No joke. In my company we "sabotaged" the AI initiative led by the CTO. We used LLMs to deliver features as requested by the CTO, but we introduced a couple of bugs here and there (intentionally). As a result, the quarter ended up with more time allocated to fix bugs and tons of customer claims. The CTO is now undoing his initiative. We all have now some time more to keep our jobs.
Thats actively malicious. I understand not going out of your way to catch the LLMs' bugs so as to show the folly of the initiative, but actively sabotaging it is legitimately dangerous behavior. Its acting in bad faith. And i say this as someone who would mostly oppose such an initiative myself
I would go so far as to say that you shouldnt be employed in the industry. Malicious actors like you will contribute to an erosion of trust thatll make everything worse
Might be but sometimes you don’t have another choice when employers are enforcing AIs which have no „feeling“ for context of all business processes involved created by human workers in the years before. Those who spent a lot of love and energy for them mostly. And who are now forced to work against an inferior but overpowered workforce.
I dont like it either but its not malicious. The LLM isnt accessing your homeserver, its accessing corporate information. Your employer can order you to be reckless with their information, thats not malicious, its not your information. You should CYA and not do anything illegal even if your asked. But using LLMs isnt illegal. This is bad faith argument
You're talking about legality again. I'm talking about ethics.
Using LLMs for software development is a safety hazard. It also has a societal risk, because it centralizes more data, more power, more money to tech oligarchs.
It's ethical to fight this. Still not commenting on legality.
You're not forced to work there and use those tools. If you don't like it, then leave the job. Intentionally breaking things is unethical especially when you're receiving a paycheck to do the opposite.
Again, no one is forcing him to be there. He's breaking something on purpose. I think you should read up on ethics because this take "I don't like it therefore whatever I do is ethical" is juvenile.
That's extremely unethical. You're being paid to do something and you deliberately broke it which not only cost your employer additional time and money, but it also cost your customers time and money. If I were you, I'd probably just quit and find another profession.
That's not "sabotaged", that's sabotaged, if you intentionally introduced the bugs. Be very careful admitting something like that publicly unless you're absolutely completely sure nobody could map your HN username to your real identity.
> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all
I understand what the author means, but I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy. For example, if you show courtesy by contributing to an open source project and following all the guidelines they have, I think it's fair to assume that courtesy will be shown in return. I know that may be difficult to achieve (e.g., a high volume of noise preventing project authors from giving courtesy to those who deserve it), but that doesn'tt mean we are entitled to nothing. And this has nothing to do with open source or software; it's just common sense when dealing with people.
But yeah, if you contribute something of very poor quality (you didn't give it the attention it needed, it's full of bugs, or shows no attention to detail; or these days, it's packed with AI-generated content that makes it 10x harder to digest, even if the intention is good), then perhaps you are not entitled to anything
> I understand what the author means, but I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy.
This only holds up for the "small" number of human interactions the average person gets. If my neighbor comes and rings my doorbell to say hello, I'm fine answering and shooting the shit, maybe invite them in for a quick coffee.
If every 5 minutes a strange comes in and rings my doorbell, I'm not getting up and answering it. And some people visiting will get angry and start pounding on the door and coming to my window and pounding on it glaring at me inside. And say, hey, I drove all the way from hours away to come visit you, the least you could do is open the door and say hello.
For them, it's their first human-2-human interaction that day, with someone they slightly admire even, and they're expecting basic human courtesy. To me, they're just the 42nd doorbell ringer today.
Ah the dehumanizing nature of affluence… a right of passage for those fortunate enough to experience.
The challenge is in how to manage and and maintain the interest, less one falls back into the realm of obscurity or worse be tarnished reputationally so as to never recover.
You as a first-time contributor need to know that the large group of first-time contributors has a lot of poorly behaved people in it, and that the burden is on you to establish that you are not one of them.
Trust is built through iterative exchange. This is Bayesian priors - default is average, and only moves on the introduction of new information.
