Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
mitchellh.com
mitchellh.com
My own addendum: the atoms are stories, too.
“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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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".
Intentionally misunderstanding what someone said is at best wordplay, and wordplay is fucking boring.
Stop being boring.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
But it’s true enough to detect subtle gravitational waves, build clocks accurate to the nanosecond, and other amazing things.
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 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
which is ‘funny’ because by offline standards the average redditor will probably be seen as weird
What an awful thing to say about a person.
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.
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.
YMMV because this is just one data point (but the most important data point for me)
Then again I don't put different foods on my fork when eating - which seems relevant.
on linux i use the default terminal in gnome which is ptyxis now iirc and haven’t felt any need to switch.
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.
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.
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.
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?
* 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
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.
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.
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.
Mitchell clearly benefits from Zig succeeding. Well, some of his products depend on it. From a cynical point of view, donating nearly a million dollars is also a way to gain soft power over the language's future direction...
I'm not suggesting that's his motivation though... I'm just asking whether someone who funds such a large share of a language's development inevitably ends up influencing its direction, even if he don't formally control the project.
> 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.
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.
Assume you meant 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
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.
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.
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.
I'm willing to test this theory out, send me some money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
> 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?
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.
For example, money can pay for better medical care.
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.
Trump/Musk without money would be more miserable I surmise.
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?
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".
And money does certainly buy health in the US.
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.
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.
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.
How far from the nearest Walmart Superstore do you live?
Ask the cashier/clerk there and at your local gas station if if they can afford to live anywhere but with their parents or a handful of roommates.
Visit a chain food establishment where a lunch for two costs less than $40, and talk to the back-of-house staff; the ones washing dishes and cooking food. Ask them about retirement fund plans and employee provided health insurance options.
If you're fortunate enough to live farther away from these parts of the American economic realities, I would expect that 20 to 40 minutes drive on a freeway can get you pretty close to it.
If you don't go to those places; ask your Door Dash or Uber Eats driver about why they drive instead of working at those stores... and pay them with a C-note for taking the time to help broaden your perspective.
Try looking at the view of current America through the eyes of someone who is non-white, non-male, non-tech or tech-adjacent. It's a stark contrast to the sanitized view from the isles of Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Erewhon, or PCC and from Sweetgreen, Cava, and the True Food Kitchen.
Im not talking from a small sample set of anecdotal observations over a short period of time, but from a wide consensus of travel, first hand interactions, and living experience. In different states, over a 35 year working history, in a variety of situations, and direct relationships with a much larger than average network of family members. I have over one hundred cousins - not counting spouses, their children and grandchildren, on each of my patriarchal and matriarchal sides.
Not joking, my ancestors have been here, on the ground, since the Clovis era (between 9000 and 13000 years ago in the Rocky Mountains) and the early 1630's - one of my direct forefathers was a Colonel who reported directly to Washington. So I have every reason to wish the country was living up to it's stated intentions and potentials. It simply isn't, not recently, but also not for a VERY long time before now. The conditions I describe are the lived experience of many Americans, and appear to have played an outsized role in the results for the nation today.
Maybe, I'm wasting my keystrokes - username trollbridge might be the clue that this is an argumentative tone question without any real intention of truthful discourse.
In that case, consider this response for the benefit of the broader HN community. We all need get outside our own bubbles, and find ways to uplift the people who do the work we rely on and provide support for the community in ways which are not being delivered by the system. It's not ok to pretend to not need a functioning society to thrive in.
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.
1: not unhappy is weird phrasing. Substitute not sad or not angry or not hungry or whatever for your particular state of unhappiness.
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?
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.
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.
The wealthiest man on the planet looks to be quite miserable, insecure and bitter most of the time.
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.
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'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 you went to school and believe what you write then you went to terrible schools.
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.
Cool cool that doesn’t sound tyrannical at all
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/two-americas-one-bank...
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.
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.
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 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.
In many(most?) parts of the world, $400 is the equivalent of months of good salary.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is when people identify government as the problem, rather than those 3 attributes.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is your brain on X.com.
How? It'll just go to the gov. budget which will be mostly used to pay for bloated healthcare, military and interest.
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.
Billionaires who do good are the exception, which Hashimoto is.
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.
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)
There are some advantages to tax. But most of it is not spent on making lives of citizens easier.
~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.
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.
Can you elaborate on this?
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.
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.
https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/
Most of it goes to contributors.
I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).
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.
Zig doesn't have a centralized package management system though. It's all links to tar.gz/git with integrity hashes.
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.
Now I wonder what other donations were deemed as much as - or more - useful.
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)
Keep being the fuckin man.
I thought all billionaires were bad?
The fact that some billionaires use their money to do good does not contradict that argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.