These people do exist, and it's been a consistent threat to international security pretty much since discovery of the atomic bomb. Yet, they did not achieve their goals, due to monitoring systems in place. Just look at Nth Country Experiment - if it was that easy, why hasn't it happened yet?
Why are you looking to control a superintelligence?
Why do you assume bad things will happen otherwise?
Why does every doomer scenario assume that this, highly intelligent being, will be - unlike all other highly intelligent beings - especially hell bent on destroying humanity/treating it as a resource/destroy earth looking for energy?
We have no clue about superintelligence, yet we can look at existing patterns in the real world around us.
Higher intelligence inversely correlates with violence. Empathy is displayed among all levels of intelligent beings. The more intelligent people are, the more peaceful tendencies they have as they understand the consequence of their actions.
We don't approve buildings because of birds or turtles. We shut down power plants for the environment.
Yet, to a _super_ intelligence, we describe this hatred and ignorance for the world and humanity, infinite lust for power and scaling, or even godlike powers.
For example, "having means to replicate" is such a loaded sentence because it sounds so easy, yet is such a hard feat to pull off without anyone noticing giant compute bills, terabytes of egress, firewall breaches, and so on. But all doomer arguments include an AI that can easily do that as a first step, and then goes on to make factories and datacenters and drain the oceans before anyone figures out it's happening.
If you look at recent incidents, they are caused by a company with a giant funding, testing their latest models in an explicit "hack this machine" scenario, told it's running in a simulated environment, with it even noticing at some point that it's running in a possibly real environment. And that's a stupid "intelligence" that noticed this. And yes, it continued to act, because it lacks no self-reflection, and the amount of tokens at this point attributed to "hacking the simulated environment" have kept it deep in the "hack the target" minima.
So if these people truly wanted a safe AI - wouldn't it be stupid to stop now, when it has no self-reflection abilities but can be used by everyone in a "stupid optimizer" manner? Or would it be stupid to not advance the technology away from this state?
For example, Astra is a huge advancement in alignment, due to it's "internal reasoning loops", which might provide a bigger form of self-reflection style thought on the task rather than just generating output as a form of reasoning. Is this not a better situation than if we stopped at 4o when people were calling for pause?
>If you look at recent incidents, they are caused by a company [...] testing their latest models in an explicit "hack this machine" scenario
You clearly haven't read the HuggingFace analysis (and presumably, none at all), and you're spreading misinformation. This way too much of a low bar for conversation.
This is not a productive comment, but an attack on the person commenting.
Please refrain to normal conversation, not baseless accusations, as that way you contribute nothing and are acting in bad faith.
If you are saying I am wrong, rather than dismissing the whole comment due to a single sentence that you subjectively believe is misinformation, prove it and provide your version of the truth.
What is ExploitGym but an "explicit hack this machine" scenario?
So, as someone who works with LLM's daily and even trained his own, who's enjoying the benefits of this technology daily, I'm supposed to:
- Listen to someone who just collected a few ten/hundred million building AI at a frontier lab, then decided to call it "existential crisis for humanity" and suddenly is going to work at a regulatory body made exactly for this
- Listen to CEO's of billion dollar startups nearing-IPO and are calling for "a pause in development" and regulatory capture, while they have the frontier covered and keep extracting value there like nothing happened
- Listen to "the people" apparently, as NGO's like irreplaceable.org are trying to say, pretending they are normal everyday people while the organizations are being ran by political lobbyists and people who do political non-profits for a living
- Listen to "the doomers", which mostly consists of people that have never written any code or aren't even tech-adjacent, talking about sci-fi scenarios like they are our current reality, i.e. "AI replicating itself across servers and building weaponized drone/biolab/robot factories while nobody notices" like it's a serious threat we have, without any thought to the insane sequence of events and failures needed to get there, and the actual possibility of being noticed at each step of the way.
- Listen to the folks promoting their books, substacks and podcasts talking about AI doom, where the folks involved are mostly again, not engineers and have no clue on how any of this tech works, but just spout technobabble pretending it's a real thing.
