orblivion

With Open Source / Free Software we're trying an alternate economic model, shooting to overtake the standard model. We rely on volunteers. It creates an awkward situation where we can't be unappreciative of effort (no matter the quality of output), but we also have to have expectations or this model is just not going to work.

So we should respectfully expect better than this. (With the caveat that Canonical is a business. I'm using Ubuntu Pro for free so I won't be berating them, but I think I paying customers perhaps should be.)

I also think that we should consider a sort of an "SLA" concept. If you say "I got you covered" and you drop the ball, I think I do have a grievance in that I could have chosen another option, and now I have to take the time to adjust. On the other hand sometimes people don't actually say "I got you covered" they say "This is a cool thing I'm working on". So something like an "SLA" could clear that up.

> rudely

You started this with "sigh"

"AI is just a tool" seems like a thought terminating cliche.

Generally supportive of this blog post (with the caveat on "eat less" but that's addressed by another commenter). It addresses a pain point for me and I appreciate it. It's particularly painful for those of us who tend to be self-critical. No matter what some asshole is telling you you're doing it wrong. I wish people giving the advice would read this as well. I found the "say yes" vs "say no" thing in particular very funny and I'm surprised I never noticed it.

I was wondering the same thing and I guessed they meant the former. As for the latter I do what I can to avoid it and I wouldn't say I'm getting away with it. I'm probably phasing out of being a software developer.

Note that the only thing I'm calling a mania here is agentic coding that is shipped with no human who understands it (to say nothing of code that nobody has even read!).

And I would put a caveat on code that could somehow be formally verified as correct, using a formal verification system that humans understand. I know people sort of do this with unit tests but I still think that's crazy.

I'm not a sociologist or well read on anything. And I don't follow these conversations all that closely. This is just my vibe from 10,000 feet, and/or some pet theories. Though, it seems that some people in it (one reply to me here) agree.

To me it's the memetic dynamic. There's "Old Wisdom". It's entrenched over a few generations now (and maybe some of it comes from before computers). "Old Wisdom" would have never allowed people to seriously start shipping code that they don't even understand. "Old Wisdom" has in fact prepared us for every possible "shiny new thing". That stubbornness was actually a good thing and held things together.

But now "shiny new thing" is so shiny that people convince themselves that it's actually okay. But they have to break the "Old Wisdom" in others. And this stubbornness (again, a good thing) is now rebranded as "being stuck in the old ways". You don't want to be stuck in the old ways, do you? So rather than coming up with real arguments, they're gaslighting people out of their defensive "be prepared for the shiny new thing" posture.

Once a person has been gaslit out of it, it's their turn to gaslight the next people. Pretty soon anyone who is holding back is the weird one. "I guess this is the new thing now?". This rolling effect is what I describe as a mania.

On the flip side, maybe it really is okay and it'll become the "New Wisdom" soon. This is probably also how things change. I still don't care for it because it's very disrespectful to people who have held their ground for good until the point where it's no longer useful. They've believed in something that wasn't actually true, it just temporarily served some greater purpose.

I picked up on a similar dynamic in radical politics when principled adherents are suddenly gaslit as "idealistic" by "practical" people, after they're no longer useful to them (they already won the election, etc).

Would you have made this comparison in 2022 about a future where you're shipping code that you're not even reading?

(made a small edit)

A lot of the real advancements that the dinosaurs didn't understand perhaps seemed like a mania, but a lot of manias seem like real advancements that the dinosaurs don't get.

I'm miles away from all of this as a non-user of AI and it seems like a mania to me.

"anyway, get back to training them to jump higher"

I don't know much about this genre but it comes to mind this this could fill in the gap in Steampunk for where light comes from without electricity as we know it. At any rate it seems very steampunk but it's 200 older than it needs to be.

Thank you for the summary. As a Linux user, am I spared because of relative obscurity, or is it that Microsoft is explicitly allowing this to happen?