brother comment makes my point clearer.
About liquidity, yes most people with a million net worth actually have more than half in their house, so technically it is much harder for them to throw cash than somebody with a billion and a much smaller % of their worth in illiquid assets such as property or unlisted companies. I wish I had made this point too.
I don't know man, maybe read the rest of the comment? Are you serious?
A salary of $400,000 is approximately 40 times the world median salary, which is estimated to be around $10,000 per year.
~400–800 million people (top 5–10% of global earners) could easily pay $833/month without major struggle, assuming they earn >$100,000/year.
So 90% people couldn’t even afford to pay a whole month of salary to a median earner without major struggle.
~3.6 billion people (45% of the global population) can likely afford to drop a $0.25 coin in a hat for a street artist without financial struggle. But that might not feel exactly the same as giving a whole month of median salary, let alone 40 years of it.
The type of money I can throw at stuff wouldn't pay a salary of a full-time dev for 2.5 years (if not more).
Pledge what you can. If everyone does this, it adds up. I have a $100/month slush fund I have set aside for Patreon/OS projects I like and use. It's a drop in the bucket, but something. Even $5/month can go to VPS hosting or something.
Somehow I feel it’s probably less satisfying if your contribution pays for a couple hours of developer time compared with the annual salary for an entire team. It’s probably more satisfying to be able to move the needle than not.
there are many non profits that rely on volunteer labor, but they still need funds to operate, amounts of $10k can move the needle quite effectively
i don't think my bank will let me withdraw 400k in cash with the reasoning of "I want to throw it"
Your bank might ask you why you want 400K in cash versus a wire transfer or some other mechanism, but it's not "to approve of your reasoning". They might require some time to physically bring $400,000 in cash to the branch you're at.
I could, perhaps, see them wanting to be cautious if you appear to be having an obvious mental health crisis (but even then, as a paramedic I've heard more than one tale of families ruined by the spending of someone who was unmedicated and bipolar).
I could even potentially see there being a law enforcement issue of creating a panic or riot, exaggerated for example: "I'm going to take this money and throw it on the tracks at a train station and people can see how much risk they're willing to take to get it".
But "you have to give us an acceptable reason"? No. I am of comfortable but not exorbitant means (lower six digit salary), and my cash withdrawal limit, by default, is $15K/day. And the one time I asked for that to be raised temporarily, the only questions I got were for an additional piece of identification, and that they were able to call the contact numbers they had for me on my account to verify that it was me who picked up the call. Not "for what purpose, sir?"
Just call your dedicated wealth manager.
Maybe it was a bank transfer.
i guarantee you it was a stock transfer, that's where the real tax write-offs come in.
you give a $200k donation, get a $200k writeoff, saves you about 50% (100K) in taxes you owe, so it's like the government is kicking in $100k and you are kicking in $100k and whatever the govt would otherwise spend the $100K on goes unfunded.
Those are limited to $25k/day for my current bank. Are those not limited elsewhere?
That's only a default limit. You can talk to your bank to allow more, e.g. for buying a house or a car.
No.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe he paid with a Centurion Card! Who knows.
your bank owns your money?
It's the norm in the US (and pretty much everywhere else with well-implemented developed financial infrastructure) for banks to apply extra scrutiny and roadblocks to large withdrawals. There's a patio11 article going over some of the reasons [0], but it notably generates paperwork for the bank reporting the withdrawal to the government and enables a lot of fraud to allow immediate access.
[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/two-americas-one-bank...
yes, I have to apply in advance if I want to withdraw large amounts of cash and it has to be approved.
This is more 'multi-factor authentication' than deciding what you can spend your money on
> I have to apply in advance
Banks try to avoid holding excessive amounts of cash in suburban branches because it makes them attractive armed robbery targets. If you have a need for a large amount of cash, you can let them know (my bank says 24-48 hours in advance), go to multiple branches, or to a large city branch. Inconvenient, perhaps, though temporary. If it's for a business or a recurring need your bank is generally happy to make that part of their regular logistics, "Monday's cash delivery needs X because asimovDev regularly wants $50,000 in cash every Wednesday".
> it has to be approved
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I don't think it's "approved" in the sense of the bank deciding if you're allowed to do so. But hmm: multiple ID checks, or a specific seniority of bank employee doing the check. Or if you decide you want to take out $250,000 and you have to do it in cash, they might a) want a day or two to physically acquire the cash, and/or b) have additional security due to their insurance policy. They certainly might try to suggest you look at a cashier's check or wire transfer or other instrument to do so. There's going to be a CAR for any transaction involving more than $10,000 in cash.
But I'd challenge the assertion that the bank tells you you're "not allowed" to withdraw "large amounts of cash" from an otherwise unencumbered bank account.