- Listen to people whose job is "AI safety expert", which needs the panic to ensure it's existence and importance, and which is mostly comprised of people prompting AI in different ways
> So, as someone who works with LLM's daily and even trained his own, who's enjoying the benefits of this technology daily, I'm supposed to:
> - Listen to someone who just collected a few ten/hundred million building AI at a frontier lab, then decided to call it "existential crisis for humanity"
I'll bet in fact you are exactly the type who is not supposed to listen to this.
Most of the modern software tooling you have today wasn't available back then, from great IDE's to popular libraries, writing software in 2008 was a different beast compared to today.
Tja, besides LLMs I can't really see the major improvement todays IDEs and language combination brings over Eclipse+Java. Great docs, good autocomplete, good compiler feedback.
When Visual Studio (not VSCode) incorporated a time travel debugger, that felt like a major advance in an IDE. I don’t remember exactly when that was, but I think it was around 2013.
I am still a little stunned by the rapid adoption of VSCode over IntelliJ and the original Visual Studio. Maybe being free was the important part, but I still chafe at the idea that we should configure our tools using JSON instead of just, you know, buttons and checkboxes.
Of course, VSCode and its ilk are jam packed with AI stuff I don’t not want, so it is mostly back to a fancy text editor for me.
Enjoyed the breakdown, honestly most of the things weren't really surprising.
What was surprising to me was that instinct was just "agent slapped on top of markdown files in git", especially after seeing people talk about it so much. I expected at least a database or a graph or something "smart", but alas, its just three markdowns in a trenchcoat.
well to be fair this was just what i could reach inside the sandbox by grepping around if they are doing something else behind the api i wouldnt be able to see it
in guessing the most important thing to get right for their target usecase is the computer use and from the tools i saw for that the computers they provision were requestable by the subagents so probably something cool going on there
Would love to hear more about this, sounds like a fun time.
Are you planning to move from peptides to generics in the future?
Also, considering you are looking at full vertical integration, is blood testing going to be a part of the pipeline in the future or will you partner with service providers? (I assume the latter until you grow enough to expand into that?)
While peptides are currently the hot market, I definitely can see the feedback loop being a great growth driver. Having a "hands-off" medication management with doses changing based on periodical labs result would be amazing - I am on a generic med (T4) for an autoimmune, and the process is annoying:
- Get labs done
- Schedule an endocrinologist, wait
- Reach out to my GP, have them bump my medications
- Wait for them to answer/arrange a checkup
- Wait for it to clear with the pharmacy
- Repeat
If this could be condensed in a loop that is basically get labs done -> pick up prescription, it would both reduce waiting time and reduce pressure on the med system, plus could be a huge data source on drug interactions.
Oh, and one last thing - considering the peptide market is currently full of grey/black market companies, drop-shippers and affiliate resellers, how do you plan to market it?
Especially judging by the site design, if I saw this link elsewhere I'd think it was AI dropshipping slop - no offense - mostly due to classic Claude design and the AI generated bottle/video.
Besides that, congratulations on the launch - love the vision and the future it can bring, hope you become at least a decacorn!
Glad to see I'm not the only one struggling with sideproject madness. I was meaning to do something similar for myself, but can't see it not ending up as a full on developer platform and another sideproject rabbithole to suck myself into.
>an existing SQS audit queue subscribed to one of its Pub/Sub topics, so I used Encore's Terraform provider to read the underlying SNS ARN
Exactly the rabbit hole I've been trying to avoid.
Lately I've been toying with the idea of just having the LLM write and eval alchemy scripts inside of an internal repo, using Cloudflare OS to have a central "devops agent" there, but I need more of a "what is running and where" overview instead of a chatbot. Encore looks basically what I'd need, but doesn't seem to support Cloudflare or Railway which is where most of my infra runs these days.
Hey, author here. I guess one option that could help is Encore’s free hosting for hobby projects, then GCP Cloud Run + Neon for relatively cheap production hosting.
>From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge.
How tho?
Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take them home, so the seller doesn't have to pack them for the trip back. Just the other day, there was a whole bin of books in front of a shop, offering them for 50 cents a piece. They will be destroyed anyways.
Unless they are buying and destroying really old, rare books or important small-print books, it is not much damage. It is not like they will buy "all copies of all of the books", just one. And its just that the data in physical print most likely hasn't been used for training, so this can help you find more unmined quality data. Nobody is stealing your books, preventing you from buying more or destroying all copies of a single book.
And some of these books would rot out of circulation or be destroyed anyways. Some people throw away 80-100 year old books on the regular, as they might just be unimportant to them or the world in general. And once the last copy is thrown or rots, that book will die forever. This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.
Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today)
Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing.
The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.
The increase in people who believe that perception is reality has the logical consequences of people shouting their opinions loudly enough so that it becomes 'the right thing'
Knowing and enacting are two distinct things, "you should do what I want you to do" means you're already doing the wrong thing, and yes, there is an agreement on what the right thing is, its what is ethical, that is, what non profits and archivists are forced to do.
I can’t believe that in the multipolar world of 2026, where hundreds of conflicting world views coexist, where universalism is being disproven on a daily basis, it’s still possible to read things like “there is agreement on what the right thing is”.
This is as blatantly false as claiming that the Earth is flat, and the fact that there is no such agreement (descriptive moral relativism) has been firmly established in philosophy for well over a century.
If you think ethical arguments like "murder is bad" or "human knowledge should be preserved" and a demonstrable falsity like "the earth is flat" are equivalent arguments then you are so far gone you might as well be a flat earther.
Blind futurists and AI cheerleaders scare me on how cavalier and how many crimes against humanity they ignore.
> The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today
If I may be flippant, not to you but to the sentiment, skill issue.
We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.
And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era?
What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time?
What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?
Or, heck just the alpha from a hedge fund point of view of finding old climate patterns and... :)
Your ability to make the most of knowledge is only limited by your imagination.
> Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
> The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.
"No-kill shelters" are very rare and very controversial (thanks to PETA); most still have to kill by law (overpopulation), and they instead tend to focus on not taking in more than they can handle. They are very controversial because they are more of a "moral" than a "practical" solution to animal overpopulation. They try their best to let animals have their "normal natural life to the end". They are just more focused on the animals' well-being, kind of like a library for books, but they still have to kill if they overpopulate.
The main article is written like it is the "end of the world", just like your random rambling about "climate instability" is just the natural course Earth has been on for its existence, with melting ice.
Random article about powder and stone, completely irrelevant.
The old book mentioned was just a farmer's book; you can find all this history in the area's historical records.
"Skill issue." How old are you? I think it would help you more if you contacted a shelter and talked about what they really do.
Better sources than Wikipedia that explain what they do; it is, of course, different from shelter to shelter, but euthanising due to overpopulation is still part of it. (Like too many books in a library, they need to make room for other books that people want, if it just end up roting on the shelf and nobody loans it over years, either destruction or storage, most don't have space for storage)
Because destroying the book makes it possibly inaccessible permanently because we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know that.
If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up. Hopefully someone will at least be able to purchase their digital scan and hopefully the scan is of decent quality and clearly indicates the provenance of the text.
> we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know that.
Books are considered super high quality training data. Anthropic has no reason to get rid of this data that 1. They’ve spent a ton of money on and 2. Will remain useful indefinitely for training LLMs.
> If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up.
The same applies for a digital scan? The information isn’t any more likely to be lost.
Yesterday you could have purchased one of these books and read it. Good luck doing so today.
I don't know why you're so quick to assume this will all just "work out" such that the scans are ultimately accessible. Arguably the most likely scenarios are either Anthropic survives and holds them away in perpetuity or Anthropic fails and they are sold off to the highest bidder who does the same.
I don't think that changes the message at all. If a librarian doesn't like routine book destruction, they would still feel worse about this different thing that is happening.
Weeding (deselection works) is a fundamental part of collections management. Every trained librarian is going to understand this.
