I don't think that's a real risk. There are strong competitors from multiple countries releasing new models all the time, and some of them are open weights. That's basically the opposite of a monopoly.

Unless back-channel conversations keep 'competitors' colluding to ensure that 'public SOTA' is ~uniformly distributed...

Declaring a “code red” seems to be a direct result of strong competition?

Sure, from an outsider’s perspective, competition is fine.

If you want to download open source libraries to be used in your Bun project then they will come from npm, at least by default. [1].

So it seems odd to say that Bun is less dependent on the npm library ecosystem.

[1] It’s possible to use jsr.io instead: https://jsr.io/docs/using-packages

Yes, both can pull in open source libraries and I can't imagine either dropping that ability. Though they do seem to have different eagerness and competency on Node compatibility and Bun seems better on that front.

From a long term design philosophy prospective, Bun seems to want to have a sufficiently large core and standard library where you won't need to pull in much from the outside. Code written for Node will run on Bun, but code using Bun specific features won't run on Node. It's the "embrace, extend, ..." approach.

Deno seems much more focused on tooling instead of expanding core JS, and seems to draws the line at integrations. The philosophy seems to be more along the lines of having the tools be better about security when pulling in libraries instead of replacing the need for libraries. Deno also has it's own standard library, but it's just a library and that library can run on Node.

That’s true of some parts of Deno’s standard libraries, but major functionality like Deno.test and Deno.serve are Deno-specific API’s.

Here are the Bun API’s:

https://bun.com/docs/runtime/bun-apis

Here are the Deno API’s:

https://docs.deno.com/api/deno/

Sure, that makes it a good backup strategy. But there’s little reason to use a worse tool until the time you need the backup comes.

Bun was VC funded.

I thought it said he was building a voxel game in the browser?

I’ve been using Deno too. Although npm support has improved and it’s fine for me, I think Deno has more of a “rewrite the world” philosophy. For example, they created their own package registry [1] and their own web framework [2]. Bun seems much more focused on preexisting JavaScript projects.

[1] https://jsr.io/ [2] https://fresh.deno.dev/

It's interesting that people have directly opposite opinions on whether Deno or Bun are meant to be used with the existing ecosystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46125049

I don’t think these are mutually exclusive takes. Bun is essentially taking Node and giving it a standard library and standard tooling. But you can still use regular node packages if you want. Whereas Deno def leaned into the clean break for a while

Apparently Claude Code being built on Bun was considered a good enough reason? But it looks more strategic for Bun since they’re VC-backed and get a good exit:

> Claude Code ships as a Bun executable to millions of users. If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent.

…

> Bun's single-file executables turned out to be perfect for distributing CLI tools. You can compile any JavaScript project into a self-contained binary—runs anywhere, even if the user doesn't have Bun or Node installed. Works with native addons. Fast startup. Easy to distribute.

> Claude Code, FactoryAI, OpenCode, and others are all built with Bun.

…

> Over the last several months, the GitHub username with the most merged PRs in Bun's repo is now a Claude Code bot. We have it set up in our internal Discord and we mostly use it to help fix bugs. It opens PRs with tests that fail in the earlier system-installed version of Bun before the fix and pass in the fixed debug build of Bun. It responds to review comments. It does the whole thing.

> This feels approximately a few months ahead of where things are going. Certainly not years.

…

> We've been prioritizing issues from the Claude Code team for several months now. I have so many ideas all the time and it's really fun. Many of these ideas also help other AI coding products.

…

> Instead of putting our users & community through "Bun, the VC-backed startups tries to figure out monetization" – thanks to Anthropic, we can skip that chapter entirely and focus on building the best JavaScript tooling.

https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic

Sort of. I'm not sure the consequences of training LLM's based on users' upvoted responses were entirely understood? And at least one release got rolled back.

I think the only thing that's unclear, and what LLM companies want to fine-tune, is how much sycophancy they want. Too much, like the article mentions, and it becomes grotesque and breaks suspension of disbelief. So they want to get it just right, friendly and supportive but not so grotesque people realize it cannot be true.

How do you know they’re investors?

In one case, it was a realtor that bought the home. She was just leaving the house when I went to look at it. Reading between the lines from what my realtor told me, I think she bought it and leased it back to the former owners so they didn’t have to move.

“The rest of my life” is a very long horizon for making predictions. I don’t think I could predict much about politics or the economy two years out.