jaredcwhite

It's weird. I still remember 2008, when GitHub's claim to fame was that it was "the easiest (and prettiest) way to participate in the collaborative development of software."

Now they want to end that collaboration, and turn it into automation. Many C-suite executives right now are smiling bigly. Meanwhile, we're leading the exodus. Turns out, we still want the easiest and prettiest way to participate in the collaborative development of software, and GitHub ain't it!

Same. I've been a programmer for over 30 years. I'll be a programmer for another 30 years, sans the LLMs. There's nothing about the technology which appeals to me in the slightest.

I've used and paid for Dropbox for well over a decade. Other than the rare hiccup every few years (usually due to switching machines/OSes or whatnot), it's been rock solid and a true workhorse. I know there are many other options, including iCloud Drive which I use sparingly, but Dropbox is a service I trust. I hope it continues in that manner and they don't destroy their reputation with a woebegone "pivot to AI".

This page rather reeks of LLM slop itself.

If not…well I don't know what to call this style of writing exactly but I see it all the time on LinkedIn (or some annoying startup landing page) and it's very upsetting to me.

"You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document."

"Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness."

"Let it sharpen your thinking, not replace it."

Why structure sentences like this? Maybe go read some well-written novels, a solid essay or two…or at the very least, write in a normal conversational style?

Ah, the classic "But just you wait, the next version will be better!" fallacy.

It's a fallacy because the reality is often not that…in fact sometimes the reality ends up worse. (See "enshittification", a process whereby technology gets worse over time, not better.)

It's funny because it's (almost) true.

Yeah I'll pick two, thanks.

Virtually every person I talk to on a regular basis either (a) generally hates AI but uses it in specific ways because of the utility they perceive, or (b) hates AI and won't use it at all.

The idea that "distain for AI" is limited to "one 'elite' or another" is most definitely not borne out by any polling data. "Of course this goes for practically any cause" seems to be an opinion based on air. Many, many people across all social strata (except maybe millionaires/billionaires) are deeply invested in a wide variety of causes to make the world a better place.

Booing is a valid form of debate. We could shout "your arguments are not made in good faith and you are a bad actor" but a boo accomplishes the same thing and is far more effective.

The level of pushback you're receiving to this honestly makes me weep for the society we find ourselves in.

I grew up expecting the future would be much like what Captain Jean-Luc Picard described in First Contact: "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

Somehow, that vision of the future seems farther away than ever. We're actively becoming LESS Federation, more Ferengi. That's not a world which holds any appeal for me.

Haha, April Fools! Good one.

Wait…it's May. Ugh, I'm so confused. :spiral eyes emoji:

Indeed. I've only seen that "quality, depth and pace of innovation" is in inverse proportion to the adoption of slop machines within an org. The more sloppy they get, the more the output stinks to high heaven.

The future of forges is decentralized, and I'm getting all I need now out of Forgejo/Codeberg/Codefloe. I'll be handcoding software merrily away on platforms which don't suck and aren't beholden to techbros spewing buzzwords.

Code exists for humans to read and write. The fact it happens to compile and get executed by a computer system is a side effect.

Yes, and I'd argue having to spend weeks on a single design decision is an extremely good thing. The worst thing that can happen to software development is for it to become trivial to pump out reams of new "software". That only means that 99% of software will be freakishly terrible on an unimaginable level.

"But the nature of painting changed."

No it didn't. You can go find wildly talented painters today who work in incredibly realist styles…in fact just a few years ago as visual social media really took off, there were many challenges to "fool" people into thinking they were looking at a photograph when it was actually a painting.

The whole "painters didn't have to paint a realist style anymore because of cameras" is an ad-hoc rationalization. That was entirely due to taste and other cultural factors, nothing really technological about it whatsoever. The only claim you could convincingly make is that painters _who made a living painting portraits for random people who hired them to paint their portrait_ had to pivot because now people could hang a cheaper photograph of themselves and their family on the wall instead of the more expensive painted portrait. That's about it really.

Handcoding great software for people who want it is alive and well. It's just not at all the industry "software engineers" who can't see past what Google or Meta like to shove out of their corporate offices have been working in from the jump.