Lots of examples of this. In 1950's westerns, if a stranger comes to a small town, the default treatment is a guarded form of hospitality with a health measure of suspicion. If you are dating someone new, you are by default understood as the average first date partner, and the average first date partner is not a great match.
I'm not saying you're wrong - but I do detest that attitude myself
As you say, trust is a two way street, and first time contributors are being expected to trust that it's not personal when they are met with brusquerie.
I know it's hard when it's the 99th person and you've had to deal with 98 less than nice individuals, but defaulting to an abrupt or blunt manner does nobody any favours.
The demands here are effectively extensions of netiquette[0] and "how to ask good questions"[1]. Every code contributor should at least understand what is asked of them.
[Julia's post sadly does not include the blunt expression "demonstrate that you have done your homework", which is a fundamental tenet.]
What’s the solution then? This is one of those emotional-labor questions.
Who is responsible for new contributors having a good experience? Especially thousands of eager, misinformed contributors?
It’s a DDOS that exhausts and burns out the maintainer even while the supply of newbie contributors is rarely meaningfully impacted by maintainer conduct.
The world has givers and takers, and we are all both at different times. The newbie thinks they are a giver, but mostly they are a taker.
I've also seen maintainers complain about "drive by contributors" where one complaint is that the submitter has provided a good patch/PR, but doesn't stick around to support it.
From the submitters point of view, why /would/ you stick around if your first (and only) interaction with the project is less than "ideal"
FTR I absolutely understand the "burnout" maintainers experience dealing with contributors that drain energy as well.
So, probably a dumb question from me, but why are we "all entitled to at least basic courtesy"? What is the "basic courtesy" that everyone has agreed to follow?
> this has nothing to do with open source or software; it's just common sense when dealing with people
Common sense is very different than entitlement. Back to the open source software point of view, your entitlement is described by the license. Basic courtesy, or even the opportunity to interact with anyone, is not included as a part of any open source license I remember. It isn't even a consideration for most [0].
Basic courtesy here, to me, means that the maintainer should be polite and probably should say something (it's not very nice to be ignored), even if it is to say that they won't review the contribution.
But that's about it. My experience as a maintainer is that too often, people feel entitled to a lot more than that.
There is not space in the collective consciousness for an infinite number of solutions to the same problem. I usually get downvoted for pointing this out but it explains why people shit on you when you start getting defensive about people calling your solution or attitude shit.
Reasonable people won’t start a project in an already oversubscribed niche. So yes, it does matter if you’re doing more than the minimum. It’s a social contract because you’re using up the oxygen.
I liken it to throwing a party. Yes it’s your party, but I can’t go to your party if it’s Timothy’s birthday. But if you’re popular enough then people will say “fuck Timothy” and that’s not cool. And you don’thave to be a great host and you can absolutely lock your bedroom door, but there better be snacks and maybe music, or people will talk about you behind your back. Or if you bring lutefisk and nobody there is Scandinavian. Read the room dude.
There are way too many software people who think, “well you didn’t have to come to my party/eat what I brought” is a valid response to criticism.
That’s not how social things work, and open source is one.
The biggest assholes in your example are the people saying "Fuck Timothy". It's also not my fault those people are assholes. If they don't like my party that's fine. If they say i don't have music or whatever that's fine.
If they tell me I don't know how to run parties and all parties need to have music and snacks or else its not a party I'm gonna tell them to fuck off.
I’ve never been the popular kid for more than a few minutes. It felt weird when it happened, both due to impostor syndrome and the unfortunate situations where it most often happened. Like an altercation where I found I was seen more than I thought.
But I’ve been involved with highly successful clubs from a young age, and I have to take things apart to understand them. I also lived for ten years with a woman who wanted to not only be in every club she saw but take over them, and I got a good anthropology study in to what things she made better and which she made worse (did I mention we aren’t together anymore?)
The reasons they were popular often turned out not to be the reasons I would have thought. Stupid little things like keeping a consistent location and meeting time seem small but the outcomes are outsized.