Last time I needed a couple thousand in cash, I had to fill out a paper form stating what I will do with the money. One time I told them "I will party in my home country" and they denied
Think of it less as "the bank owns your money" and more "the government likes to watch large cash flows moving around".
Also, "the bank likes to make sure elderly people are not being scammed/abused", which is a common problem when someone suddenly wants to take all their cash out. The bank indeed has a duty to advise its clients if a wire transfer, etc. might be a more suitable way to do what they need.
People I know who have $250k in cash or cash like assets generally keep it in a mix of dollars, euros (one paranoid guy I know has a bunch of Canadian dollars - no idea why), junk silver, gold / silver bars (for the former, you're talking about $150k just for a 1kg bar), a collection of watches that appreciate in value, and so on. To quote one guy, "I want to make sure we can wear my family's wealth", which they indeed did (for no good reason, they're just from a cultural background that leads to them being paranoid about banks) when they moved from Scandinavia to Australia - watches, gold bars, etc. on them and their children's persons, valued easily north of $300k in current money.
EDIT: comment was under incorrect parent. my error. moved it to correct location.
EDIT2: Actually it’s more interesting. The commenters seem have changed their wording away from what I was criticizing.
Original observation: Try to purge envy from your heart. It’s a poison.
There was originally a lot of dark envy in this thread but interestingly it’s been revised out to be more subtle.
I don't feel the parent post is about bad envy. There is also good envy, when you feel happy for someone's blessings. But you also would like to have it for yourself.
Or you can just be excited that $400k is getting dumped into Zig, and without onerous strings attached. That's an unmitigated good thing.
I don't feel a need to know too much about the particulars of mitchellh's life or what else he spends his money on.
Nah this is definitely bad type of envy you can look at the full discussion and additional comments from the user.
In a working society, nobody should be able to throw away life changing money. Being rich is poisonous to society. Most of us suffer due to people hoarding money and humanity needs to overcome the concept of money generally.
“Life changing” money is relative. We take some family friends and their kids on a vacation every two years. Sometimes the bill is split, sometimes we cover most or all of the cost. We’re not rich, we just have extra money they don’t because of different life circumstances. But as a result we can help give them and their kids experiences they never would have had. Likewise some friends who are better off than we are were able to take us on a trip we could not have afforded on our own. Again they’re not rich, just a different set of life circumstances.
Now you might argue that “vacations” aren’t “life changing”, but I would certainly argue that if you never would have had the experience or seen the place then they absolutely can be. But even if not, I refer you back to the original thesis which is that “life changing” is relative. Because the sums of money we’re talking about would have been “pay my rent for a year”, “buy a reliable (used) car”, “reduce my student loan balance by nearly a third” sort of money. And those I think could all be reasonably said to be life changing sorts of things.
Finally I would suggest that if you are “throwing away” this sort of money on actually changing someone’s life, then you are by definition not “hoarding money” and can hardly be said to be poisoning society with your relative wealth.
Hoarding money is not economically prudent in a system designed with mild inflation. Money loses value sitting still, to grow wealth there has to be some action with a positive return. The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours...
I've spent a lot of time in communities trying to grow past 'money' and decided that the usual replacement is allegiance to some other ideology that aligns everyone's incentives to a common cause or cult. I'd rather have diverse incentives with a common language of cash.
If we cant grow past money as a species we are pretty much doomed. I'd rather have allegiance or community based incentives over monetary gain, given that most people on earth can't really afford life anymore and rack up debt so rich people can get richer.
Capitalism is the single greatest force for improvement in the human condition. Money is the foundation of capitalism.
If you went to school and believe what you write then you went to terrible schools.
The problem is that the same people who say this also argue in favor of optimal extinction.
There is clearly something broken about the neoclassical market economy where it is optimal to not have children and to collapse the ecosystem with climate change (the economist who got a riksbank price for his climate change work suggested that 4°C warming is economically optimal).
Capitalism also marked the end of humanity and is the single greatest force driving human extinction. But yall money driven brains cant comprehend that :)
And how is it driving human extinction? It’s lifted humans out of endless poverty and bringing a coming age of abundance, what world are you living in?
It's causing unhindered exploitation of resources and corruption. We are going to burn the very last tree on earth for chump change.
I guess my question to people that dislike capitalism, is - what do you want to see replace it? Capitalism with changes, Communism?
I don't think Humans can ever do anything other than capitalism because at the end of the day, a farmer making food and delivering it is just going to STOP working when he finds out a daycare owner has made $15 in 3 years without actually taking care of kids. And everyone just bubble wraps the explanation - and then they disallow anger. The farmer then writes up a proposal for starting a daycare and the food stops flowing. Everyone dies in communism.
