C J SilverioHorrible elitist opinion: most programmers aren't very good, and we’ve just cranked their blast radii up ten times or so.
Mx. Aria Stewart@ceejbot Not wrong.
@ceejbot But also: _this is why we design processes and contexts to minimize harms_.
Unfortunately that means now _re_designing a bunch of them.
Glyph@aredridel @ceejbot fundamentally this _is_ the difference between a good programmer and a bad programmer.
a good programmer will think "I am not a good programmer. because of this, I will design for safety, because I will make mistakes."
a bad programmer thinks that they can try a little harder and be safe that way
dreid@glyph @aredridel @ceejbot I think a lot of people are working on the assumption that mistakes aren't as costly anymore.
You won't have to live with the consequences very long and you can just rewrite everything if the technical decisions you make end up being wrong.
This doesn't hold for genuine safety issues, like things affecting the privacy and security of your users, but industry was already caring about those things pretty reluctantly.
@dreid @aredridel @ceejbot I have the *subjective* impression that things were improving for a long time and in the last few years there has been a catastrophic regression to a previous decade's lack of concern, but it's hard to put any real numbers to that
@glyph @dreid @aredridel At some companies there's huge pressure from fairly ignorant/credulous leadership -- or worse, leadership with a financial incentive to promote use of tech that doesn't really work-- to pump out lines of code with these things. This has predictable outcomes.
Microsoft/GitHub has a history of doing this, but this time the bad tech speeds up the bad code production instead of getting in the way and slowing people down.
I don't know how to express online with its context collapse problem exactly how mixed my opinion is about all this. Writing software is changed forever AND using these tools has a real place in your workflow if you learn how AND it's a horrible mess because capitalism has its usual incentives.
@ceejbot @glyph @aredridel there is the assumption that they won't make bad code forever so we'll just use them to replace the bad code with better code later.
Also we can put the person who committed the bad code on a PIP while ignoring the organizational defects that prevented putting any safety procedures into place.
On paper there is lots of interesting stuff happening. But in practice I can't figure out a way to use it without enriching the worst fucking people.