Arne BrasseurMar 24

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

Show threadHans HübnerMar 24

@plexus In the end, software engineering is about creating solutions to problems other people have. The solutions are not a byproduct, but the primary purpose. To the majority of users, the inner workings and the creation process of software is opaque. The qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.

This means that for most people in the software industry, adapting to the new tooling that makes the creation process more efficient is 1/

Show threadHans HübnerMar 24

@plexus not a matter of choice, or resent. The market for "human crafted" software will be small, much smaller than the market for software that is cheap and does what users "want".

It is clear that the hidden costs of LLM generated software are huge, but these costs are not going to be realised at the point of creation.

This mechanism is the same for many aspects of capitalism. Opting out of one thing won't fix the system, but is a gesture. Just. 2/2

Show threadcanMar 24
@hanshuebner @plexus yes and no. It‘s a systemic problem that needs a fix on a regulatory scale. But enough single devs opting out can also make a difference. Furthermore, regulation is done by politics, which in the end is the sum of the votes and voices of the people.
Show threadHans HübnerMar 24

@can @plexus It is a personal choice to frame it that way, if you can afford it. For the majority of developers, it is a question of adapting or dropping out of the industry.

Humanity went through this process a couple of times now, and every industrial cycle left those who were made redundant by new technologies with the same choice.

Social change is possible, but our class - workers of the software industry - is not going to spark the next revolution, I fear.

Show threadArne BrasseurMar 24
@hanshuebner @can seriously Hans, I am in no mood for this. Yes, the force of capital is overwhelming, and there's little that a bubble of old timers on the fediverse is going to do about it. We're all going to have to reckon with that and figure out what choices we have left. That's life under capitalism. The least we can do is speak our truth, and call things out for what they really are. At least we won't feel like we're the only ones who think this shit sucks, or who see it for what it really is. There's a reason I talk about hegemony. The defeatism only hastens the process.
Show threadHans HübnerMar 24

@plexus @can I don't actually think this shit sucks. Things are not that easy. Mind you, computers are a product of the military industrial complex in itself, and we were just lucky to be far away from WWII and the Manhattan Project that we could ignore and forget how all this stuff came to fruition in the first place.

There is no alternative to taking the world as it is when working on social change, though. It does not seem like a successful strategy to opt out of the technology everyone 1/

Show threadArneBab11h ago

@hanshuebner Some of us can ignore how this shit came to fruition, because thousands and thousands of us sat down and wrote free software to cut off the shackles that were there.

And now that free software has been guzzled up and is sold to us as new shackles we’re expected to wear happily.

@plexus @can

Show threadHans Hübner10h ago

@ArneBab I'm not attached to the code that I wrote over that I wrote over the course of my life. Some of it was good, much of it was not, and in the end, I enjoyed the process of writing it.

You seem to be rather bitter about the fact that you don't control what is done with what you've created. I'm not.

Show threadArneBab10h ago

@hanshuebner I’m angry that the work I invested with a specific goal (being able to use computers without proprietary shackles), secured by copyleft licenses, is being used to achieve the opposite.

And the double standard that I am expected to adhere to licenses of others while the licenses I chose are widely ignored by laundering the code through LLMs.

Show threadHans Hübner
@ArneBab You are angry about that, because you believe in licenses. I do not. I believe that claiming that licenses protect freedom is a pretty far-fetched idea.
7:37amWeb
Show threadArneBab10h ago

@hanshuebner Disbelieving that licenses (can) protect freedom seems illusory given the experience with copyleft Free Software over the past decades.

But facts on the ground won’t be able to change your belief, so there’s no use discussing that further.

Show threadHans Hübner10h ago
@ArneBab My experience with copyleft licenses over the last decades is that they're just an annoyance and don't actually protect user or programmer freedom. They serve those that use them to preserve their beliefs, but that is it.