I will say that I find discord to be a breath of fresh air, but I haven’t really found a true community there, more like disparate groups of people who share common interests but rarely first names. The internet today is either terrifyingly closely related to your first and last name or a hall of mirrors hidden behind myriad layers of post-irony. The veil has been shattered: either you sign up for “real” talk with people you will never know or settle for a blanched façade of communication with real-world acquaintances who refuse to really show themselves for fear of what that might mean.

My experience with Chat GPT ranges from “it’s really good for rapidly getting a bearing with a certain topic” to “it’s a woeful substitute for independently developing a nuanced understanding of a given topic.” It tends to do an OK with programming and a very poor job with critical theory.

If you’re at that scale, then great, do that. But I also fully agree that cargo-culting that kind of decision out of the gate can be a massive waste of money.

Second: the rise of pedantic has given the Python ecosystem a great way to enforce typing and make up for python’s lack of SA. It can be really helpful to document what types are fed to which layers of the system. Since Pydantic will aggressively explode if users try to start throwing arbitrary models/data packaged around, it can really help if you’re working in a system where a model needs to change in one place rather than 10, and can lead to better hygiene than in the old days, where it was more common to pass less strict data wrappers around or have many layers of software defining their own interfaces rather than exporting that to a model which can be reused globally. In theory this is also possible with POPOs but in reality, duck-typing and mocks can lead developers into some really bad places where they think they’re typing things correctly until they get to the integration tests, which catch the bug and throw any unit work out the window for another iteration.

With tech being a space that attracts everything from VC/finance/business people (usually a bit righter-wing), academics and journalists (usually more left) and hackers (who knows/free thinkers), I’m fairly surprised at the overall level of cohesion here.

One thing I’m more or less convinced of is that the tech world has changed a lot from the millennial era of “free thinker”ism and Obama-era liberal optimism. We now skew older, more conservative than 2009 (not necessarily right wing, but less “move fast and break things”), and, in some cases, more disillusioned with the trajectory of tech from a cool, nerdy backwater (pre dotcom boom) to a major cultural and economic engine.

As a side note, there are several good articles and documentaries that track cultural trends in HN, 4chan, reddit, and other online spaces in the transition from the wild-west to the walled garden. Will post links if I can dig them up.