Edit: old post is someone is curious: https://dev.to/jamilxt/electron-vs-gpui-what-discords-290-mb-rust-rewrite-can-and-cannot-prove-34b6
Replaced with the one from The Verge
On the one hand, I would love if more applications moved to native rendering instead of Electron… On the other hand, this is no doubt all vibe coded which I hate. On the third hand I somehow have, what’s gonna happen to alternative clients like Vesktop? I hope they’ll keep working because everything Discord offers by default is so bad.
this is no doubt all vibe coded
It might not be entirely so. I’ve watched their youtube announcement (less than 2 minutes video), and they talk about starting this project back in 2019, so there’s no way it was all vibe coded. I don’t doubt that the recent stretch was probably heavily using claude, but I wouldn’t call it removedcoded if they truly started back in 2019 before LLMs were anywhere useful.
Edit: link to the video
Yes Discord’s been using Rust for a long time, I meant the client itself. The infrastructure has been been in Rust for a while. gpui wasn’t a thing in 2019 so they couldn’t have started back then.
this is no doubt all vibe coded which I hate
No doubt, but why do you hate it? Vibe coding actually works now, and it means we can ditch Electron!
Vibe coding actually works now
Guess you missed this:
Do you think Valve isn’t using AI? lol
Hi friend! Epic Games actively promoting that they are “vibe coding” all their software and being all removedy is not good.
The effective monopoly by Valve is not great, and DRM games are not good at all, but prices aren’t being driven up like the console market is, they are awesomely supporting Linux with projects like Proton, they are innovating with hardware (albeit unfulfilled orders are big problem that they need to fix!), meanwhile Epic is boasting about a broken vibe coded Linux client and they are not offering anything much of value to the open-source community, nothing like Proton at the very least!
I would encourage everybody to purchase games through GOG and itch.io if it’s available there, with Steam as a last resort e.g. for some multiplayer titles! Lutris, Heroic, etc. exist if you use Linux :D
The CEO of Epic Games has also donated lots of money to Omarchy, and tells you all you need to know about their beliefs (if yapping about LLMs replacing human programming wasn’t enough).
I understand the negative sentiments, but LLMs are replacing human coding as we speak & largely have already outside of certain niche sectors. This is where we are, Valve engineers are certainly using LLMs as well. Sweeny is far worse than Gabe in everything, intelligence, political views etc, but that matters very little here. Everyone is vibecoding to a certain extent & I’m not sure what’s better, actively promoting it or trying to pretend that you are not. The industry is gravitating toward the latter, because that’s what seems to sell more for obvious reasons, but it’s just theater.
My personal opinion is that LLMs shouldn’t be used at all except for certain use cases, namely translation and processing large data sets (computers are good at repeating tasks, LLMs are no different). However, of course, some people will be using LLMs for programming. I do not and am against it, but people do what people do, however there is a difference between using it a tool and claiming that it will replace human programming. Neither is particularly amazing in my book, but almost everybody would agree that the latter is much, much worse, for jobs, the maintainability of the codebase, and user experience (broken apps are bad!)
Epic Games are claiming to “vibe code” all their software and repeating the rhetoric of the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Turns out, everybody does not like it when companies ship broken software that doesn’t work at all, and boasting about it will hurt your image.
that matters very little here
I would imagine most people would prefer supporting someone who doesn’t donate to racists! LLMs, especially corporate ones, are typically associated with the far-right because it’s literally giving a handful of companies supreme power over your information, your code, your independent thinking, and most importantly in this case your creativity (a fascist’s wet dream).
Also, you seem to have ignored my main points about Valve. Their monopoly is bad, we should support other third-party stores like itch.io and GOG more! You have also ignored Valve’s contribution to Linux gaming and their genuine innovation in hardware (see Steam Deck, Frame VR headset, Steam Controller 2, etc.)
there is a difference between using it a tool and claiming that it will replace human programming
Yeah the difference is about 6 months of model releases.
Seriously, you would have been totally correct 6 months ago (or if you are still using models from 6 months ago). Now… not so much.
Remember when we all laughed when Anthropic tried to vibe code a C compiler and it was laughably broken? Yeah now they can vibe code an entire OS.
(They should really run that C compiler test again just to show how much progress they’ve made.)
I anticipate that this is an effort to clamp users into their ecosystem
Every Discord user is already in their “ecosystem”. Even if you use a third party client, every single message you send is available to them to scan/sell to advertisers or cops with zero barriers whatsoever.
The only benefit of a third party client (besides UX enhancements and customization) is that Discord can’t execute malware/spyware natively on your PC. This is something they will inevitably do in the future in an effort to chase endless growth, but afaik it’s not happening today. They make enough money from the data they harvest from your chats, at least for now.
