It's frequently said that technology is ethically neutral, and whether it's used for good or bad ends depends on how it is applied.

What you call the anti-tech crowd is simply the crowd that takes their ethical responsibilities seriously.

There are other potential points of view that could be adopted instead of tech neutrality. Some tech could be seen as inherently good, in which case there very little concern about how much of it is used. Some tech could be seen as inherently bad, meaning it should be avoided at all costs.

Anyone being honest about AI can see that although it has some positive uses, the potential for misuse is enormous. Therefore, if you're going to use it at all, you should think carefully about how to apply it. To people that have fully bought into the hype this caution appears like negativity instead of rationality.

Yes, but one key reason that a stable ABI isn't provided for drivers is to help encourage companies that ship drivers to make their drivers open source. The idea being, if a driver is mainlined into the Linux kernel, the Linux developers will help maintain support for that driver, in exchange for it being released with an open source licence. There are companies (like NVIDIA) that ship closed source drivers for their devices, but they rely on a kernel-side shim that interacts with the userspace driver, and this is seen as second best compared to mainlining the driver in the kernel.

I've noticed the opposite. Seems that it depends on where you're looking and what you're looking for.

While you're right that it's easier to try to justify this level of work for founders, the reality is that this level of work is not sustainable by anybody, and founders would risk damaging their physical and mental health and reducing the quality of their work the longer this went on just as much as anyone else.

I'd also argue that it's largely unnecessary. There may be some periods of time when there are too many competing demands on your time and you just have to accept extended working hours to get through a week or two or even a month, but more often than not this situation comes about due to poor planning and/or poor working processes. Effective delegation and automation can greatly reduce the likelihood of having to work 65+ hour weeks, even for founders.

England is a very culturally diverse place, anyone that thinks that there's a great sense of social uniformity hasn't understood it that well.

> Perhaps the difference lies not in the amount of gesturing, but in the heightened emotions of us southern Europeans.

As someone that has familial ties to both England and Sicily, although people on average are more overtly expressive in Southern Europe, the English are certainly not a monolith. For every "mild-mannered Englishman" there's also an equal amount of very "expressive" people, for example the meme of English tourists being absolute menaces in Southern Europe (especially Spain) does not come from the "mild-mannered" crowd, and I'm sure there are people who put up with these tourists that wish they were less expressive than the locals.

If this is a joke, I clearly don't get it!

Worth noting that pfSense (and OPNsense) are not Linux-based, they're based on BSD, specifically FreeBSD. While it's possible to have standard router OS web UIs that are cross platform, the underlying technology is different, so it's not really a surprise that there will be differences in how the devices running these OSes are configured.

Yes and no. Engineering does involve delegation but what defines an engineer is is what work they do, not what work they pass onto others.

If it helps you understand this, consider the role of an engineer as someone that makes engineering decisions. If you give a specification to a colleague and ask them to write code for you, then you're delegating those engineering decisions. When you write high level code, yes you allow a compiler or interpreter to determine how to turn your instructions into machine code, but you have made engineering decisions in order to design the end result. If you give instructions via product specifications, then you have acted as a project manager or business analyst, not as an engineer.

To use another analogy, imagine you are a chef and you go to eat at a restaurant you don't work in. When you order from the menu, you are not a chef at that moment, even if your background suggests you are capable of being one. Similarly, ordering code from an AI agent does not give you the right to call yourself an engineer when doing so, as you did very little of the real engineering work to produce the end result.

> If all you do is write code you're not an engineer.

Engineering requires thought and application of thought, and if you're outsourcing both then you don't qualify as an engineer.

> The engineer who spends 90% of his time architecting systems and testing them at a high level is making safer and more stable software than the codemonkey who spends 90% of his time tinkering with the details.

The devil is in the details. A technical architect that doesn't understand the tradeoffs in the designs they're specifying isn't worth the money they earn.

> Who said anything about "saving time"?

Almost everyone that is selling the benefits of AI. Clearly you haven't been paying attention to industry trends.

The less coding you do, the less good you will be at making those decisions on code quality. Coding skills atrophy when not used.

Less bad is not the same as good. For example, electricity from solar panels is less bad than electricity from fossil fuels but there's considerable disruption to the natural world to produce them, not least of which involves mining for raw materials. In the same vein, we're nowhere near reducing pollution to safe levels or even reducing our overall pollution, all we've managed so far is a reduction in the rate of growth of fossil fuel use, it's still going up YoY.