>Everyone dies in communism.
Everyone dies in capitalism as well though. Everyone dies generally at some point in life.
Reality is, currently most of us are wage slaves and I'd love to work a little less and still be able to afford life. An alternative to capitalism would be socialism and killing corrupt people off.
> killing corrupt people off
Cool cool that doesn’t sound tyrannical at all
I never claimed I was against tyranny. Tyranny thats emitted as rightful punishment from the masses is fine in my opinion. Single people having power emitting tyranny is a whole different topic. Its about outweighed consensus for me.
> Capitalism is the single greatest force for improvement in the human condition.
Capitalism has done a lot of good in the world, and it has also done a lot of bad.
The problem isn't that capitalism exists, it is that far too many people treat it as a religion rather than a tool.
> The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours...
There are just purely economic problems caused by wealth inequality too because while money numbers can just keep going up infinitely, there are only so many real assets (and services like education and healthcare) that can be bought with those money numbers, so the higher the wealth of the top relative to everyone else, the easier they price everyone else out of the economy, which we are very much seeing the effects of over the last few years as things get increasingly K-shaped and the middle class vanishes.
All of this said, the last time and place I'm going to be snarky or critical of any one person's wealth is when they are voluntarily redistributing it to improve things for the common good.
Except this inflation is not a direct fee charged to every holder of money. Inflation primarily affects people purchasing consumer goods.
If anything, inflation is the hoarding.
Rich people indirectly hold money by owning shares in companies that hold the money on their behalf. If the money is paid out via stock buy backs, the money is in the hand of the investor. Said money is reinvested into companies, those companies may temporarily pay out salaries, but eventually the money returns back to the investor leading to a dynamic form of hoarding. They started with less money but ended up with more money. The only way dishoarding can happen is if the money is spent on consumption.
Let me repeat:
If you understand the above, then inflation doesn't impact the rich who don't consume anything. If anything the opposite is true. The government/central bank throws just enough money into the system to prevent the economy from collapsing from the hoarding since money is needed as a tool or utility the same way housing is needed. As far as we know the preferred method of giving out that money to cause inflation has never been helicopter money, it's been quantitative easing which historically benefits the capital markets more or basically made the government take on more public debt.
Then there is the fact that any system where income is proportional to ownership basically negates the impact of inflation for said income. If you earn 3% yield at 3% inflation you might say that this nets out to 0%, but it doesn't. In nominal terms that is still a net inflow of money. You might counter that multi billionaires only turn into trillionaires on paper from inflation but they are still just multi billionaires. The point is that despite this real yield of 0%, the total share of money held by said multi billionaires can still go up and increase inequality even if in real terms their actual wealth did not change simply because consumers pay inflation and the billionaires don't.
If you ever bothered doing even a little bit of research the standard solution to "growing past money" is either something like a demurrage currency or the banking version called oeconomia augustana by dieter suhr (the bank charges a liquidity fee on both positive and negative balances to encourage getting to 0 residual balances, the liquidity fee is automatically determined by competition between banks, it is essentially a private implementation of Keynes' bancor proposal).
Wicked people will be wicked with or without money.
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Not sure about the motivation behind the comment, but small donations help too and provide you with a good feeling. Almost anyone here can probably part with the equivalent sum of money of a mobile phone plan in their country and split it across their most valued open source projects. I've honestly come to the conclusion that if you rely on open source software you simply should.
Many of us have probably been poor at some point (e.g. as a student, young adult), but most of us spend a significant amount of time in their life having means to contribute, even if only small.
The most beautiful form of power.
what was your original comment? I’m pretty sure it was a lot more critical sounding.
I really do not understand how people talk about "Being rich / being a billionaire will make you fundamentally unhappy". Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness. There's diminishing returns, of course, but I'd hazard it looks a bit like ln(n), in that the returns are quite significant in the beginning.
Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money. How much money you need to accomplish that depends though.
Unhappiness and happiness are surprisingly orthogonal. Removing unhappiness does not make you happy, it makes you not unhappy[1]. Being not unhappy is a requirement for happiness, but it's not sufficient.
1: not unhappy is weird phrasing. Substitute not sad or not angry or not hungry or whatever for your particular state of unhappiness.
The person you are replying to agrees that money can get rid of things that cause unhappiness. The point is that removing unhappiness is only part of what creates happiness, and money can’t buy the other part.
> Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness
> Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money
Was it too hard to read beyond the first comma?
> Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money
Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.
Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer?
At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more pathetic.
> Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.
Have you done the math of what life consists of for most people?
It's 9-to-5. Your life is DOMINATED - by large order of magnitude - by involuntary wage slavery. Where you literally sell away your time for pennies on a dollar to a highest bidder.