Which is what I meant.
There are lots of Vencord plugins that allow you to get Nitro functionality (or close enough anyway) for free. I don’t expect them to be particularly fond of that.
They are almost for sure all going to die.
Not if Discord intends its web client to still work.
LLM writing, just infuriating to read.
Another example of how a human could have delivered the same information in 25% the time.
The LLMs have been trained on articles written by humans, who, in turn, have been trained to draw out their conclusion into several pages in order to fit advertisements between the paragraphs and pages. It was infuriating before LLMs, and it’s equally infuriating now.
One reason I like Kagi is that it downranks ad-heavy pages. And of course I like uBO. But there are still so many web users without ad blockers that I makes sense for sites to spew slop, just like you’re saying. Blows my mind that anyone would use the web without a blocker.
Before LLMs were a thing, I would just out of sheer muscle memory skip the first few paragraphs of an article to get to the point of what the headline was about, because every fucking article starts with the big bang and works its way to the content of the headline.
Sorry, I missed it.
I spend 10 minutes trying to find an article about that news, the only other option being the post by the Discord CTO on Twitter of all places.
I’ll see if there’s a genuine blog post about it now.
Edit: updated to Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM
I’m getting worse at spotting these. What gave it away?
LLMs use the wrong language cues. They spend a lot of words emphasizing an utterly mundane point, and it’s difficult to read because it’s constantly winding you up to reveal some arcane knowledge just to drop knowledge bombs like, make sure you use good names for variables and always handle your exceptions. I’ve seen them spend two paragraphs when a short sentence would do.
I think they are improving on this too, some latest models give pretty terse answer for example
Just generally it waffled on, and didnt get to a point.
That makes this a useful comparison, not a verdict
Thats the “its not X, its Y” pattern.
Not so fast.
That makes this a useful comparison, not a verdict.
Plus all the other constant flip/flop contrasting throughout the text. It’s like a comparative decision matrix converted to prose, and exhausting to read.
Not to mention the ai writing assistant pop up or whatever’s this is upon viewing the page:
Fortunately I disallow javascript execution by default, so I often don’t see this crap. Of course, about half the time I don’t see images or the article content either, since delivering text or images is apparently completely impossible without running arbitrary code.
I seem to vaguely recall we used to have some sort of hyper-text markup language that could do all that, but I guess I must’ve imagined it.
Free the code or perish🖕
One of the main benefits to using Discord in a browser is that you can nuke all those dumb popups with uBO. And I have my browser open anyway. Not sure why I’d want the Rust native app. Definitely not sure why I’d want the electron app.
I haaaaate using the browser for stuff like that. I want to run it independently and just use my browser for … Web browsing
Positive: Rust means no more Electron.
Negative: Rust typically means massive attack surface through hundreds or thousands of third-party dependencies.
Negative: Discord likes to demand personal information.
Negative: Discord remains the gatekeeper of your creative work.
Negative: Discord can harvest everything in your direct messages and private channels.
Negative: Discord has been known to lock people out of their communities if they don’t give up their personal information, or even at random.Yeah. Npm definitively is safer than cargo /s.
Any non-removeded company would just verify that their dependencies are secure. And then self-host their own cargo repo to avoid supply chain attacks.
This is a company issue, not a language issue. And if it were a language issue, JavaScript would be worse anyway.
Most of that has nothing to do with a rewrite, and I don’t think the attack surface of an Electron app is actually any better because it’ll depend on bloody
left-pador whatever.
How much memory does Discord normally use?
😆 That’s insane. 1/16th of my RAM for a voice comm program. What a bunch of bloat.
Makes me curious what Fluxer is using now that I switched to that.
It uses flutter, still bloated but it’s frequently uses a quarter of what discord does for the same work load. Typically between 500 megs to 1 gig. When discord would use 2-4 gigs.
If you want a full all in one client like this your going to have to use a decent chunk of ram no matter what. But discord lost its marbles ages ago.
Are you including video streaming in that number? We just use it for voice and text and I’ve never seen it go above 2gb.
I suppose that was a couple years ago, though, so things may have changed
This is based on what my ram usage tracker has listed from when I used discord about 8 months ago. I’m weird and keep track of ram, CPU, GPU and io usage for every process 24/7.
I haven’t used it since switching to fluxer.
It’s usage is honestly kinda all over the place. While fluxers is really consistent. Couldn’t tell you why.
But I can say that watching video streams would be included in that ram figure.
Right right but I’m asking what you were doing in discord when you got that 4gb number. Was discord idle? Were you in voice chat with 5 people? Sharing video?
Yeah I definitely only want the voice features, so if Fluxer ever starts bloating I might move back to Mumble like I was using 20 years ago lol.
