I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you explain it in assembly?

We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

Ditto. I’m not going to put in the time to clean up a project working fine for me just to have it ignored or complained about. It’s all expectation, very little reward

And even if I did get volunteers, I’m not coordinating people on my personal projects. Sounds like a great way to take all the joy out of it…

Open source is just broken right now, it runs by draining the passion out of people

People just don’t get it… LLMs are unreliable, casual, and easily distracted/incepted.

They’re also fucking magic.

That’s the starting point - those are the traits of the technology. So what is it useful for?

You said drafting basically - and yeah, absolutely. Solid use case.

Here’s the biggest one right now, IMO - education. An occasionally unreliable tutor is actually better than a perfect one - it makes you pay attention. Hook it into docs or a search through unstructured comments? It can rephrase for you, dumb it down or just present it casually. It can generate examples, and even tie concepts together thematically

Text generation - this is niche for “proper” usage, but very useful. I’m making a game, I want an arbitrarily large number of quest chains with dialogue. We’re talking every city in the US (for now), I don’t need high quality or perfect accuracy - I need to take a procedurally generated quest and fluff it up with some dialogue.

Assistants - if you take your news feed or morning brief (or most anything else), they can present the information in a more human way. It can curate, summarize, or even make a feed interactive with conversation. They can even do fantastic transcriptions and pretty good image recognition to handle all sorts of media

There’s plenty more, but here’s the thing - none of those are particularly economically valuable. Valuable at an individual/human level, but not something people are willing to pay for.

The tech is far from useless… Even in it’s current state, running on minimal hardware, it can do all sorts of formerly impossible things.

It’s just being sold as what they want it to be, not what it is

… What? Code quality is “does it work” followed by readability, only then do you get into performance and other things

Good code is better than shitty code by definition.

Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows

When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors

He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.

It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.

I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better

My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so

Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk

Sure, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a Corp that frames fair use as a subset of fair use, making allowances only when it’s beneficial to them for marketing

For the most cut and dry example, they allow blog posts praising them… What about a blog post offering a nuanced criticism? What about a satiric post about them?

Those are both undeniably fair use, but by framing it as outside fair use, they’re being shit heels

The real LPT is always in the comments

Holy shit… The balls of that policy. “Hey, we took two common words of the English language for our project. They’re ours now.”

The psuedo-friendly tone where they define fair use as “all the places we want you to market for us, and none of the ones we don’t” (specifically “showing support of rust”… Not as in “our software supports rust”, but “I want to praise rust publicly”) and you use the word rust in a project… So I guess -rust can probably be licensed if we ask.

I think I figured out the hack - you use the word rust, along with the logo for the still popular game rust (released 2 years before it). They’ll be paralyzed by the mental gymnastics it takes to twist their stance into a “friendly cease and desist” for months. And when it finally comes, you can insist you were talking about the game, Rust, using familiar programming concepts allegorically to comment on game mechanics and emergent design and through player interaction and feedback.

Then you say “I think I’ve heard of rust-lang in the last couple years, some people really seem to like it. But library availability is a concern, do you have a good package manager? Can I find a package for most things I might need?”

I never used atom, but I could use a new sidearm next to vs code (my plugin list is getting a bit ridiculous)

Is it (or rather proton) worth checking out?

Most of the code I write alone is full of jokes and puns that no one would ever get. But then when I go back to it much later, I smile and go “yep, I know exactly how I most have been looking at the system when I wrote this”

It says you should write some damn code.

Anyone can program, granted they aren’t intimidated by the concept… It’s actually very easy, and most professionals are pretty bad at it.

I, and probably lots of others, would be happy to recommend a starting point based on your interests. If nothing else, it will make you smarter

Ultimately this. I believe the 20% came from a lower court opinion, but search sucks these last few months so I can’t find exactly what I was looking for

At the end of the day 20% different isn’t the actual standard, it’s more complicated than that. But it’s what we tell fresh developers so they have a baseline - they’re almost certainly safe at that point, and more importantly they feel safe to build things with a hard line like that

Ultimately, the supreme Court decided the case on a more fundamental level (so the % didn’t come into play at all)

It’s precedent. It’s not law, but it’s not a myth either - it’s a case study we go over with new programmers so they’re not afraid of undeserved lawsuits

As a developer, honestly I think this is a good thing.

Open source isn’t always a good thing. It’s not just opening the source, it’s a very specific way to develop software.

In theory, you make something open source, and other devs walk in and out, helping the project grow and helping with admin work. People can tag in and tag out as their schedules allow, and the software will grow organically and democratically, bigger than any single user

In practice, it’s politics. Contributing is rarely on a walk-in basis - but code is your ideas given form, and no amount of power is too little to trip over.

People are protective of their baby, but also don’t want to spend their free time interviewing contributors instead of working on it. And just like mods on top boards, managing a popular open source project attracts a very specific type of person

And finally, we live in a hypercapitalist society right now. Know what happens if you open source a project and it gains traction? Someone runs off and turns it into a service, usually the owner, but not always. Services tend to become the first class citizen, and are free to take investor money and make pull requests to serve their use case at the expense of someone using it themselves.

I think it’s safe to say Linux is the greatest open source project of all time. It’s a clusterfuck that has not lived up to the imagined ideals of open source - I think it’s great and too important to entrust to any group, but it’s a hot mess. And Linus Torvold didn’t open source it for years until it reached a point of maturity.

My point with all this is that OSS is fantastic, but it’s not a virtue intrinsically. After all, almost no one makes money on OSS, but plenty make money on turning such a project into a service.

Opening your source on the other hand? Other people can take bits and pieces to learn from, and people can audit it. If you keep out corporate use, I think that’s fair - I mean, even if you copy code for your own project, you quickly move beyond the 20% difference you need to remove their copyright claim if you’re building something different

I think we need to be more pragmatic about OSS… We need to make multiple philosophies for different people and different types of software