(Inline edit, I’m such a space cadet I left out the punchline) one of the biggest is figuring out how to successfully channel the enthusiasm of new members 90% of which will be gone in 6-18 months. Which OSS has in truckloads.
As I’ve matured I’ve realized that I should not dream of being in charge of these organizations anymore. The qualities (or energies really) I possess in insufficient quantities to keep that many plates spinning. Properly. So I help those people be the leaders we need, and I hop in when the stars align and my energies are sufficient to take something off their plate. And god forbid they get hit by a bus and I become acting president of VP, my first effort would be in grooming a replacement, not trying to take over.
You can’t have an objective conversation about this sort of stuff with people who still have a chip on their shoulder about how they’re right and the universe is wrong for not understanding how amazing you are. You’re right, but you’re also tragically wrong. And until you grasp that you will be railing against the universe for the indignities it thrust upon you.
I get that vibe in a lot of these conversations. And I wish I knew how to find the people who understand this. All I can do is talk to the people who rail and hope the silent audience gets something from it.
I agree with you, but this is one of those things where if you haven't had the experience of being part of a popular open source project, you don't realize how bad the scaling effects are.
Let's say courtesy only requires five minutes of my time. There are millions of users of the programming language I work on. Let's say only 0.1% of them desire my courtesy. Even at that small fraction, I'm going to spend 83 hours out of every 24 hour day (including weekends and holidays) giving each of them that cheap courtesy.
Yes and if you have o(1000) prs or issues in a single day, I guess you have a different scale of problem and will need to automate triage and management, probably through an ai-powered tool.
Even if it is 0.01% per day it’s still a very high volume. At that point it’s not a hobby. Millions of users maybe would point toward a more formal management and governance approach.
See Gemini-cli for example. Or a bunch of Microsoft projects. They use ai to triage and respond to tickets. (And they pocket veto many of them)
> I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy
Why? If you are hostile towards me, mock me, or attack me or are in some other way a douche towards me, I reserve the right to handle you in any way that I want to. My opinion of you has to be earned, just like respect. There is no entitlement for my basic courtesy. I am willing to give everyone the benefit of doubt at the beginning, and extend courtesy, but "entitlement"? no. You do not get to decide what I think or how I feel about you.
Yeah, doing shitty things while “donating” a bunch of money to make your legacy look really good is a classic move throughout history.
These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.
It's like you're allergic to subtlety. Yes, saving untold numbers of children from malaria is a good thing. You can do bad things and good things and while everyone else is arguing about morality, the thing that matters is the end effect. Did Bill Gate's time on earth result in a better world when he's gone or a worse one? I won't pretend to know enough about his life to answer that, but he has prevented a lot of really, really brutal suffering.
Nope. I'm not weighing "good deeds" that amount to his entertainment against the aggressive selfish business destroying greed that got him the money to spend and everything else he's clearly done in his personal life, shrugging my shoulders, and saying "who knows! maybe him doing all this is all for the best"
I'd rather have better men had that money to spend and his victims both personal and business leave him penniless and alone at the end.
Don't get it. What's the relation between Mitchell being a "better" developer than most of us (and better is always relative, but that's another story) and getting value out of AI? That's like saying Bezos is a way better businessman than you, so you should really hear his tips about becoming a billionaire. No sense (because what works for him probably doesn't work for you)
Tons of respect for Mitchell. I think you are doing him a disservice with these kinds of comments.
Maybe you disagree with it, but it seems like a pretty straightforward argument: A lot of us dismiss AI because "it can't be trusted to do as good a job as me". The OP is arguing that someone, who can do better than most of us, disagrees with this line of thinking. And if we have respect for his abilities, and recognize them as better than our own, we should perhaps re-assess our own rationale in dismissing the utility of AI assistance. If he can get value out of it, surely we can too if we don't argue ourselves out of giving it a fair shake. The flip side of that argument might be that you have to be a much better programmer than most of us are, to properly extract value out of the AI... maybe it's only useful in the hands of a real expert.