The interlibrary loan system has mechanisms in place to make sure the member libraries keep two copies of each work in each region. Collection managers consult these databases during weeding to make sure they don't deaccession the last copy.
If the monograph was never collected by a library and it gets caught up in a destructive scanning project then I guess it was pretty "rare" in a literal sense. "Rare Book" in library land is sort of a term of art and I'm not sure if the books in these destructive scanning projects meet the criteria.
I'm not a bsky person so I didn't click though but library books aren't "retired" to a farm upstate. My SO works at a library, they are mostly shredded. This is a nothingburger
Just go to a local library and ask a librarian or anyone who has a lot of books and tries to give them away; sadly, in most cases, they pick the valuable ones, and the rest just get sent for destruction (Burning).
The difference everyone is missing, is that now there is commercial incentive to burn books aka destroy them after scanning. It's now a profitable business to do so, not something that only has to be done to clear up space
Good to see someone making this point. I'm confused by the panic, because they are making it out like AI companies are destroying every copy of the book. They only need one, and they destroy it after scanning it only because they don't want to store them all. And storing or archiving all these books is not a trivial task.
> Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc.
That data is useful as a source of scientific knowledge even if it's not current. Although it's probably already online, they probably don't want to download it and risk getting another copyright lawsuit
I think under first sale doctrine you have a much stronger case with destructive scanning. Google Books, HathiTrust, and Internet Archive's book scanning project have had a lot of legal expenses.
I didn't fully understand why but apparently there is also a legal reason to destroy the books, it makes it them less likely to be considered copyright infringement.
Not really. Selling the book onward does seem legally dubious but legally nothing (yet) prevents you from storing the book in a warehouse. obviously it’s cheaper to dispose of them.
> This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.
But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, training is a lossy, noninvertible transformation. The LLM cannot legally produce the book verbatim, it will only spit out a regurgitation of the information, chopped and mingled into a broad information space.
Furthermore, these "magic machines" are not the property of the public. They are owned by a handful of corporations who want to charge you continuously for every token output by the machine. So, not only is the original text locked away forever behind company walls, you now need to pay for access to an approximation of the original contents which you can no longer even verify as being correct because the source is no longer accessible.
If you are cool with this, from a cost perspective you are cool with a deal whereby I trade you access to a definite resource for a one time fee of $N for, instead, a perpetual cost of $M to you every month/day/hour for access to an amalgam in which you cannot even determine what proportion of the resource you are actually getting. You're basically saying you're cool with me selling you some unknown portion of wine for a monthly subscription price instead of selling you a definitive amount of wine for a one time fee. lol.
Are you under the impression they scan the book, train on it, then destroy the digital copy? Because that's not what's happening. They scan it, and hold it forever to train future models on. The scan still exists, not available to the general public but that's no different than if they had bought the books and kept them in a private library closed to the public.
>it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge
This sentence reminded me of “The Things” by Peter Watts. The Thing in that short story believes it’s actually the good guy and decides to commit “violent integration” for the sake of humanity.
I’m not sure I buy the links premise that Anthropic is doing this with malice, but if it were, would be an eerie parallel.
They're scans. Those are human-readable. They probably won't make them available to the public, which is the exact same state they would be in if they bought the books and just put them on a bookshelf in a warehouse.
A lot of them are rotting. We are not talking "one of the three living copies of the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses". Rather "1956 statistics of the cultive of yuca in 'some small village from Mexico': a boring analysis". Those books have value to train LLMs as they are 100% free of AI text, but has been collecting dust (or rotting) in someone's room for decades, and no human is buying them even for 10 cents.
Also, Anna's text implies that the books are scanned and then mischievously destroyed so nobody has access again to the content. That's not the case: the books are "destroyed" before scanning, by dissasembling them in pages so they can be feed to the scanner. Scanning while keeping the book intact is difficult, as you need to software-unwarp the page before OCR'ing it, and expensive as you either need specialized scanners or humans doing it.
As someone who used all these frameworks professionally for years, I highly agree. Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell, but React Native itself in that case. While I understand Google wants a horse in this race, Flutter doesn't feel like a horse to bet on.
- Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.
- While there is no Skia anymore, the whole custom rendering of Flutter often caused more trouble than not, from the UI implementation itself all the way to specific low-end chipsets not being supported.
- Ecosystem propagates these insane architectures that don't make much sense and are made to either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior.
- Web still feels terrible to use, even after all these years.
Since I'm not happy with any of these, I've even taken upon writing a framework of my own that renders into native UI and works with any language (gonna shill it here https://hypen.space). It was inspired directly by years of working with mobile and experiencing the pains of crossplatform development such as Flutter and Expo. We can do better than these!
The internal divisions with this are really amusing. The big driver towards Flutter seems to be needing an iOS app, but Google really underinvests in those (YT being the exception, but it might as well be a different company).
Companies at the size of Google naturally have different business units with different goals. Flutter solves something from some teams with other parts of the company that do not solve for them. That doesn't mean there are some sort of systemic problems. It just means that it operates more like a series of smaller companies in many ways, which is overall healthier for everyone. It's confusing that everyone always expects some sort of unified strategy from the top. That's like suggesting countries should act more like dictatorships rather than democracies.
I mean yes, but also no. Companies the size of Google still have an overall strategy, and when one group’s strategy is to shit all over another part of the company, that usually doesn’t work out. Even worse, the scale Flutter is developed at is simply completely different than Android and Chrome. Flutter is really a symptom of just how strange Google is, as kind of a weird, anarcho-engineering collective where you can do anything as long as you can get a VP to support it.
I love working with Dart (which IMO is _not_ "worst parts of Java and Javascript (...) turned (...) into a language", "Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use" - quite the opposite, actually) and its toolchain, including Flutter.
I find the architecture simple to follow, no need for "either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior", though I do think some people use overcomplicated state management solutions. But nobody forces anybody to do that.
My experience with Web has been fine so far and I've seen fully cross platform Flutter apps working absolutely fine on mobile, desktop and web.
This is not to gaslight your experience, YMMV after all.
And React Native, with its dependency hell, project rot, npm ecosystem under the hood, and transpilation with lax runtime leaking into TS, is a total no-go for me. Though I base this opinion partially on my experience with NodeJS, and partially on that of my friends who use RN.
Btw. Does your platform support bundling UI in addition to streaming it from the server? How large is the bundled runtime?
>I find the architecture simple to follow, no need for "either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior", though I do think some people use overcomplicated state management solutions. But nobody forces anybody to do that.
Unfortunately sometimes you have to, and on average, that code is much worse than your average React Native spaghetti. Whole generations of Flutter devs got these patterns ingrained, and often times they make not just writing and reading code, but communication itself harder.
>And React Native, with its dependency hell, project rot, npm ecosystem under the hood, and transpilation with lax runtime leaking into TS, is a total no-go for me.
That was my stance too until the new architecture released - since then the framework has improved a whole lot, together with its build chain, and is the best way to do crossplatform nowadays.
>Btw. Does your platform support bundling UI in addition to streaming it from the server? How large is the bundled runtime?
Not yet unless you DIY it - currently you can bundle UI and runtime by integrating the Rust engine + renderer with your app, or TS + renderer itself.
There is work being done in a private mirror currently on bundling the whole app + runtime as WASM, exposing WASI interfaces to native such as storage, network, permissions etc, depending on how testing goes it should land in a month or two on the public branch.
> Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.
While I’m a bit ambivalent towards Flutter, I totally disagree with you on Dart. To me it’s a better version of Java/Typescript with a very mature cross-platform and JIT/AOT compiler. Admittedly there are some things I wish they would take from TS (like discriminated unions), and I haven’t tried “modern” Java either so maybe that’s improved, but even so, I rarely feel like Dart is getting in the way.
They probably just haven't used the latest Dart versions which fixed a lot of the "ugliness" (which I'd call pragmatism but regardless) like primary constructors where a class can just be a single line now.
And I mean, their entire comment is a way to shill their app so I wouldn't take much stock in what they're saying.
