I think you can have a lot of debate on the design decisions on Rust, but I don't think the need for these articles tell you a lot about the language itself. I'd argue that Python needs articles like this more so than Rust does, but for entirely different reasons. In two decades of more and more programmers who aren't coming from an engineering background, I've yet to see anyone who used a Python generator or slots. Data Classes are less rare, but mainly in the form of pydantics "version". Which doesn't exactly matter for a lot of Python code... This is a world where 4chan can serve 4 million concurrent users an apache server running a 10k line PHP file neither of which have been updated since 2015... so you can be fine doing inefficient and entirely in-memory Python code 95% (or more) of the time.
That doesn't mean you should though. Imagine how much energy is being wasted globally on bad Python code... The difference is of course that anyone can write it, and not everyone can write Rust. I'm not personally a big fan of Rust, I'd chose Zig any day of the week... but then I'd also choose C over C++, and I frankly do when I optimise Python code that falls in those last 5%. From that perspective... of someone who really has to understand how Python works under the hood and when to do what, I'd argue that Rust is a much easier langauge to learn with a lot less "design smell". I suppose Python isn't the greatest example as even those of us who love it know that it's a horrible language. But I think it has quite clearly become the language of "everyone" and even more so in the age of LLM. Since our AI friends will not write optimised Python unless you specifically tell them to use things like generators and where to use them, and since you (not you personally) won't because you've never heard about a generator before, then our AI overlords won't actually help.
We've moved from .NET and C# to Go, and I'd argue that it's very competetive with general purpose languages like C#, Java and similar for a different philosophical approach to enterprise tech. It's been a great technical fit for us in both finance and energy, but the main purpose for our adoption is because it's opnionated approachs are a much better fit for us than traditional OOP languages. There is no "magic", everything is explicit, the standard library is incredible and it's a relatively easy langauge to write and read.
In a world where 4chan can serve 4 million visitors on some dated apache server version running a 10k line PHP script which hasn't been updated since 2015 it's important to remember, that for 95% of all software (if not more), any, general purpose language will be just fine technically speaking and it's in the development processes (the people) the actualy differences are found. Go is productive and maintainable (cost-efficient and rapid changes) for teams that work better without implicit magic and third party depedencies.
The hype may be gone, but the Jobs aren't. In my area of the world Go is the only noticeably growing programming language in regards to job offerings.
> any company sitting this out risks being unable to capture users back from Open AI at a later date.
Why? I paid for Claude for a while, but with Deepseek, Gemini and the free hits on Mistral, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity I'm not sure why I would now. This is anecdotal of course, but I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour. I think the best the subscription companies can hope for is that their subscribers don't realize that Deepseek and Gemini can basically do all you need for free.
I doubt it. Google is shoving Gemini on everyone’s face through search, and Meta AI is embedded in every Meta product. Heck, instagram created a bot marketplace.
They might not “know” the brand as well as ChatGPT, but the average consumer has definitely been exposed to those at the very least.
DeepSeek also made a lot of noise, to the point that, anecdotally, I’ve seen a lot of people outside of tech using it.
This is anecdotal but I often buy yearly plans on products that I've got a pretty good idea that I'll use, even if it's the first time I buy them. Though I'll freely admit it's always been the option of getting 1-2 months for "free" by signing up for the yearly plan. I've done it with various products, Proton, Disney+ (which saved them from my Danish boycot wrath to my daughter's delight) and so on. I've never even thought about it as a way of tricking me into buying the yearly plan, and now that I've thought a bit about it, I don't think your pricing would either. It's hard to say how I would've thought if I'd looked at the pricing page before reading these comments, but I genuinely don't believe I would've thought of it like that.
That being said, I would not base my pricing too much on a few random comments on HN. These responses can be a good indication, but I'd frankly reach out to some of my trial sign-ups who didn't transition into a paying client as well as some of my actual customers to get their view on it. I think pricing is going to be especially tricky in the AI space since it's so new and there is so much competition.
I'm not convinced it's really that useful. If you have rows of people sewing the same piece of clothing or similar, then it's not exactly hard to track output without digital surveillance. If you have assembly lines where people perform different parts of a larger project digital surveillance is useless next to things like lean, and again, bottlenecks will show themselves extremely fast if a single station is slower than usual.
I suspect the purpose of these systems is actually to create a horrible work environment. Not because that is a good thing, but because it'll drive away anyone who has other options and leave you with the most desperate people. Who will also be the cheapest people.