No, it doesn't work that way. I don't know if Mitchell is a better programmer than me, but let's say he is for the sake of argument. That doesn't make him a god to whom I must listen. He's just a guy, and he can be wrong about things. I'm glad he's apparently finding value here, but the cold hard reality is that I have tried the tools and they don't provide value to me. And between another practicioner's opinion and my own, I value my own more.
>A lot of us dismiss AI because "it can't be trusted to do as good a job as me"
Some of us enjoy learning how systems work, and derive satisfaction from the feeling of doing something hard, and feel that AI removes that satisfaction. If I wanted to have something else write the code, I would focus on becoming a product manager, or a technical lead. But as is, this is a craft, and I very much enjoy the autonomy that comes with being able to use this skill and grow it.
I consider myself a craftsman as well. AI gives me the ability to focus on the parts I both enjoy working on and that demand the most craftsmanship. A lot of what I use AI for and show in the blog isn’t coding at all, but a way to allow me to spend more time coding.
This reads like you maybe didn’t read the blog post, so I’ll mention there many examples there.
Nobody is trying to talk anyone out of their hobby or artisanal creativeness. A lot of people enjoy walking, even after the invention of the automobile. There's nothing wrong with that, there are even times when it's the much more efficient choice. But in the context of say transporting packages across the country... it's not really relevant how much you enjoy one or the other; only one of them can get the job done in a reasonable amount of time. And we can assume that's the context and spirit of the OP's argument.
>Nobody is trying to talk anyone out of their hobby or artisanal creativeness.
Well, yes, they are, some folks don't think "here's how I use AI" and "I'm a craftsman!" are consistent. Seems like maybe OP should consider whether "AI is a tool, why can't you use it right" isn't begging the question.
Is this going to be the new rhetorical trick, to say "oh hey surely we can all agree I have reasonable goals! And to the extent they're reasonable you are unreasonable for not adopting them"?
>But in the context of say transporting packages across the country... it's not really relevant how much you enjoy one or the other; only one of them can get the job done in a reasonable amount of time.
I think one of the more frustrating aspects of this whole debate is this idea that software development pre-AI was too "slow", despite the fact that no other kind of engineering has nearly the same turn around time as software engineering does (nor does they have the same return on investment!).
I just end up rolling my eyes when people use this argument. To me it feels like favoring productivity over everything else.
Is this similar to Ableton? Wanted to "create" music as a hobby, but don't really wanna pay for Ableton. I tried once https://lmms.io/ but didn't stick. Never heard of Ardour.
Ardour is not as focused on "in the box composition" (i.e. making music entirely on your computer) as Live or Bitwig are. It originated as something closer to ProTools or Logic or Digital Performer in the sense that it was focused on recording people doing stuff (blowing,hitting,singing,speaker,scraping etc. etc).
However, in recent years, we've added a lot of the stuff you need for "in the box composition" and many people do use it that way. There's (always) more to do, but it's fairly capable in this sort of workflow now too and will continue to improve over time.
Ardour has been around for more than 25 years.
Please be aware that almost any fully-capable DAW (everything named here except lmms) has a steep, challenging learning curve. Don't jump in thinking it will be easy.
Similar but not quite. One of the problems that you might face is a lot of tutorials are for Ableton, Logic, Cubase etc. It shouldn't actually matter, but you might find it confusing what you can and cant do if you are following what someone else is doing in another program. It’s like learning C# from a Java course. Once you understand the fundamentals it does not matter what you use within reason.
But I’ve used Ardour a long time ago and I don’t see why you couldn’t release music with it. Another alternative is Reaper.
if you mean you just want to make music and arent too bothered about recording then Cardinal is a free modular eurorack synth you could mess around with
or you use a VST host like Kushview's Element and load up on all the free VST instruments and effects that are out there. you would just need a midi keyboard hooked to it then or use Cardinal to generate note patterns
And running the marathon is just running the marathon? I disagree. Big part of running the marathon is in the preparation. Weeks after weeks of training and not skipping a single session. The marathon itself is the tip of the iceberg; important but not the whole "thing".
