6 ms·

> It seems a bit unfortunate to me that they've apparently already intending to never support future releases instead of planning on re-evaluating in the future

by johnfn 5mo ago

> It seems a bit unfortunate to me that they've apparently already intending to never support future releases instead of planning on re-evaluating in the future. On the other hand the yt-dlp developers definitely don't owe anyone anything. I think your final comment gets at it. If they said "OK, I am skeptical, so we're going to pause on updating to see how this Rust thing plays out" -- that sounds like a reasonable engineering decision. Saying "because they vibe coded we are dropping support for Bun" sounds political.

fmbb 5mo ago
Adding support again later is cheap. Stopping maintaining and testing support for upcoming versions is cheaper than doing that work. Sure it’s political but it is also just a sane approach, to stay away from such disruptive change and treat it as wait-and-see instead of tagging along for the ride. There is not really any technical upside to tagging along and promising support.
- dmix 5mo ago
  > Stopping maintaining and testing support for upcoming versions is cheaper than doing that work. If it’s based on predictions of how some alpha software might turn out in the future then I don’t see how you can claim it’s cheaper. If a bunch of new bug reports came in then you said no, then everyone would understand. This is pretty obviously ideological otherwise. Which is fine, but we shouldn’t pretend otherwise because we might agree with it
  - kelnos 5mo ago
    I think it's perfectly rational to take a wait-and-see approach when a dependency has been completely rewritten from scratch. That would still be rational if it had been rewritten by hand, and not by an LLM.
    - usef- 5mo ago
      This isn't a wait and see approach, this is proactively removing it
      - aragilar 5mo ago
        It's "we support 4 JS backends, we don't have the capacity to support 5 currently". They're not dropping bun entirely, instead bumping the minimum bun version and not supporting "bunv2" because they don't want to be beta testers.
        usef- 5mo ago
        Has the team announced that they're breaking backwards compatibility, or that testing will be reduced?
        soraminazuki 5mo ago
        No, the team mislead people by claiming the rewrite was experimental only to merge 1M lines of unreviewed code merely days later. Responsible software developers don't operate on blind trust, and both the Bun code and the maintainers are highly unpredictable at this point. That's more than sufficient technical grounds to drop an optional and replaceable dependency, especially since there are no user-facing consequences beyond the bruised egos of a cult following that demands blind loyalty to its tech‑bro leaders.
        usef- 5mo ago
        Who did they mislead? A few days later it was no longer experimental and it became the main dev branch as they decided it would be the way forward for development (see the blog post on why). No stable release has been declared yet. Here was the Bun team's message on merge: > It passes Bun's pre-existing test suite on all platforms (and fixes several memory leaks and flaky tests), the binary size shrinks by 3 MB - 8 MB, the benchmarks are between neutral and faster - and most importantly, we now have compiler-assisted tools for catching & preventing memory bugs, which have costed the team an enormous amount of development & debugging time over the years. > > The codebase is otherwise largely the same. The same architecture, the same data structures. Bun still uses few 3rd party libraries. No async rust.
  - fmbb 5mo ago
    I don’t thing maintaining and testing support for an extra runtime is free. It is by definition cheaper to not support extra runtimes like Kaluma, Elsa, WinterJS. Adding support is not just the initial work of adapting CI and writing policies, maintenance and support is ongoing work.
oytis 5mo ago
Vibe-coded code is a code no human has written, so no human truly understands how it works. It's a perfectly reasonable technical decision not to support such software, especially if actual human effoft is required for that
- rho_soul_kg_m3 5mo ago
  I wouldn't have problems with AI-generated code, but LLMs are not AIs, they are random sentence generators. They don't have logic, yet programs are logical constructs. So let's call this what it is: randomly-generated code, kinda sorta filtered by humans and tests. It's not because the output distribution has a good match with the expected distribution that it's not random. An LLM that is "hallucinating" is still working perfectly well and isn't doing anything different, in the same way that a straight-line fit through data points isn't "hallucinating" where it isn't overlapping the data points exactly.
  - seanw444 5mo ago
    I wouldn't say it's random. But I do like referring to them as statistical code generators.
  - cesarb 5mo ago
    > I wouldn't have problems with AI-generated code, but LLMs are not AIs, they are random sentence generators. AI includes a lot of technologies, LLMs being just one of them. Several of these technologies use probabilistic algorithms, so having randomness does not disqualify something from being classified as AI.
    - rho_soul_kg_m3 5mo ago
      And I didn't say it does. Intelligence is not necessarily deterministic, and being random is not the problem with LLMs. The problem is that they are not intelligent: they statistically mimic reasoning and logic, which still could have been acceptable except that they don't generalize well and have double-digit (at best single-digit) error rate percentages. They also have the worst possible failure mode imaginable: Producing erroneous output that looks perfectly fine and expertly-crafted. Imagine a food synthesizer machine. You press a button. 80% of the time you get a chicken sandwich, 20% of the time it beeps an error. That's OK. With the LLM version of that, 80% of the time you get a sandwich, 20% of the time you get what looks like a perfect sandwich except that it contains bits of plastic and metal, and you have to start eating it to find the pieces. "You're absolutely right! Food shouldn't contain bits of plastic. Let me synthesize that again."