If you're in finance, public sector or energy production you're going to want to mitigate the risk of US services now that the US is an adversary. We have things like DORA and NIS2 with high demands on cybersecurity. It wouldn't be far fetched to imagine the EU making it illegal to use US tech companies similar to how we can't use Chinese or Russian tech companies.
They are two separate things. There is a flat VAT on every consumer product in the EU. When I buy something in Denmark from a Danish (or any EU) shop I pay 25% to the government. If I buy something from a non-EU shop I pay 0% to the government until it gets dutied in customs and then I pay the 25%. In America you also pay taxes on goods, the difference is you have to add it on top of your price yourselves... Like that was so crazy shopping in a US store the first time... that the price listed was not the price you had to pay. I don't think it would be particularily unfair for the US to do the same, but the difference is that you don't have the 25% flat vat on your internal goods, so in order for it to be equal we would need to add a tax on US goods to balance it out.
Anyway, taxation on car varies from EU country to EU country. In Denmark you pay a ridiculous amount of money to get a car registrered. To prevent every Danish person from buying a car in Germany we tax imported cars equal to Danish cars. Then on top of that you have various enviromental taxes, which our local car dealers are obviously geared toward, but if you were to import some non-eco friendly car your taxes on it would be silly high. (I say ridiculous and silly but I agree with it). The flip side of this is that some vehicles (like Teslas) have been getting very large tax reductions because they are green. Here is the kicker though, these are for private imports. If a Ford dealership wants to sell American cars, they can do so on equal terms to European car companies. You can argue Trump is at least a little correct on cars, but the reason Danes do not buy American cars is because American cars aren't build for our roads. Somewhat ironically a lot of the countries which have the highest taxes on imports of cars are also the countries which don't produce cars. America can tax the EU sky high on cars and it wouldn't impact Denmark because we produce exactly 0 cars. It would impact Germany, which has much lower import taxes than us and is also where a company like Tesla produces the European cars which are sold in Denmark. Something which would likely be a target for EU retaliation.
The worst part is probably that it'll mainly impact smaller businesses. Our biggest exporter of anything to the US is Novo Nordisk but companies like them have production inside the US and will not be impacted by the tariffs. Mean while some specialist tiny store will likely lose a lot of money. I have a pair of Iron Ranger boots as an example. I guess Red Wing might not be a tiny company, but they don't have EU production so I would find a non-american alternative to these if we enter a trade war and there is another 15-20% added on top of the VAT to balance things out. Not that I'll need a new pair of boots for a while, but you get the point.
The reality is that if we enter a trade war, we will both lose. The Trump administration is gambling that they can pull production back to the US, and maybe they'll succeed better than Australia did back in the day. The US is certainly a big enough economy that it might be capable of doing it. It's far more likely that it'll surrender the global economic leadership to China though. It's tricky of course, because China would already have that if they decided to meet EU regulation on safety standards. The danger to the US is if BRICS manages to pull half of the world away from the dollar. If that happens there will be nothing to carry the massive US deficit, and the US is the first and only nation in the history of the world that has been capable of remaning dominant while also having a deficit. Which is solely thanks to the dollar being the world currency.
I use Zig and C with Python regularily and I think the interoperability is excellent. It's one of the coolest part about Python in my opinion, but the ecosystem is a nightmare to navigate. It's easy to use C structs for more efficient "classes" with libraries like msgspec, but chances are you've never heard about msgspec because there are at least 10 other libraries which do something similar, and there is also __slots__.
Even your package and project manager isn't straight forward. With Javascript you're basically going to use either Deno or Bun, but with Python you're going to use what? I'd argue that UV was the only "real" option (come at me!) but like 90% of the Python programmers I work with tend to have never heard about it. Maybe it's just my part of the world, but when you enter a Python shop that does web-api's you're 95% sure to find Flask, FastAPI or ninja-django (might be django-ninja), all of which are ok. The internet is full of recomendations on these, but they are all so underperformant compared to Litestar.
Then you have the actual language design where it is ridiculously easy to shoot yourself in the foot. As an example there is a massive difference in how you can loop over collections with Lists and Generators. It's not that different (in concept) from C# where you have IEnumerable and IQuerable, but it sort of is different in the way that almost every C# developer will know the difference while many Python programmers will never have heard of generators.
