Interesting project, writing a useful PHP extension is an every web developer's dream.
However, the licence choice is weird. It's really asking to be MIT. Any company bigger than 2 people pays attention to that. Most web projects are proprietary. GPL‑v3-or-later is not appropriate for proprietary/closed-source.
Also, the README is lacking a nicely looking comparison chart, motivating people why they should use your project instead of just running grep in shell_exec. I'm very unlikely to run the benchmarking scripts myself. You have to convince me why your project is better than the established industry practice.
I made this as a joke with AI in about two hours because I kept seeing this pattern where code bases were grepping for classes because it was faster than anything else available to PHP userspace.
This is a runtime extension so it doesn't preclude you from using it as it would not be considered part of your proprietary code. Similar to how running grep through shell_exec is not the same as incorporating GPL code in your code. I suppose that is a matter of philosophical and legal opinion but I believe my interpretation is the de facto reality.
As for benchmarks there is a thing in the docs folder talking about that. I spend some time on it. The tldr is the PHP runtime is slower to startup so the overall slowness for PHP was 20% slower compared to the grep CLI but that's an apples to oranges comparison because if you already have a php thread running doing an extra ggrep call in userspace is going to be faster then grep because the binary doesn't need time to load into memory.
I just wanted to throw this code out there in case it's useful to anyone but I was considering write a new one for ripgrep or ag because they are both faster than GNU/Grep.
Paraphrasing the classic, it's not AI that people are unhappy with, it's their life around AI. The world generally appears to have become a harsher and more dangerous place - even though it hasn't. But people and especially tabloid press like finding scapegoats and participating in mass hysteria. The anti-AI hysteria is going to go away soon while AI isn't. It's just another tool, like cars or factories. Granted, it brings some danger, but at the same time it brings overwhelmingly more good.
This reads like such a cope. The only people who are hysterical about AI are the people pushing it, pushing the investments, pushing the AGI risk, pushing the marketing and promising to push workers out of their jobs. Listen to Sam or Dario for 10 minutes and tell me they’re not hysterical themselves. Sam compares himself with Oppenheimer, making direct nuclear weapon analogies, and warns of the dangers of what he is producing, yet the people who are concerned about this are hysterical?
You are in a massive bubble my colleague, and I hope you have held some small doubts in your mind so when it pops you will have something to hold onto.
The minor benefits of vibecoding unusable prototypes or lazy cretins "writing" blogs with AI can't quite compare to the benefits of cars and factories, don't you think?
If the impersonator was asking about Ukraine, rest assured that was a Russian spy. Ukraine is kicking Russia's ass pretty well right now with UAVs, so that's why they are trying to get information on them.
What a horrible mess. One "project" created after another one and eventually ditched in favour of creating something else from scratch. No one wants it, they are pissed and they blame Gmail for this. What a shit-show.
I don't want to learn your project, thank you very much. If anything, I'll create my own. Nowadays, it's super easy to do it with AI, but even before AI, I would have still prefered creating my own stuff instead od using yours. I don't want you as a dependency, I don't want you to become the master of my work, I don't want to try to understand how your pitiful "project" works since it would be 10 times easier for me to write the functionality I need from scratch myself. I don't want to do a security audit for your stuff and try to understand how it works while creating my own will always negate this problem entirely. I don't want to work for your "resume" so you could proudly put your turd "project" there seeking better employment. Not at my expense, not at the expense of my time and nerves.
Oh god, don't get me started on this. The article goes full opera-level tragedy, like we're all marching into some corporate gulag where AI eats our souls and the lights go out forever. "The famine comes later" my ass. It's peak doomer porn, written to make you feel like the sky is falling instead of just another round of executive circle jerking.
The corporate world has always been 80% lies, fake KPIs and theatre. "Synergies", "disruptive innovation" "digital transformation", same shit since the 90s. Managers don't give a flying fuck about your clever moat. They wake up one day, get a spreadsheet from McKinsey saying "cut 15%" and boom - your undocumented wizardry gets deleted along with your badge. Nothing personal, just Excel doing what Excel does.
Yes, the corporate bullshitry has been turbocharged with AI now. But it's nothing new and nothing that much tragic. At the very least the same AI can help me finally release personal projects that have been collecting dust for years. Who knows what the future will bring. I'd be much more worried of oil supply chokehold than of AI turbo circus in the corporate world. No oil means not having enough food tomorrow; or medical supplies. My child might die because of this. But AI temporarily causing perturbations at work is just another round of corporate theatre. Been there many times.
Employment danger is real, but not apocalyptic. Some jobs will evaporate, sure. But even as the same articles states, now once thing ("AI know-how") replaced another thing ("domain knowledge siloing"). The corporate machine still needs warm bodies for the messy human parts: sales, talking to customers (customers hate talking to a robot, what a fucking surprise), covering ass. I would say, covering ass is the most important one, along with delegating the project management to someone else below on the corporate hierarchy, so upper management wouldn't have to work and would only keep asking for status updates. They would always need someone to type the actual AI requests. It's not like top management or VP would ever do that, neither they would ever run it automatically, since AI can delete production (happened many times), and they don't want to be the scapegoats.
So yeah, the article is overdramatic trash for clicks. AI is just another round of that circus. The "famine" won't be real, it'll be a bunch of overpromises, just as usual. Same as it ever has been.
>"Synergies", "disruptive innovation" "digital transformation", same shit since the 90s. Managers don't give a flying fuck about your clever moat. They wake up one day, get a spreadsheet from McKinsey saying "cut 15%" and boom - your undocumented wizardry gets deleted along with your badge. Nothing personal, just Excel doing what Excel does.
The buzzwords you cite are the vulnerabilities of the corporations which predator consultancies rely on to make sales. I don't know that the corporate world is 'about' those things so much as it suffers from them.
I would love to switch long time ago, but I make money on Windows enterprise customers, using specific Windows tools that have no reasonable Linux counterparts.
I'll throw my Windows laptop out of a (pun intended) window on the exact second I'll secure viable and sustainable income using Linux. I know it can be done, but so far it's outside of my circles.
Feels sluggish, but maybe this could be fixed by reducing the transition time.
But why? People usually don't notice such transition effects and it doesn't affect user experience in any meaningful positive way. It feels absolutely unnecessary.
Maybe you could re-use it as a mod for some game engine. This feels appropriate for video games; not for web-sites.
I have the exactly opposite view, possibly with the same amount of conviction. It feels very necessary to communicate hierarchy and where things are coming from and going. It communicates a lot of important information and continuity. In real life, you don’t have things suddenly appearing and disappearing all the time. That’s not how our brains are conditioned.
Firefox issues are real and I want to fix them. On the "why", fair to be skeptical, it's not for every UI. But I do think it makes sense when hierarchy needs to feel spatial.
However, the licence choice is weird. It's really asking to be MIT. Any company bigger than 2 people pays attention to that. Most web projects are proprietary. GPL‑v3-or-later is not appropriate for proprietary/closed-source.
Also, the README is lacking a nicely looking comparison chart, motivating people why they should use your project instead of just running grep in shell_exec. I'm very unlikely to run the benchmarking scripts myself. You have to convince me why your project is better than the established industry practice.
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