For example, ruby uses blocks a lot. Ruby blocks are curious little thingies because they are arguably just syntax sugar for a HOF, but man it's great syntax sugar. Python then has "yield" which is simultaneously the same keyword ruby uses for blocks, but works fundamentally differently (instead of just a HOF, it's for generating an iterator/generator) and while there are some decorators that can use yield's ability to "pause" execution in the function to send control flow back out of the function for a moment (@contextmanager) which feels _even more_ like ruby blocks, it's a rather limited trick and requires the decorator to adapt the Generator to a context manager and there's just no good way to generalize that.

Somehow this is the perfect storm to make LLMs completely incapable of converting ruby code that uses blocks for more than the basic iteration used in the stdlib. It will try to port to python code that is either nonsensical, or uses yield incorrectly and doesn't actually work (and in a way that type checkers can even spot). And furthermore, even if you can technically whack it with a hammer until it works with yield, it's often not at all the way to do it. Ruby devs use blocks not-uncommonly while python devs are not really going to be using yield often at all, perhaps outside of @contextmanager. So the right move is usually to just restructure control flow to not need to use blocks/HOFs (or double down and explicitly pass in a function). (Rubyists will cringe at this, and rightly so... Ruby is often extraordinarily expressive).

The fact that such a simple language feature trips them up so completely is pretty odd to me. I guess maybe their training data doesn't include a lot of ruby-to-python conversions. Maybe that's indicative of something, but I digress.

I also think that AI might be the beginning of the end of copyright. While before, everyone with money clearly had tremendous incentive to keep copyright strong, now all of a sudden trillions of dollars are basically predicated on the idea that LLMs aren't violating copyright. Copyleft has been a major tool in the FOSS toolbox. If that's weakening, I don't ALSO want free software to be locked out of agentic programming too.

This comes as the latest concern of mine in a long line around "how software gets written" remaining free-as-in-freedom. I've always been really uneasy about how reliant many programming languages were on Jetbrains editors, only vaguely comforted by their "open-core" offering, which naturally only existed for languages with strong OSS competition for IDEs (so... java and python, really). "Intellisense" seemed very expensive to implement and was hugely helpful in writing programs without stopping every 4 seconds to look up whether removing whitespace at the end of a line is trim, strip, or something else in this language. I was naturally pleased to see language servers take off, even if it was much to my chagrin that it came from Microsoft, who clearly was out of open standards to EEE and decided to speed up the process by making some new ones.

Now LLMs are the next big worry of mine. It seems pretty bad for free and open software if the "2-person project, funded indirectly by the welfare state of a nordic or eastern-european nation" model that drives ridiculously important core libre/OSS libraries now is even less able to compete with trillion dollar corporations.

Open-weight, quantized, but still __good__ models seem like the only way out. I remain somewhat hopeful just from how far local models have come - they're significantly more usable than they were a year ago, and we've got more tools like LM Studio etc making running them easy. But there's still a good way to go.

I'll be sad if a "programming laptop" ends up going from "literally anything that can run debian" to "yeah you need an RTX 7090, 128GB of VRAM, and the 2kW wearable power supply backpack addon at a minimum".

It's also why so much of AI is targeting software, specifically SAAS. A SaaS company with ~0 headcount driven by AI is basically 100% profit margin. A truly perfect conception of capitalism.

Meanwhile I think AI actually has a decent shot at "curing" cancer. AI-assisted radiology means screening could be come significantly cheaper, happen a lot more often, and catch cancers very early, which is extremely important as everyone knows to surviving it. The cure for cancer might actually just involve much earlier detection. But pfft what are the profit margins on _that_?

Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.

I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).

Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???

- the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU.

- I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

You can literally be an expert in everything relevant - and your mail will still not get delivered just because you're not google/mailgun/etc.

I was trying to do a very simple email-to-self use-case. I was sending mail from my VPS (residential IP not even allowed at all) which was an IPv4 i'd had for literally 2+ years to exactly only myself - my personal gmail. I had it all set up - SPF, DKIM, TLS, etc etc. And I was STILL randomly getting emails sent directly to spam / showing up with the annoying ! icon (grates on my sensibilities). I ended up determining - after tremendous, tremendous pain in researching / debugging - that my DKIM sigs and SPF were all indeed perfect (I had been doubting myself until I realized I could just check what gmail thought about SPF/DKIM/etc. It all passed). And my only sin was just not being in the in-crowd.

Incredibly frustrating. The only winning move is not to play. I ended up just switching from emails-to-self to using a discord webhook to @ myself in my private discord server, so I get a push notification.

And this was just me, sending to myself! Low volume (0-2 emails per WEEK). Literally not even trying to actually send emails to other people.

I can literally just go write a script that uses headless firefox + mitmproxy in about an hour or two of fiddling, and as long as I then don't go try to run it from 100 VPS's and scrape their entire website in a huge blast, I can typically archive whatever content I actually care about. Basically no matter what protection mechanisms they have in place. Cloudflare won't detect a headless firefox at low (and by "low" I mean basically anything you could do off your laptop from your home IP) rates, modern browser scripting is extremely easy, so you can often scrape things with mild single-person effort even if the site is an SPA with tons of dynamic JS. And obviously at low scale you can just solve captchas yourself.