gpm 5mo ago
> Saying "because they vibe coded we are dropping support for Bun" sounds political. I don't think "political" is necessarily a bad thing. Engaging in politics is how you shape the world. The mere act of writing and maintaining yt-dlp is quite political considering the context of IP law and enforcement that we live in. It happens that in this case that I'd disagree with their politics if that's why they are dropping Bun support - I think there's a great deal of value in moving to memory safe languages, little harm in accepting anthropic compute and funding to do so, and that use LLMs themselves is roughly value neutral (though many uses are very much not value neutral). That said reasonable people definitely disagree with me.
- johnfn 5mo ago
  That's not what I meant by political. I meant political in the more modern sense of "appealing to emotion rather than thought". EDIT: Everyone is rightfully calling me out that this doesn't make a lot of sense. What I meant is that the move is driven by ideology. I think there is a lot of overlap between politics and ideology, and an increasing amount of overlap between ideology and emotion. But it's fair enough to call me out here.
  - phoronixrly 5mo ago
    Wait, expecting all code to be verified and tested by a human is not engineering-driven but instead emotion-driven mindset???
    - zephen 5mo ago
      [flagged]
    - johnfn 5mo ago
      What code is fully, or even primarily, tested by a human? Haven't you heard of automated testing suites, regression testing, conformance testing..?
      - happytoexplain 5mo ago
cmiles74 5mo ago
I disagree it's a political stance, this reads like a technical decision to me. In my opinion, there is no vibe-coded project that's going to be reliable long term. Eventually there's too much code, too many bugs and the whole things slows to a halt. Or it gets too expensive to continue to be vibe-coded, because token cost. If they had decided to drop Bun for "AI assisted coding," that might strike me as a political decision.
truncate 5mo ago
> Saying "because they vibe coded we are dropping support for Bun" sounds political. I disagree that this is a political stance. People based on their experiences have formed opinions on whether they trust that model of development or not. Bun having taking extreme measure of going 100% in within a week is itself extreme positioning from their side which will likely result in extreme reactions because depending on who you are and your experience you'd bet on the fact that it may or may not work out.
- irishcoffee 5mo ago
  In all sincerity, what does political even mean in this context? ELI5, I’m a toddler when it comes to the politics of AI/LLMs.
  - truncate 5mo ago
    Its a polarizing world with AI. There are fanboys drinking the kool-aid blindly listening to whatever Sammy/Dario/... say as gospel, and on other side there are haters who again blindly reject the fact that these AI tools can be actually be useful. I think that's what the politics is.
    - johnfn 5mo ago
      Yes - exactly! I honestly thought I was going crazy when a bunch of people were saying that this decision wasn't political in the slightest.
    - irishcoffee 5mo ago
      I’m tracking the polarity of the whole movement, I didn’t understand how politics was attached. I desperately don’t want the whole thing to become a left vs right disaster. We have enough of those.
      - __loam 5mo ago
        You might not like it but you actually live in a world with other people and building technology often affects their lives and they have opinions on it. For AI a lot of that impact has been negative.
beej71 5mo ago
That wasn't my read, though. I think if they don't want to go with the vibe-coded version then they have to go with the last release before that. And presumably that last release won't be updated (except with the vibe-coded version). Therefore it makes sense to deprecate.
kibibu 5mo ago
What's wrong with yt-dlp - an app almost entirety driven by political stances - taking another one regarding llms?
kelnos 5mo ago
Why is it "political" to say "I don't trust software fully written by an LLM that has not been vetted by a human"? That feels like an entirely reasonable stance to take. And I see the argument/correction downthread that it's an "emotional" or "ideological" stance. Why does it have to be that? It seems completely rational and logical not to trust software written by a technology that is known to hallucinate and "cheat" to make tests pass. Of course, I can't say that the yt-dlp maintainer is or isn't being political/emotional/ideological when making this decision; none of us can know their true motivations without asking them, and I choose the charitable explanation unless shown evidence otherwise.
skywhopper 5mo ago
“Vibe coded” means “human programmers did not review the code”. So I think that’s an entirely reasonable line to draw that’s no more political than dropping support for some other project that suddenly decided to drop all unit testing or to refuse to do any security vetting.
boomlinde 5mo ago
What does "political" mean in this context? To me it seems obvious that yes, that is a political choice, as is every other choice a group of people make for themselves together.
yallpendantools 5mo ago
I'm repeating a point I made in a sub-thread but please WHY should the onus be on yt-dlp to review their decision on a project that has zero commitment to review their very code? I get the idea to "battle-test" the rewrite first but (a) how does one even determine a reasonable timeframe for battle-testing that much LOC and (b) each vibe-coded update pushed to the Bun upstream basically resets the battle-testing timer. I guess you could lag behind $LATEST by a given window but that just brings us back to (a).