There are some things that you just can't do without preparation. But never mistake the preparation for doing the thing. You can be "getting in shape for a marathon" forever without ever running a marathon.
I kinda agree, but I also gain pleasure from doing all those things that are not supposed to be "the thing". The thinking, the dreaming, the visualizing... I just like that. I do it a lot when working on personal projects (which some of them I never ship). I think it's fine, and I wouldn't go as far as saying that those things are "not doing the thing"; in many ways those things are "the thing", at least for me.
That's OK. It's totally fine to not doing the thing. Find joy however you want.
But it's not good to lie to yourself about doing the thing while not doing the thing. If your joy comes from the result of doing the thing, but you're putting time into other things that aren't doing the thing, that joy is not getting any closer.
Is it always like that? I worked in teams where we had some planning beforehand (months, like in your example). We shipped just fine and the product started to bring money. I guess it depends, as usual.
As an IC that's been in the industry for over a decade, I don't see myself jumping into the management track. I just can't. I see my calendar and I see few meetings, and typically I have the power to move some of them (because some of them are arranged by me). I see my manager's calendar and it's constantly packed with meetings he probably cannot move. Worse than that, I see for instance he has one meeting at 10, then another at 12, then another at 3 and then another at 5. Like, you cannot escape that hell. I start my work at 10, work solid 4-5 hours or so and then close the laptop. I cannot sacrifice that kind of freedom
As someone who did get on the management track a couple of years ago myself, I think it’s great you have that perspective. I miss being able to turn on some tunes, code for a few hours, and call it good for the day. At the same time, I have always naturally fell into leadership positions I think mainly because I like helping people make better decisions. As an IC, I despised broken processes, bad decisions from product, and overall poor management. As an engineering manager, I have some amount of control over these things and I hope those I manage, as well as our users, have benefited from me being in this role.
A few examples of things I heavily influenced:
- reduction in investment of time, effort, and cost going to offshore engineering. We’ve reduced bugs and effort from our engineers in coordinating between disparate time zones.
- advocacy of a design system shared between design and dev teams. We now have one.
- reduction in the amount of meetings our devs are expected to attend weekly, increasing time they can spend building
- heavily advocating to reduce number of clicks for our users to get where they need to be, benefit UX greatly
- better defined incident management process
It’s not perfect though, the amount of control I have is still limited, and I am in meetings basically all day sometimes.
While I will say that would have sounded like hell to me a couple of years ago as an IC, I have been able to sway the direction of the company meaningfully in ways that feel ultimately more impactful than what I could have done jamming on some code in the same amount of time. The cost of doing so is a little more stress, but hey I get to do so from the comfort of my home and I’m allowed a good amount of schedule flexibility outside of some specific meetings each day. It’s definitely not for everyone though!
I've been using Zotero as my "book" organizer. I have all my epubs, pdfs, everything there. Since version 7 I think you can read PDFs within Zotero, and I love it. I keep custom labels so I easily search for stuff. The only feature I don't use is everything about citation (funny enough). Before Zotero I had everything in file system directories, but I wanted the feeling of having one place (one app) where I could see all my books by category, by read/no-read, etc.
Having said this, I will probably wait a bit before upgrading to V8 (since I use it everyday, so I wouldn't like to face bugs and the like)
My experience with Zotero was similar - I tried adding my ebook library to it as an alternative to Calibre because I really want to sort of categorize and easily reference my books and/or get like library call number groupings which is not trivial with Calibre.
I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre.
Someday I will write an indexer with either a web search tool or an LLM interface to better find info on my books but for now I just spend too much time browsing through the files which makes me sad (but not sad enough yet to overcome the laziness)
> I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre.
Just find the citation on the web like at Open Library or somewhere, grab it, and add the book as an attachment.
I wouldn't drop it because all the stuff may not be done automatically. If you're going to read the books, you should be spending hours with them. I myself only put them into Zotero when I start reading them. I don't need to crowd it with wishful thinking. It's bloated and gets slower the more entries you add.
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