josteink

We contract this company at work. They’re clearly capable.

Can confirm that we’re getting our money's worth. :D

> AI causes massive environmental harm in a time where ecosystems and the climate are already under severe stress

One could also argue this is a temporary condition - driving the world to better, more efficient power-supplies in the long term (like nuclear).

It also allows engineers to more quickly arrive at efficient solutions for their problems - enabling more efficient systems being deployed earlier - possibly saving energy in the long run.

I don't think this is as clear cut yet as some people make it out to be.

> We also see a lot of AI-based pull requests to open source projects that completely overwhelm maintainers.

I agree this is a negative. Open-source maintainers have limited capacity to follow up work - and externally AI-generated PRs only make this problem worse.

> AI is harmful for small libre and open source projects.

Not if the projects themselves decides to use AI to more quickly diagnose bugs - and fix issues or features they want to implement. There are several OSS projects which are going this route, to the point that they don't want PRs. Instead they want bug-reports which are accurate enough for an LLM to create the PR for them, in accordance with the projects coding and process standards.

How is this harmful?

> AI is forced on people because of capitalist incentives

This sounds like a very weak argument.

Everything in a capitalist society is imposed on people based on capitalist incentives. That's how and why capitalism works (compared to other, lesser successful models).

Why should AI be treated differently?

> People who care about their craft are labeled as old-fashioned

Not really. Develop what you like, how like!

But people who see AI as the big-bad-wolf and go on a war-path against it, are being labeled old-fashioned yes. Same as people who were fighting against IDEs, linters, type-checks, compilers, etc.

> the way the software was produced might have been a very joyless process, because AI was doing all the fun work.

Some people find craft at a higher level - creating a specification for what would be the perfect piece of software.

And with AI, they can use that spec to magically materialize real working software from that.

That brings me REAL joy - even as a software craftsman.

> AI in programming also leads to deskilling and makes it less likely that junior programmers become as good as the current senior programmers

This is true.

Also: My predecessors were probably better at fixing their car should it break down than I am. Despite that society seems to have moved on.

> And in the meantime AIs will run dry of new high-quality learning material.

This is a real risk and a real possibility. AI going brain-damaged over training or "reproducing" on its own generated output. Digital incest.

But it's not a proven outcome yet either.

But in a capitalist society - we'll choose the model which works best - and this should self regulate.

> Free software licenses are based on copyright. These licenses are supposed to protect the freedoms of the end user (because that's the ethical thing to do).

Software licensning has long been impossible to enforce.

If somebody copies GPLed code to stack overflow without the license - what means do we have to prevent people from using that in closed-source products, or permissively licensed OSS projects?

AI doesn't solve this at all - it just makes the impossibility obvious to all.

One could argue this is a net benefit (a reality check - over idealism) or a problem. I see both cases.

> AI-contributions to software projects might be incompatible with the license of that project

So could any non-AI contribution as well. See above.

In short - I don't find your argument convincing, but at least I can see what angle you are coming from. Thanks for taking the time to answer at thoroughly.

What ethics?

You seem to hold a position which for you is self evident, but obviously not others.

Care to explain?

I honestly have NO idea what sort of value “Dynamic Island” is supposed to have on a laptop running a full computer OS.

It being marked as a highlight makes even less sense to me.

Someone help an old graybeard out?

Consider me weird, but I really find that old-school CDE interface really appealing, visually.

I don’t want my desktop to work like CDE (ie OpenCDE), but just look like it.

Now if someone could create a Hyprland template for that, that would be awesome.

> If you are able to hold together an audience by banning automated tools, you might had suboptimal software but you might keep the actual goal

If the result of your software project is suboptimal software compared to what others are achieving, what was really the goal you say you get to keep?

If your argument is to hold together, the goal must have been something besides the software.

To be clear, this is fair, but then you cannot claim to primarily have been working on a software project, but something else.

I guess in some parts of the FOSS movement, predominantly in the left-wing politicised (“woke”) parts, there is a hard anti-AI wave flooding through these days.

They consider AI to capitalist, fascist and whatever is their current slur for things they don’t like.

On the other end of the moment, the non-political side of the movement, people seem to think AI is just another tool. Some absolutely love it. Others don’t care.

Both of these are thriving in their own ways because they are not instilling confrontation and restriction on whatever is being made. They focus on output, and not the politics of creating it.

Over time I’m pretty sure which side is gonna come out of this with most successful projects and the most healthy communities.

It’s unified RAM like on a Mac, so it also counts as VRAM. Go check what a 128GB VRAM GPU costs. I’ll be waiting.

And a similar spaced MacBook Pro (128GB RAM) is like $9k+.

It’s not like this is a horrible deal in that regard.

Looking back on those screenshots, iOS 16 looks so much better than these modern liquid glass versions.

A nice clean UI, and a very consistent and clean visual hierarchy.

The rate-limit given there seems really low. 5 requests per second?

I wouldn’t be able to use that API in any app with any significant number of concurrent users.

Or am I reading it wrong?

Whatever just works.

Ubuntu used to be the Debian that just worked without tweaking.

Today I find Debian to be the one which’s works without tweaking, and Ubuntu the one where one has to undo/disable lots of Ubuntuisms.

So for me: Server is Debian. Laptop is Arch.

Ubuntu started doing too much weird or non-standard stuff, so I moved all my servers to Debian.

Previous releases was MIR, Upstart, Snapd… This release it’s no X11 and GNU Coreutils replaced by buggy Rust rewrites.

Debian feels more like pure FOSS and in general just better. None of that icky flavour in the back of your mouth.

Mess might not be the right word, but lots of features are clearly developed without any grand vision or coherent thought about how the features are supposed to work together.

> Do most Apple users not just use the Gmail apps and web app?

People here are discussing email apps, not Gmail apps.

Gmail apps only work with 1 provider (gmail), while email apps works with all email providers.