That is the most painful thing in life, bar none, there is nothing worse than this. This is what ruins most of your health, ages you the most, causes most of the stress, which seperates you from spending more time with your family and loved ones and being free and doing what you want.
Unless the wage-slavery happens to be of enjoyable type for you. Which is bit of an outlier, lets be honest.
> From having no respect from your peers?
Most people automatically give respect and admiration to people with money, regardless if it's deserved or not.
> Will money save you from heartache? From being lonely?
Being a 9-to-5 wage-slave is ten times worse than heartache or loneliness. Or most other things.
If you're lonely and aren't able to distract yourself from heartache and you have boatloads money, you have SKILL ISSUES of the most severe kind.
Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life.
This, all day long... 9-5 is just the first job of the day if we're lucky.
Then there's the 7 to 2am second job, the 5 to 7 on Saturdays and Every Other Sunday.
Just to not actually have health insurance which is accepted at anything but the worst health care facilities in the region, with a 6 month waitlist for basic check-ups and a 60% fails or cancel for those appointments and reschedule 3 or more months away.
We are all ONE semi-serious illness or injury away from living out of a shopping cart under an overpass.
Money isn't the cure to ALL problems, but if the only problems you have left are the ones that cannot be solved by money, quit whining about being luckier than practically and statistically EVERYONE else. It is unbecoming and makes you look the fool.
Exactly where is this dystopia you speak of? It certainly isn't the case where I live right now (in the U.S.)
Well said. This place has too many people who have never seen true poverty and people with the life drained out of them working shitty jobs just to be able to eat. Money has also directly lead to more happiness in my life.
In fact, it's almost a direct relationship.
The biggest impact isn't in the material objects it has allowed be to buy, but in the freedom it provides to self-actualize, to pursue activities and build skills that would've been near impossible if it weren't for money.
I agree money doesn’t buy happiness, but money can go a long way to helping with those problems.
For example, money can pay for better medical care.
I don’t agree with you. Most of the things you mention are the same level of pain and unhappiness regardless of if you have, or not have money. The one with the peers is misguided because with enough money maybe you don’t need your peers! Freedom of choice.
And money does certainly buy health in the US.
Money won't cure pain and suffering (although it does make trial lawyers happy) but even there it can buy better care. But pretty much everything else in life is better and more enjoyable with more money. You can live in a nicer house, in a better neighborhood, with better schools, with better goods and services, with more things to do, etc. You can travel more, in a more comfortable style. You can support other projects, artists, charity, etc.
More money absolutely does make it easier to have social life. It absolutely does make it easier to cure curable diseases as well as live the life to the fullest when you have incurable diseases. And increasing your wealth is strongly correlated with gaining respect of people who were born into similar backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions as you were.
More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a romantic partner (fixes loneliness) and harder for them to later leave you (prevents heartache).
So, if you squint a little, money fixes 5 of the 5 listed problems.
None of that makes you happier.
Define happiness, but there's a baseline for not being miserable (I have enough to eat etc) and then there's actual satisfaction with your life.
If you doubt the thesis, consider the extreme examples of Musk and Trump. they have infinite wealth and power and are demonstrably, publicly miserable.
The consistently happiest people I've personally met are Buddhist monks of various sects, who have nearly nothing in terms of money or physical possessions.
One of the downsides of arguing over internet is that whenever you provide an argument that precisely counters the point person A has made, there comes person B who makes a completely different point than person A, but still treats my reply to person A as if I was replying to person B instead.
I define happiness as whatever the person before me defined it as. GP defined it as good health, love and respect of others. Thus, my reply to GP was focused on how money can be turned into good health, love and respect of others. Your definition of happiness is completely different. So of course my reply to you is going to be completely different. The definition of happiness we're operating on has changed since my last comment, after all.
You are conflating two diametrically different claims. One is that money makes people inherently happy. Which is so obviously wrong it's not even worth talking about. It's also something nobody in this comment section said. Least of all me.
The other claim is that money can be exchanged for things that indirectly will make some given person happier than without those things. In short - that money can buy happiness. Both "can" and "buy" are extremely important here. "Buy", as in money itself is useless unless it's exchanged for something. It's this something that you exchange money for that's supposed to increase happiness, not money itself. "Can", because everyone has a choice what they do with their money. You can use the same money to buy something that will make you happy, or to buy something that will not. Musk and Trump are extreme cases of people who could buy happiness but chose to buy something else instead, and are therefore deeply unhappy despite their wealth.
What do these "Buddhist monks of various sects" eat? Where do they get food from? Is eating part of what makes them happy, or just something they're forced to do to continue living? If it was somehow possible for them to continue living without eating, do you think they'd stop eating?
