Paul Hoffer

19 Followers
65 Following
132 Posts
Rubyist since 2010. 🌲
Starting to think the real risk is not AI replacing junior staff, but senior staff quitting because they just can’t take this AI bullshit any longer and just opt for early retirement.

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116217477822586442

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever.

It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

Spend the day talking to workers council members about "AI". And it's kinda wild hearing their stories from the wild: Management is 100% in fantasy "AI" can do everything land and makes huge plans for how to use "AI" to cut workers when real projects that supposedly can do 50% of a specific task end up being able to do 8%. And they still go live. It's fucking bonkers. CEO's are really not okay.
Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
Nobody tells you "resistance is futile" unless they are desperately trying to talk you out of resisting
People keep telling me to treat LLMs as junior devs, as if "a junior dev who is structurally incapable of learning from mistakes" isn't a working definition of hell.

Call to action to cis people: be assholes anytime you get asked for your sex assigned at birth. Write letters, complain to staff, refuse to answer. Make it impossible to collect sex assigned at birth. Be really offended that anyone would ask you. Make enough noise that if trans people want to quietly not answer or give whatever answer feels correct to them, no one will notice.

#Boost #CallToAction

“Ruby Central has resolved nothing. Don’t let their delaying tactics convince you otherwise. The Ruby community cannot trust Ruby Central with control over our gems until there is accountability for destroying the very governance they were supposed to be providing.”

https://andre.arko.net/2026/03/03/four-months-of-ruby-central-moving-ruby-backward/

Four months of Ruby Central moving Ruby backward

From the moment RubyGems was first created in 2004, Ruby Central provided governance without claiming ownership, to support the Ruby community. Providing governance meant creating processes to provide stability and predictability. Avoiding ownership meant allowing the community to contribute, to the point where unpaid volunteers created and controlled the entirety of RubyGems.org for many years. Last year, Ruby Central flipped that successful formula on its head. They now claim ownership of both Bundler and RubyGems, but refuse to provide governance. Ruby Central now claims sole control over all code and decisions, despite paying for only a few percent of the work required to create and sustain the projects across 22 years. Instead of providing stable and predictable processes, Ruby Central suddenly hijacked the Bundler and RubyGems codebases away from the existing maintainers, shut out the community, and started issuing the threats to sue.

André.Arko.net

J suspects that this article was produced with AI.

I wonder why?

My experience with generative-AI has been that, at its very best, it is subtly wrong in ways that only an expert in the relevant subject would recognise. So I don't worry about us creating super-intelligent AI, I worry about us allowing that expertise to atrophy through laziness and greed. I refuse to use LLMs not because I'm scared of how clever they are, but because I do not wish to become stupider.