I recently wrote a scraper script that just sent me a discord ping whenever it ran into a captcha, and i'd just go look at my laptop and fix it, and then let it keep scraping. I was archiving a comic I paid for but was in a walled-garden app that obviously didn't want you to even THINK of controlling the data you paid for.

Happy to see Scoped Values here though. That'll be big for writing what I'll call "rails-like" things in Java without it just being a big "static final" soup in a god-class, or having a god object passed around everywhere.

Your remark on the adult/child/fetus/etc line is always one that I felt was under-examined in the context of the political discussion around abortion. And indeed most of the successful reasoning around abortion focuses less on the morality of a very specific kind of abortion, and more on the fact that you can't ban "true" abortion without also banning (or making dangerously more legally fraught) "aborted for reasons that give clear moral justification" - life of the mother, nonviability of the fetus, and so on. And even pro-choice people don't touch philosophical examination of "abortion for no reason except that the mother doesn't want to have and raise the baby." I mean, for obvious reasons. The public would be unable to have any kind of actual debate, and it's far too tied to things like "what is the nature of the self" (which I think is what's at hand in the AI discussion) and questions about the existence of God and of course the enormous can of worms of metaphysics.

My point with all this is that I suspect two things:

1) humans/industry/politics are not going to dig into the philosophy here in any real way

2) even if consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, I somewhat doubt GPUs can do it, no matter how complicated.

I think if we ever really get down to it, it'll be the reverse direction. We'll "copy" human minds into a machine and then just need to "ask the people if they still feel the same."

Google functionally controls just enough of a monopoly via chrome that they can generally do whatever they want (and not do whatever they don't want to do). So that standards still mostly can't do anything google isn't enthusiastic about dumping dev time into.

And they're just barely not enough of a monopoly that they can't just go wild and actually turn the browser into a locked down capital-P Product. Safari and Firefox (in that order... much to my chagrin) are holding them back from that.

So browsers just kind of hang out, not doing too terribly much, when obviously there are strong technical forces that want the browser to finally finish morphing from a document viewer to an application runtime. Finally fulfill the dream of silverlight and java applets/JNLP and so on. But nobody wants to bother doing that if they don't get to control it (and firefox doesn't have the dev power to just trailblaze alone in OSS spirit).

So instead the js people just have to plow along doing their best with the app-runtime version of NAND chips since the incentives don't want to offer them anything better at the browser/platform level.

I think the main problem for me is that these companies benefit from copyright - by beating anyone they can reach with the DMCA stick - and are now also showing they don't actually care about it at all and when they do it, it's ok.

Go ahead, AI companies. End copyright law. Do it. Start lobbying now.

(They won't, they'll just continue to eat their cake and have it too).

It's well known that these fresh employees are not going to contribute to velocity of a team for at least a year. They're investments. I've seen levelling docs specifically call this out.

"It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance"

This describes a team of juniors. If it's describing an entire team, then everyone above mid-level needs to be fired.

I will say that I think "the bottom of the market getting eviscerated" is going to apply to software devs too. There is now very little point in hiring someone who already only produces slop as their best output. The main people who need to be afraid of AI in the next 5 years is probably offshore and near-shore people, and perma-juniors who have done the "1 year of experience 10 times" thing.

I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literally can't find it. I suspect "my", "kafka", and "topic" all get constructed somewhere to produce that topic name because it doesn't show up in the code as a literal. I also think there's so much indirection between the producer setup and where the "event" actually first gets emitted that MyMessage might not look very much like the actual origination point. Where's the initial origin point?"

Previously, that was "ctrl-shift-F my.kafka.topic" and then ask a staff engineer and hope to God they know off-hand, and if they don't, go read the entire codebase/framework for 16 hours straight until you figure it out.

Now, LLMs have a decent shot at figuring it out.

I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful.

But anyone expecting anything like Gen AI (being able to replace a real software engineer, or quality customer support rep, etc) is going to be disappointed.

I also think AI will generally eviscerate the bottoms of industries (expect generic gacha girl-collection games to get a lot of AI art) but also leave people valuing the tops of industries a lot more (lovingly crafted indie games, etc). So now this compute-expensive AI is targeting the already low-margin bottoms of industries. Probably not what VCs want. They want to replace software engineers, not make a slop gacha game cost 1/10th of its already low cost.

Can you explain why this is the result? And why is it allegedly democrats that the ratchet pushed towards?

There are well-known differences in political alignment both among more-educated workers (the federal government probably does not employ many people without at least a college degree of some sort?) and being employed in a public-services government job (e.g. what kinds of workers are more likely to want to work for the EPA? People who want to protect the environment or people who want to exploit it more? Remember, one party tried to sell off a large number of public forests and lands and is gutting the national parks).

These seem like they would explain the majority of the effect you mention without any mention of some kind of ratchet mechanism.

Do you plan to sue people to enforce your license? Do you think people who are committing war crimes / crimes against humanity are going to not violate your license alongside all their other crimes?

The only thing this license accomplishes is ensuring no even semi-serious business will touch this with a 10' pole because it's a completely bespoke license with no prior understanding by their legal counsel. But you can already basically do that via the AGPL, except that some companies who are well-meaning may actually still use it.