What do these Buddhists do when they're not eating? I assume whatever it is, it's what makes them happy. And the more time they dedicate to it, the more happy they become. By not eating, they'd free up time to do even more of the thing that makes them happy.
In real world, these Buddhist could stop growing food by hand and instead ordered catering. They would be exchanging money for more free time, which in turn would increase their happiness. Is that not so?
> One is that money makes people inherently happy. Which is so obviously wrong it's not even worth talking about.
Really. The mere fact of having large chunk of cash and resources, without necessarily even spending it as such - per say, can make people inherently happy-ier.
I'll give you an example: You can say NO whenever you wish. It reduces stress without having spent a single penny of it. It changes your attitude to life by mere fact of having it. Even if don't say NO (because situation doesn't call for it), having the mere option to say it at any given moment - makes you inherently happier and have a healthier attitude to life.
So not even this point stands. Money can make people inherently happy-ier. Without as much as even spending a penny extra as you would have had before you got the "big stash".
> If you doubt the thesis, consider the extreme examples of Musk and Trump. they have infinite wealth and power and are demonstrably, publicly miserable.
Trump/Musk without money would be more miserable I surmise.
> Will money save you from heartache?
Probably yes. If you consider dating to be a numbers game, money moves things into your favor greatly and will give you a chance to move past.
> From the pain of losing a loved one?
Money will help greatly, because for many people getting over loss involves therapy which costs money.
> From being lonely?
Money for many people buys companionship.
> From having no respect from your peers?
Given that people associate respect with money excessively, probably yes as well.
> From losing your health to incurable cancer?
Your chances of surviving cancer greatly scale with money.
Sure, there are limits to it, but absolutely access to money is tremendously pushing things towards happiness. I think it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise, at least in a capitalist society we all live in.
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I don't think so. The original comment said reducing unhappiness leads to happiness with diminishing returns. This one said they are two different things.
And the remaining unhappinesses can end up in starker relief, as you continuously try to remove all unhappinesses from your life to nearly impossible and sometimes distorted degrees.
The problem isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s that it can remove your ability to endure the necessary amounts of unhappiness in life.
The terms I've learned to use is rather: Happiness, and Stressors.
If you need your car to earn money, and you don't have the money or other resources to repair it if it breaks - that's a huge uncertainty and a huge source of stress and worry. Liquid funds can remove that source of stress. More drastic examples would include rent or food.
That's why liquid funds can remove impediments and distractions from your life, but once all of those are gone, then what?
I own my home and land, could in a fairly straightforward fashion produce enough food to feed ourselves (although we don't choose to 100% rely on that), and have quality barter type relationships to repair vehicles, and technically could get by just fine with a bicycle for 95% of our transportation needs (although we don't choose to do that either).
Nonetheless, there are more stressors from other things that come along with that... like making personal choices to assist other people with housing, food, and transportation needs, because that's just what you kind of do when you've taken care of that for yourself but you see people around you with various kinds of needs.
It will not make you unhappy. It will just not make you happy. Big difference. The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.
What that always leaves out, however, is that no/little money can very much cause a lot of unhappiness.
The amount of money to get over that hump is small. Many people in poverty are happy. If you are at the very bottom with not enough to eat and such money can buy happiness, but you can be below the poverty line and still be about as happy as everyone.
This is a lie that people with money tell themselves to make themselves feel better about not giving away more of their money (ironically, proving themselves correct).
There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.
Quite a bit indeed. Forbes ran an article a few months ago claiming that a family of four with two incomes needs to be earning a combined $400K to be able to reasonably afford the paid child care needed for both parents to be working.
That hump is slightly above the average income level, so I wouldn't call it small. And it doesn't flatten at the hump -- people with more money are still generally happier, but the correlation does drop a lot.
No it's not. It might vary by country and culture but in the west that amount has consistently been found to be well over the poverty line and more often over double the median household income.
> The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.
I'm willing to test this theory out, send me some money.
People conflate the ideas of happiness, and comfort. Money buys access to increasing levels of comfort, but comfort becomes normalized very quickly. Once you've become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, the luxury of it wears off and it becomes a new norm. You also have an expectation to, at a minimum, maintain wealth so that you don't lose access to your current level of comfort.
When people with 1X see people with 10X or 100X and go hey! Why aren't you doing more? That gives me hope. When these people succeed, they are exactly the type of people who will give back and derive happiness from it. The right person who acquires wealth can do a lot of good in the world.
A recent example: https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-...
> Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I don’t know what to do with it
What a hyper-capitalist statement. You are living a sad life if money and status is all that is driving you.