by johnfn 5mo ago

fmbb 5mo ago

Adding support again later is cheap. Stopping maintaining and testing support for upcoming versions is cheaper than doing that work. Sure it’s political but it is also just a sane approach, to stay away from such disruptive change and treat it as wait-and-see instead of tagging along for the ride. There is not really any technical upside to tagging along and promising support.

dmix 5mo ago
> Stopping maintaining and testing support for upcoming versions is cheaper than doing that work. If it’s based on predictions of how some alpha software might turn out in the future then I don’t see how you can claim it’s cheaper. If a bunch of new bug reports came in then you said no, then everyone would understand. This is pretty obviously ideological otherwise. Which is fine, but we shouldn’t pretend otherwise because we might agree with it
- kelnos 5mo ago
  I think it's perfectly rational to take a wait-and-see approach when a dependency has been completely rewritten from scratch. That would still be rational if it had been rewritten by hand, and not by an LLM.
  - usef- 5mo ago
    This isn't a wait and see approach, this is proactively removing it
    - aragilar 5mo ago
      It's "we support 4 JS backends, we don't have the capacity to support 5 currently". They're not dropping bun entirely, instead bumping the minimum bun version and not supporting "bunv2" because they don't want to be beta testers.
      - usef- 5mo ago
        Has the team announced that they're breaking backwards compatibility, or that testing will be reduced?
        soraminazuki 5mo ago
        No, the team mislead people by claiming the rewrite was experimental only to merge 1M lines of unreviewed code merely days later. Responsible software developers don't operate on blind trust, and both the Bun code and the maintainers are highly unpredictable at this point. That's more than sufficient technical grounds to drop an optional and replaceable dependency, especially since there are no user-facing consequences beyond the bruised egos of a cult following that demands blind loyalty to its tech‑bro leaders.
        usef- 5mo ago
        Who did they mislead? A few days later it was no longer experimental and it became the main dev branch as they decided it would be the way forward for development (see the blog post on why). No stable release has been declared yet. Here was the Bun team's message on merge: > It passes Bun's pre-existing test suite on all platforms (and fixes several memory leaks and flaky tests), the binary size shrinks by 3 MB - 8 MB, the benchmarks are between neutral and faster - and most importantly, we now have compiler-assisted tools for catching & preventing memory bugs, which have costed the team an enormous amount of development & debugging time over the years. > > The codebase is otherwise largely the same. The same architecture, the same data structures. Bun still uses few 3rd party libraries. No async rust.
- fmbb 5mo ago
  I don’t thing maintaining and testing support for an extra runtime is free. It is by definition cheaper to not support extra runtimes like Kaluma, Elsa, WinterJS. Adding support is not just the initial work of adapting CI and writing policies, maintenance and support is ongoing work.

