Damn 😳

Literally everything is so annoyingly nuanced, couldn’t agree more lol. Cheers!

(Edit: well. Certainly not everything.)

Okay, I see what you mean. I’m usually pretty sensitive to things that smell like exploitation for financial gain, and it didn’t trigger that response for me.

But after hearing some of the less hostile takes here (like yours) I think I have to acknowledge it’s me, there may be some bias I’m unaware of going into my reading on this one.

Thanks for elaborating.

What a great reply, I think I sincerely understand your POV now, as well as the similar ones from others.

Thanks!

I don’t think you can compare high quality mature OSS projects to busking. I love buskers and busking, I’m old school punk. But the analogy to busking in the software world would be just random devs’ small personal projects.

The better analogy for a big mature project and the phenomena the author is describing:

• team of people create a large scale professional grade musical performance and allow attendance for free
• til now, enough people come to the free show that spend money in other ways to sustain the whole thing
• now, gigantic companies stole everything in the show, put it into their giant entertainment library, giving nothing back, and there are no longer enough attendees to support the free show

I can see disagreeing with what to do about the problem, but it’s bizarre to me to see the “fuck AI in every way” place turn around and attack this guy.

Would you say more? Are you saying he hasn’t contributed the open source stuff he claims? Or that someone else wrote this for him? Something else?

That seems like an extremely uncharitable read (to be clear, I don’t know him either).

But he’s not just a “contributor”, I think we need a word that better describes people like him. It sounds like he’s shaped his career and the software he’s written, thoughtfully in the direction of open source.

He’s saying the previously established way of having a career and OSS projects has been broken by the introduction of AI agents.

How are you getting “shareholder”??

I like hearing strong opinions about stuff I haven’t thought too deeply about. Rant away!

What about it feels not-fantasy? Maybe more broadly what characterizes the appropriate use (and misuse) of genres like this?

This is even worse than I already knew, holy shit.

4-wire USB 2.0 in a USB-C cable should be fucking illegal. Utterly counterintuitive if one stops short of reading specs and merely “keeps up” by having to use this nonsense all day every day. Learning about that alone put to bed some head-scratching confusion I’ve run into with my own stuff over the years.

The cabling problems in particular…just woof!

I use these too. The “team sports” nature of it all is really deeply engrained, like a “water is invisible to a fish” kind of way. You can use that to surprise them and build some genuine curiosity sometimes.

It’s really disarming and opens up convo when I seem to disagree with them on everything… but then just agree and help them attack whichever hideous Democrat they go after during a given conversation. Same for news, the conversation shifts in useful ways when they learn I dislike “their” (Fox and worse) news, as well as what they think of as “mine”.

It’s not enough to magically deprogram anyone, but it can start the gears turning. In my experience it usually takes the situation from two people standing across from each other fussing at one another, to two people standing together fussing at everything else. It’s a start.