This person is free to do what they like. Family, friends, hobbies, philanthropy, … But apparently they have been stuck in a hamster wheel, chasing money and status their whole life, without ever stopping to think what they actually want or like, what is important to them.
The whole section about him working for DOGE to "embark on a journey to save our government" tells you everything you need to know about him.
Point and laugh at the man who is honest about what he feels
OTOH, that’s probably how they got rich, and why I’ll never be.
I mean, the answer is so obviously in front of our faces right now... :-)
Use the free time to learn some Zig! And start a life of happily giving back powerful and useful GPL software to put your own 2 cents on the mountain of society building blocks that allowed you to thrive in such a way to begin with.
It's surprising how few people do this; mitchellh is the exception that proves the rule.
A lot of the really valuable open source software gets written by people who aren't wealthy and have full time jobs doing something other than writing open source software.
"money can't buy happiness" is a poor mans cope. It's a comforting lie for proletariat, the opium for the goycattle.
If you can't buy happiness either one of these is true:
1. You don't have enough money to buy it. Buying happiness isn't cheap.
2. You have skill issues.
Most people simply don't have enough money to test the hypothesis that "money can't buy happiness", for them earning money involves a lot of struggle and selling their time, and all sorts of opportunity costs.
Thus for working class people having more money is intrinsically linked to selling more of their time or "working harder" (having two jobs, overtime).
Therefore it seems unintuitive to them that having more money will bring hapiness. After all they have to work so hard for it and sell a piece of themselves for it.
And then there, of course, people with skill issues.
The more money I have, the happier I become. Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life, it has made me smile more!
Being rich doesn’t make you unhappy.
But spending your life pursuing an unsatisfiable goal (because the goal is “more”) probably isn’t good for your happiness.
Not to mention, there are very satisfying ways to contribute to things you think are important that don’t necessarily involve a lot of money.
Because the most vocal rich people in this age seem to have an unusual lack of empathy and just being able to enjoy themselves.
Yeah, I think people have the correlation backward. I suspect that driven people are more likely to get rich and less likely to be happy, so there seem to be a lot of angry rich dudes.
Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
I wonder what is better, for people, for society, having many rich angry people or having many poor angry people?
How about let's aim for neither ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People who get rich by accident (e.g. lottery winners) typically spend it all and end up back where they started. Money is hard to hold on to for people who are unsophisticated about money. Predators and grifters come out of the woodwork to take a lot of it, and the rest gets frittered away on trinkets.
So they did improve the lives of the people around them.
Nailed it.
Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
I think this is quite defeatist thinking. A thousand people who donate $400 is also $400k and is well within the realm of most people here. A lot of non-profits also want the thousand people that donate $400, because $400 yearly from thousand people is much more robust long-term funding.
Recently a well-known Dutch journalist, who started an organization to critically follow big tag (and take them to court when necessary), raised 1.3 million Euro. Most of it is from people like you and me, who can chip in 10 Euro monthly. It's reliable, because most people just have a recurring donation set up.
Not to detract from mitchellh's pledge, because ideally you get both types of donations.
We're working on a subscription model (well, membership - it's nonprofit) that is in the $3 - $5 range per month per member (or annually for $30 - $50). The main reason for this is simply so members will feel buy-in and will be willing to participate more and sit on advisory committees and so forth, although the extra cash can be useful, but it's not the primary focus.
I think the point that above commentor was making is that mitchellh is likely more than a 1000 times as rich as most commentors here and that being able to out-influence over a 1000 people can be quite personally satisfying.
The kinds of people that become billionaires are not those who are happy, the hole in their sole is why they are billionaires in the first place. Yes there are exceptions, just like with everything.
You should probably have a billion dollars, you would do great things. But you probably shouldn't become a billionaire to get there. Being rich doesn't make one unhappy, but getting there does.
That relentless grind changes a person, much like the ring.
I echo the sentiment in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630565
Yeah I feel the same about people who say they wouldn't know what to do when they retire. I have so many projects! I guess we are just different...
Yet most wealthy people don't act like that.
The wealthiest man on the planet looks to be quite miserable, insecure and bitter most of the time.
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I applaud this, particularly as I view Zig as a viable alternative to rust for many applications. Do I think rust is a positive addition to the Linux kernel. Absolutely. Would I reach for rust or Zig first when I was implementing a real-time audio synthesizer if I had to choose between the two? Unless Rusteze, a Clojure dialect hosted on rust existed, I would choose Zig. I sense a hegemonic power growing behind rust, and I think we need to support a breadth of alternatives in how we invoke computation.
> I sense a hegemonic power growing behind rust
Can you elaborate on this?
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This is great IMO. I like zig as a language and the idea behind it. But boy, it has a syntax issue. I with they figure out better syntax before 1.0, developer ergonomics I think are as important.