oytis 5mo ago

Vibe-coded code is a code no human has written, so no human truly understands how it works. It's a perfectly reasonable technical decision not to support such software, especially if actual human effoft is required for that

rho_soul_kg_m3 5mo ago
I wouldn't have problems with AI-generated code, but LLMs are not AIs, they are random sentence generators. They don't have logic, yet programs are logical constructs. So let's call this what it is: randomly-generated code, kinda sorta filtered by humans and tests. It's not because the output distribution has a good match with the expected distribution that it's not random. An LLM that is "hallucinating" is still working perfectly well and isn't doing anything different, in the same way that a straight-line fit through data points isn't "hallucinating" where it isn't overlapping the data points exactly.
- seanw444 5mo ago
  I wouldn't say it's random. But I do like referring to them as statistical code generators.
- cesarb 5mo ago
  > I wouldn't have problems with AI-generated code, but LLMs are not AIs, they are random sentence generators. AI includes a lot of technologies, LLMs being just one of them. Several of these technologies use probabilistic algorithms, so having randomness does not disqualify something from being classified as AI.
  - rho_soul_kg_m3 5mo ago
    And I didn't say it does. Intelligence is not necessarily deterministic, and being random is not the problem with LLMs. The problem is that they are not intelligent: they statistically mimic reasoning and logic, which still could have been acceptable except that they don't generalize well and have double-digit (at best single-digit) error rate percentages. They also have the worst possible failure mode imaginable: Producing erroneous output that looks perfectly fine and expertly-crafted. Imagine a food synthesizer machine. You press a button. 80% of the time you get a chicken sandwich, 20% of the time it beeps an error. That's OK. With the LLM version of that, 80% of the time you get a sandwich, 20% of the time you get what looks like a perfect sandwich except that it contains bits of plastic and metal, and you have to start eating it to find the pieces. "You're absolutely right! Food shouldn't contain bits of plastic. Let me synthesize that again."

gpm 5mo ago

> Saying "because they vibe coded we are dropping support for Bun" sounds political. I don't think "political" is necessarily a bad thing. Engaging in politics is how you shape the world. The mere act of writing and maintaining yt-dlp is quite political considering the context of IP law and enforcement that we live in. It happens that in this case that I'd disagree with their politics if that's why they are dropping Bun support - I think there's a great deal of value in moving to memory safe languages, little harm in accepting anthropic compute and funding to do so, and that use LLMs themselves is roughly value neutral (though many uses are very much not value neutral). That said reasonable people definitely disagree with me.

