If you're learning programming skills: Igalia is taking applications for a program paying you to work on open source

💰 Fully paid grant program
📆 450 hours of work with a mentor from June
📍Global remote program
🎓 Open to students or self-directed learners
🚨 Applications close April 3rd!

https://www.igalia.com/coding-experience/

Sie mussten die Antimaterie am nächsten Tag in der Postfiliale abholen, weil der Fahrer sie auf dem Rückweg "nicht angetroffen" hat. 😏

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/antimaterie-transport-lkw-100.html

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.

I just proofread the American Astronomical Society response to SpaceX's response to AAS's petition to deny on SpaceX's million sat filing. It's a great document, but the fact that we need to say any of this (and spend volunteer time fighting SpaceX's highly paid lawyers) is completely infuriating.

I need to go outside now, really tough that I'm in a city and don't have a hay field available for easy rage-screaming.

My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

This isn't your normal "looking for work" post.

I've decided to shut my business and do more volunteer / community work.

If you know of an organisation which could use a board member with strong digital skills, extensive experience in open source and open standards, or cybersecurity please let me know.

Nothing full time. Personal recommendations preferred. Feel free to share.