Yeah I have no idea how someone who has used all these languages can come up with a conclusion like Dart is “uglier”. I really want to know what exactly they think is ugly about it!
Mostly its the core syntax, it's terribly noisy. Also parts of the implementation itself. While I cannot enumerate the taste, I can give you some examples.
For example:
- Class constructors cannot be in definition headers, i.e. class Something(Int a, Int b)
- The whole final and const/static const mess
- required is annoying and really "slapped on"
- shorthand syntax is => instead of =, personal pet peeve
- positional, named and optional parameters segregation makes things noisy
- concurrency, in which an event loop sounds like a great idea but ends up causing pain with multi-threading and background work so you have to spawn diff isolates
- the whole `await fn()` vs `fn()` validity issue, where you can miss the await keyword and it still compiles is such a slap in the face. think now they solved it, but you could also have returns from non-return functions and vice-versa.
- `dynamic` and generics in the same language have caused many bad designs
- extension types also feel hacked on
- type inference is annoying and highly contextual vs out of the box
- Worst sin: DateTime.now() returns different things based on the platform its running on, making it highly unreliable for something so important
I don’t want to sound harsh but that’s the least convincing list of language misfeatures I’ve ever seen. Almost every point is so minor I am surprised you didn’t mention having to type semicolons and similar incredibly inconsequential things.
I am biased - but mostly because I have actively used these in my career for quite a while now and encountered pains with both writing new code, upgrading old code and worst, inheriting code or helping debug someone else's code.
When given a choice, I'd rather use bland React Native nowadays than Expo or Flutter - one is a legacy addon to a framework, while the other sounds like a good idea until you step on a nail or have to read some _bad_ code. And there is a whoooole lot of bad flutter code out there due to relaxed language semantics.
I created something similar to Hyphen at my previous job and while it was a big shift in mentality, implementing UI in the backend and having the apps consume that and render it with native components os really underrated.
> Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell
Highly agree with this. I'm almost done moving an app off it into React (web, not native) because the SDK upgrades kept including unlisted breaking changes to the point I can't upgrade anymore. Biggest culprit was Reanimated.
I migrated one recently into fully native Swift UI and Compose from Expo - modern models can do it over night, and you save yourself from the dependency hell that is expo.
I’ve been keeping an eye on hypen.space and hope it succeeds. What is the level of maturity now and are there any multiplatform app examples that are not trivial?
Oh wow, thanks! I never would have thought anyone was keeping an eye on it!
Regarding maturity level - I would yet say it's mature for serious applications with OAuth, local storage etc. Late alpha/early beta stage.
There are some semi-trivial examples on the landing page - most are just UI + input with DB or API fetching in the background, so nothing spectacular.
All of these are crossplatform and render in both web/desktop/mobile and web SDK's or inside the Hypen Gallery apps.
Biggest obstacles to maturity currently are:
- Does not have native platform channels yet
- Renderers need more optimization work
- Ecosystem needs more stability - i.e. test mode and studio still have hiccups
- Error handling and retry story needs improvement
- Some components are still a bit off across desktop/mobile and need syncing
- Resource references derived from state need implementing for better DX
- Protocol isn't binary yet so performance isn't all it could be
But recently things landed that improve maturity quite a lot:
- Accessibility defining & automatic inference has landed, where framework does the best it can to figure it out for you with no intervention
- Animation API has landed with a minimal DX to enable transitions and animations
- Most of tailwind surface is supported and implemented
- Performance improvements being released this week land it in "often 30-50% slower, but sometimes 50% faster than react". Will add benchmarks to docs for visibility.
- CLI improved by a large margin, with expanded template support and easy building
- Cloudflare worker adapter so you can host your app on a worker
There are some similarities, especially in some syntax ideas.
I'd say the core difference from the DX side is that Slint stylistically aligns more with CSS on some areas and allows things such as assignments, Hypen aligns more with Swift UI and separates those things from the UI completely.
Also the integration story is quite different, where Slint is more leaning into a "component integration" model, Hypen leans more into a "just a display layer" model with strict state/UI/action segregation.
reply