johnfn 5mo ago
That's not what I meant by political. I meant political in the more modern sense of "appealing to emotion rather than thought". EDIT: Everyone is rightfully calling me out that this doesn't make a lot of sense. What I meant is that the move is driven by ideology. I think there is a lot of overlap between politics and ideology, and an increasing amount of overlap between ideology and emotion. But it's fair enough to call me out here.
- phoronixrly 5mo ago
  Wait, expecting all code to be verified and tested by a human is not engineering-driven but instead emotion-driven mindset???
  - zephen 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - johnfn 5mo ago
    What code is fully, or even primarily, tested by a human? Haven't you heard of automated testing suites, regression testing, conformance testing..?
    - happytoexplain 5mo ago

cmiles74 5mo ago

I disagree it's a political stance, this reads like a technical decision to me. In my opinion, there is no vibe-coded project that's going to be reliable long term. Eventually there's too much code, too many bugs and the whole things slows to a halt. Or it gets too expensive to continue to be vibe-coded, because token cost. If they had decided to drop Bun for "AI assisted coding," that might strike me as a political decision.

truncate 5mo ago

> Saying "because they vibe coded we are dropping support for Bun" sounds political. I disagree that this is a political stance. People based on their experiences have formed opinions on whether they trust that model of development or not. Bun having taking extreme measure of going 100% in within a week is itself extreme positioning from their side which will likely result in extreme reactions because depending on who you are and your experience you'd bet on the fact that it may or may not work out.

irishcoffee 5mo ago
In all sincerity, what does political even mean in this context? ELI5, I’m a toddler when it comes to the politics of AI/LLMs.
- truncate 5mo ago
  Its a polarizing world with AI. There are fanboys drinking the kool-aid blindly listening to whatever Sammy/Dario/... say as gospel, and on other side there are haters who again blindly reject the fact that these AI tools can be actually be useful. I think that's what the politics is.
  - johnfn 5mo ago
    Yes - exactly! I honestly thought I was going crazy when a bunch of people were saying that this decision wasn't political in the slightest.
  - irishcoffee 5mo ago
    I’m tracking the polarity of the whole movement, I didn’t understand how politics was attached. I desperately don’t want the whole thing to become a left vs right disaster. We have enough of those.
    - __loam 5mo ago
      You might not like it but you actually live in a world with other people and building technology often affects their lives and they have opinions on it. For AI a lot of that impact has been negative.

beej71 5mo ago

That wasn't my read, though. I think if they don't want to go with the vibe-coded version then they have to go with the last release before that. And presumably that last release won't be updated (except with the vibe-coded version). Therefore it makes sense to deprecate.

kibibu 5mo ago

What's wrong with yt-dlp - an app almost entirety driven by political stances - taking another one regarding llms?

kelnos 5mo ago

Why is it "political" to say "I don't trust software fully written by an LLM that has not been vetted by a human"? That feels like an entirely reasonable stance to take. And I see the argument/correction downthread that it's an "emotional" or "ideological" stance. Why does it have to be that? It seems completely rational and logical not to trust software written by a technology that is known to hallucinate and "cheat" to make tests pass. Of course, I can't say that the yt-dlp maintainer is or isn't being political/emotional/ideological when making this decision; none of us can know their true motivations without asking them, and I choose the charitable explanation unless shown evidence otherwise.

skywhopper 5mo ago

“Vibe coded” means “human programmers did not review the code”. So I think that’s an entirely reasonable line to draw that’s no more political than dropping support for some other project that suddenly decided to drop all unit testing or to refuse to do any security vetting.

boomlinde 5mo ago

What does "political" mean in this context? To me it seems obvious that yes, that is a political choice, as is every other choice a group of people make for themselves together.

yallpendantools 5mo ago

I'm repeating a point I made in a sub-thread but please WHY should the onus be on yt-dlp to review their decision on a project that has zero commitment to review their very code? I get the idea to "battle-test" the rewrite first but (a) how does one even determine a reasonable timeframe for battle-testing that much LOC and (b) each vibe-coded update pushed to the Bun upstream basically resets the battle-testing timer. I guess you could lag behind $LATEST by a given window but that just brings us back to (a).