Over all though, I think there is a reason Python is everywhere. It's very productive, and it's also very easy to deal with bottlenecks when you run into them. I think the philosophy of designing code to be perfect from the get go is flawed. Partly because you're likely not going to know where bottlenecks will show up, but mainly because 95% (I pulled this out of my ass, but I'd wager it's accurate) of all software will never succeed enough to have scaling issues. Stackoverflow didnt even get CDN's until something like 2018ish, and during it's early days it was just a couple of IIS and SQL servers. Python fits perfectly into this sort of YAGNI philosophy because almost everyone can get things working well enough, and then you can always use actual engineering to deal with performance once you need to. Sure, I tend to write performant and type safe Python from the get go, but in a world of too few software engineers, it's very handy to have non-SWE personal build software which is "good enough". Especially in non-SWE industries, and Python is, the, language every non-SWE programmer uses.
We use the Azure models and there isn't an issue with safety filters as such for enterprise customers. The one time we had an issue microsoft changed the safety measures. Of course the safety measures we might meet are the sort of engineering which could be interpreted as weapons manufacturing, and not "political" as such. Basically the safety guard rails seem to be added on top of all these models, which means they can also be removed without impacting the model. I could be wrong on that, but it seems that way.
Berlusconi is the architect of the modern oligarchy. Control the media, control the public opinion and narrative. I think that what is happening in America is something new though. The dismantling of the US government is weird on it's own, but the step down from US soft power is what really makes no sense. The previous 80ish years of US world dominance was build on a combination of military might and soft power. Europe was rather ruined after WW2, the reason it's as advanced as it is today, and the reason we are/were such close allies with the USA is because of programs like the Marshall plan. Which was essentially the USA giving Europeans the money to buy American products. Stuff like access to US produced tractors revolutionised European farming as an example. On the US side this meant that the USA investment into Europe made it possible for the American wartime industry to restructure itself. So that instead of producing tanks, factories could produce farm equipment and so on. Total win-win.
Military power is necessary, but political influence is bought with soft power and diplomacy. The reason USA has military bases over most of the world. Places which allows America to have places to "store" all that military might outside the USA is because it has allies. The Russian loss of their Syrian bases is a good example or what happens when you lose that soft power. That same soft power is also the reason American brands can sell their stuff globally. Basically the entire American entertainment industry and all the foreign aid programs are giant advertising ventures, selling the American lifestyle. When that soft power is gone, America will still be capable of getting it's way in many cases through threats. People don't respond well to that though. With USA rivals more than happy to step in, you shouldn't be surprised to see Coca Cola replaced by some Chinese cola brand sometime down the road. This is obviously a semi ridiculous example, but I think it's a good illustration if what could happen. That same thing will affect US tech dominance as well. Here in Denmark companies are now actively looking for exit strategies from the American cloud because of the increased risk. I don't think anyone seriously expects something to happen, but at the same time, there is nothing companies hate more than risk. The reason Google Cloud never made it in Europe is because it has more risk than Azure and AWS, and with European alternatives having caught up... Well...
What is perhaps even worse is that the only reason the USA can function with its current deficit is because of the Dollar. If BRICS succeeds in moving half of the worlds population away from the Dollar, the American "empire" will fall considering it's the only "empire" in the history of mankind which has been capable of maintaining it's world dominance while also increasing its deficit.
Hitler and Nazi Germany might be the example everyone knows, and Musk performing his "gesture" doesn't exactly help matters. There doesn't seem to be a real long term plan behind what the aristocracy in the US is doing right now though. At least not one which will keep them safe from each ohter or society as a whole. Berlusconi and his buddies never went to prison after all, no one fell out of a window and so on.
That doesn't mean you should though. Imagine how much energy is being wasted globally on bad Python code... The difference is of course that anyone can write it, and not everyone can write Rust. I'm not personally a big fan of Rust, I'd chose Zig any day of the week... but then I'd also choose C over C++, and I frankly do when I optimise Python code that falls in those last 5%. From that perspective... of someone who really has to understand how Python works under the hood and when to do what, I'd argue that Rust is a much easier langauge to learn with a lot less "design smell". I suppose Python isn't the greatest example as even those of us who love it know that it's a horrible language. But I think it has quite clearly become the language of "everyone" and even more so in the age of LLM. Since our AI friends will not write optimised Python unless you specifically tell them to use things like generators and where to use them, and since you (not you personally) won't because you've never heard about a generator before, then our AI overlords won't actually help.
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