Are we surprised that a project bought out by an AI company wants to vibe code a new AI-sloppified runtime? (The comments of "it's basically the same codebase" are so laughable as to feel like intentional gaslighting. Are we really that stupid?)

Decades? Maybe not. A few years at minimum? Hell yeah!

The Web is Dead. –WIRED Magazine, 2010

But seriously, I feel like every few years we're all wringing our hands about what's happening to the web. And plenty of folks think they have the correct remedy. Remember when web3 was going to swoop in and save us all? lol

Truth is: the "Keep the Internet Weird" phenomenon never left us, it just went a bit underground. Is that a bad thing? Honestly, perhaps not. Many of my friends in the Fediverse specifically don't want it to grow much, or grow very slowly at most, and I don't entirely agree but…I get it. Would your local comedy club down in the basement be better if it seated 20,000 people? Hell no!

The small web, the slow web, the indie web…these are all movements which are alive and well. Join us!

100% the opposite here. I derive all the pleasure from writing code, which is why I'm still writing code.

Probably not what the author intended, but this article highlights exactly where Millennials (of which I am one) went terribly, terribly wrong. And the last piece of advice at the end is unfortunately the exact opposite of the remedy we need.

The MOAR FASTER OMG CAN'T KEEP UP CHANGE COMES AT YOU FAST FOMO WEEE mindset is what got us into this terrible situation in the first place. I'm not here to bash on my generation, but if we could gently take a piece of advice (probably good for GenXers as well) it would be this:

Slow the ever-loving f*** down.

You will succeed by ignoring nearly all hype cycles, intentionally not jumping on the next big thing, skipping past virtually all "influencers" online…in fact you should probably just spend the bulk of your waking hours offline entirely.

Cal Newport has been one of the leading voices of this corrective movement (Deep Work, Slow Productivity, etc.), and I pray to the gods above that Gen Z rightly rejects so much of this hustle porn that Millennials came up with in the first two decades of this century.

Slow dooowwwnnnn. Focus on real-world values which last, not fleeting spikes in viral activity. Build meangingful community IRL. Learn tangible skills with your brain and your hands. Interface with people who are not at all like you. Talk to more people in different generations. Realize the hazards of "software brain" as The Verge's Nilay Patel wisely has talked about.

We have a lot to answer for I fear. And if we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the Boomers, we really need to shut up and listen to what the kids are telling us. There's a reason they now hate AI and want iPods for Christmas.

Nice, looking forward to all the, ahem, creative protest to be done on the robocars if they ever do show up here. heh

"rapidly evolving industry"

That has always been wildly unprofitable…

RIP Mozilla. I can't even with this nonsense…truly a shame considering I once admired this organization and the principles it stood for.

So a sloppified Django spit out by Claude? Good luck with that.

The water stuff isn't fake though. It's just easier to lie about.

The future isn't more autonomous cars driving on city streets. It's fewer cars on streets.

I truly believe massive gains in transit & micromobility especially when related to the green energy boom is the real game-changing story of our time.

You don't seem to be engaging seriously with respected experts in this field who have been reporting for years at this point that merely scaling LLMs and so-called "agentic systems" doesn't get us anywhere close to true AGI.

Also computers in the 1980s could perform many tasks that previously would have "required human intelligence". So? Are you saying computers in the 1980s were somehow intelligent?

Oh? And what extensive knowledge and experience makes YOU qualified to determine what "the vast majority of people on this planet" are doing for work and if those tasks are creative or uncreative?

AI, the way you are describing it, has not been invented yet. It is a fiction.

What is called "AI" today is an extremely vague marketing term being applied to various software technologies which are only dangerous because humans are dangerous. Nuclear & chemical weapons are also "very scary" but only because the humans who might decide to use them in fits of insanity are scary.

I'm not in the slightest bit uneasy about "AI" itself right now, because as I said, the AI of Sci-Fi has not yet been invented…and seems unlikely to in any of our lifetimes. (Not throwing shade on clever researchers. We also don't have working FTL travel, though plenty of scientists speculate on how such an engine might be built.)