Zig has multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but it's one of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
That is an opinion framed as a fact. There's plenty to rub a coder the wrong way, such as the sigil in builtin functions like @import, the dot syntax in structures (.{}, Timestamp{ .seconds = 0, .nanos = 0, };), triple slash comments (///), and multiline strings (beginning each with \\ - good luck grepping for escaped backslashes). However, that is just like any programming language - none is immune to this criticism.
the triple slash is only for doc comments, not normal code comments - those are still double slashes. also, why would you want to grep for escaped backslashes?
Lisps have multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but LISPs are some of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
Zig syntax has been mostly stable since 0.2, it is extremely unlikely it will change beyond tweaks. You have to go to Odin, C3 or (in the future) Jai for an alternative.
Can you elaborate on what you find to be an issue?
For me, anytype and the everything is public
all fields are public. declarations are private to the file they're in by default and then public if you choose to make them public
I guess I should have been more specific. I'm not a fan of fields all being public
You're in luck regarding anytype: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/32099
https://matklad.github.io/2025/08/09/zigs-lovely-syntax.html
I'm not in the OSS world much so hopefully someone can help me understand: what does 700k buy you in OSS language development?
In the case of Zig, You can see their financial reports here:
https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/
Most of it goes to contributors.
Who are paid at a steady and relatively decent rate. That's cool.
$60 an hour is an absolute bargain for a developer who can operate at this level, particularly considering they aren't using AI tools.
https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials
I really appreciate the "it's okay to be weird" sentiment. It has never been easier to try out a crazy idea. We may as well embrace it and try to learn something.
Nothing more beautiful when game recognizes game.
I wish Rich people did this more often. Not just rich people but rich companies. Not just rich companies but rich governments. But we are a broken society. People should be paying more to OSS for building digital infrastructure.
I love this guy
Really cool to see Zig have strong support and a stable financial status <3
Another language that is in a similar space to Zig that I think deserves more attention, particularly for funding is Odin. While I think Zig is a great language, there is a consistency of design and simplicity to Odin that makes low-level programming more ergonomic and enjoyable to me. While Zig boasts a lot of impressive projects, Odin was used to build the JangaFX suite[1].
[1] https://jangafx.com/
Ginger Bill, the Odin language developer, is openly hostile against package managers (he wrote a post called "Package Managers Are Evil") so he maintains his own wrappers of popular C libraries in vendor folder next to the compiler. That doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me.
I think zig is also highly opinionated but it always seemed to me that Andrew started from solid pillars and made an excellent job of carefully considering each feature that was added to the language:
- No hidden control flow.
- No hidden memory allocations.
- No preprocessor, no macros.
Odin on the other hand is just some developer's personal taste marketed as "Programming Done Right". So, if you disagree with any choice Bill made, you're not doing programming right.
> Ginger Bill, the Odin language developer, is openly hostile against package managers (he wrote a post called "Package Managers Are Evil") so he maintains his own wrappers of popular C libraries in vendor folder next to the compiler. That doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me.
There are good reasons for this (supply chain attacks, dependency hell), and while Odin doesn't have a package manager it does have a concept of a package. There is nothing stopping anyone from downloading and adding them to a project, in fact Odin developers do this already. The Odin core library is absolutely massive and contains a lot of what you would need for most projects, vendor rounds it out. The purpose is to be batteries included so your project doesn't have to rely on as many dependencies.
> I think zig is also highly opinionated but it always seemed to me that Andrew started from solid pillars
It's funny you say that, because I hold the same stance for how Odin was constructed, and the examples listed hold for Odin too. There is a lot about Odin's design that is consistent with Zig. Check it out, you might be surprised ;)
> Odin on the other hand is just some developer's personal taste marketed as "Programming Done Right". So, if you disagree with any choice Bill made, you're not doing programming right.
What do you think every programming language is trying to do? Solve the issues of the author. Bill has strong opinions about programming, so he made a language and a reasonably successful one at that. Given the swathe of people who would just complain, it's refreshing when people try to instead better the world relative to their values. Say what you will, he does it because he cares.
You could use Zig's package fetching system for Odin vendor packages since they made it work with C libraries for Zig.
Zig doesn't have a centralized package management system though. It's all links to tar.gz/git with integrity hashes.
Appreciate Odin, especially the batteries included approach (simple to use structure of arrays, matrices, array programming, the context system for custom allocators, ...). To be fair though: the heavy lifting in JangaFX is likely done by a ton of C++ code, it being high performance real time graphics programming.
I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).
JangFX is the company I believe. They have many products. One of them, EmberGen (a fluid simulator), is fully written in Odin. No idea what the rest are written in.
Yay a big win for open source!
Now I wonder what other donations were deemed as much as - or more - useful.
I read it as a pledge to continue doing non-AI-LLM-slop work. End result could be interesting for everyone, on one side project with no-LLM policy and on the other side projects which heavily rely on LLMs.
In the short term we might not see the benefits, this pledge reads like: "Please keep doing what you are doing now, I am interested in how far it goes" (not in any negative sense)
Low value comment but obligatory to a superfan: mitchellh is based AF and it just keeps giving back. I switched to `ghostel` in emacs this weekend and it's give or take life changing.
Keep being the fuckin man.
I thought the correct way was to build everything on Zig, get butthurt when they don’t merge your slop, and then rewrite it in rust?
Is Bun's Zig fork called Bunzig ?
Huh, is there?
do good and talk about post
If I ever get "fuck you" money like Mitchell did, I plan to use his post-money life as an inspiration to "retire".
I have been using zig and it is so much better. I am thankful they are avoiding vibe slop in compilers.
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happy pride month
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Then do?
I'm curious - what's the point of this comment? Did you think the commentor was unaware of their own capacity for philanthropy?
I did but don't have 400k laying around lol
Doesn't this prove that Mitchell Hashimoto is probably the only "good billionaire"?
I thought all billionaires were bad?
I’m not going to personally donate a little under 0.1% of my net worth, and I may seem a hypocrite, but at some point you have to acknowledge that it’s a maddening, life changing amount of money that in no way would have a noticeable effect on his life. On the other hand, it could hurt most people’s ability to pay rent to give away that money.
Survival is mostly a fixed cost that is unmet by many people, while other people donate those who are less off’s life earnings to their fancies they vibe with. It’s gross. Unfortunately humans are not brave or imaginative enough to realise another system (99% tax on billionaires would be a start), but most people also hate the idea that someone in need would get something for free or at a low cost.
Billionaires have an extraordinary economic footprint and level of influence. They employ teams of people managing their affairs through their family offices [0].
I do not think they should be thought of or spoken of as individuals, they are brand entities. Their true intentions are as unknowable from scale and complexity and opacity as, I don't know, Macy's.
Commenting on if any specific billionaire is a uniformly good or bad person distracts from the more important conversation on what the optimal number of billionaires should be and what the tradeoffs are in recalibrating the system.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office
It's because you only hear about the loud ones. There are lots doing good work.
In particular Lauren Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs.
Warren Buffet is essentially bequeathed the majority of his wealth to good causes.
A lot of the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is phenomenal (despite the recent and disturbing Epstein news).
George Soros has funded a lot of good causes, depending on how far you want to believe the conspiracy theories.
Harris Rosen funded free daycares and university tuition to benefit an impoverished Orlando community.
Dolly Parton's philanthropy is legendary.
A lot of the Robber barons (Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller's) bequeathed to causes that Americans are still benefiting from today.
Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, pretty much gave the company away for environmental causes.
Chuck Feeney pretty much gave away 99% of his wealth.
I am sure there are some bad billionaires. That moniker is used to demonize them for the most part.
1. he's not a billionaire in large part due to giving away large amounts of wealth
2. would you rather allow a small number of people 10x more wealthy than Mitchell dictate our laws and culture, or would you prefer a more democratic approach?
Giving away less than 0.1% of your worth over 6 years doesn't prove anything about anything. It's cool for the Zig project though.
There are billionaires who gave over 99% of their wealth away by the time they died who make for much more debates with much more interesting exchanges.
I guess it depends on exactly what you're talking about, but my impression is that the primary "billionaires are bad" argument is simply that a system that allows billionaires to exist is inherently broken. A system that rewards people based on their actual contributions would not allow billionaires to exist.
The fact that some billionaires use their money to do good does not contradict that argument.
It is very likely that most billionaires are very bad.
That does not mean that there are no good billionaires. There are even billionaires who have become billionaires by being bad, but who nonetheless have attempted after that to do only good things, perhaps to atone for their past sins.
Mitchell Hashimoto appears to really be one of the good ones.
I have recently discovered the ghostty open-source terminal emulator, written by him in recent years, which appears to have some advantages that I value, over its competitors, and I have switched to it, after using a very large number of other terminal emulators in the past, and switching between them whenever I encountered a better one.
Therefore I am grateful to him for his good programming work, shared with the world.
Most of ghostty is written in Zig, so there is little doubt that he likes the language, thus there is no surprise that he is choosing it for a donation.
Has the Zig team/community warmed up towards other systems-ish languages?
This is speaking from recollection engaging with programming communities years back - I found the Rust community to be interested and respectful of Zig but it didn’t seem to be well reciprocated, if anything much the opposite.