Post #2140659
2026-05-05 22:59 UTC
Replies (7)
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@arclight@oldbytes.space 2026-05-06 05:00
I'm still going to write code to solve problems I care about but I need to rethink licensing and distribution. Making my code public may actively harm me - hosting costs, time & effort defending against AI scrapers, attribution laundering, plagiarism, all devaluing the skill I use to put food on my table. Plus the morale damage that comes from knowing that work I put care and effort into is being ground into a barely recognizable paste to fund psychofuckwit nazi oligarchs that deluded themselves into believing a box of anxious electrified sand is a god. If someone else was _just_ making money off my work it wouldn't be nearly as bad. But no, it has to be shoved into the LLM blender and extruded as "AI search results" that actively makes everyone else stupider, prevents people from finding canonical and trustworthy sources of information, actively prevents people from finding experts or recognizing expertise. That high velocity StupidityAsAService is already infecting every piece of computational technology that touches the internet. Code is churned out faster and faster, quality is plummeting in free fall, and every organization that dove headfirst into the empty pool that is AI is sweating bullets that their end of the pool will start filling up before they faceplant into the concrete. I swear, computer programmers are some of the most gullible, delusional, arrogant, and just plain stupid people on the planet. And we're stuck with them shitting up everything they touch.
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@phaysis@mastodon.coffee 2026-05-05 23:56
@arclight@oldbytes.space I want to build and create. But I Am So Tired.
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@curtosis@lingo.lol 2026-05-06 02:36
@arclight@oldbytes.space Not a joke: I installed WordStar 7 in DOSBox-X today. Zero JavaScript. It doesn’t download anything. Doesn’t connect to anything. It *can’t* connect to anything. It’s gonna take a while for the muscle memory to come back, though.
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@hatzka@tech.lgbt 2026-05-06 20:18
@mdhughes@appdot.net @arclight@oldbytes.space That seems overly pessimistic. I can't imagine you grow your own food, built your own house, synthesize your own medicine. For all these things you rely on others, even though the stakes are higher than for most software. I think the difference is the lack of oversight. There are enforced regulations governing how each of these things are done, so that (at least ideally) you can rely on them being of a certain level of quality. Software is pretty unique in not having that yet, at least at a societal level.
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@arclight@oldbytes.space 2026-05-06 20:32
@mdhughes@appdot.net We've been sold the notion of reusable code for decade. This history of LINPACK/LAPACK is interesting - the motivation in the early 70s was to have quality numerical routines instead of every dingus with a VAX writing their own matrix solvers badly, they modern equivalent of rolling your own crypto. DIY is usually a Really Bad Idea in these cases. On the other extreme is basically every interpreted code calling in an avalanche of nested dependencies because somebody didn't want to write a ten line function and they had DRY beaten into them. I think what's lost with frictionless dependencies is that devs don't question whether most dependencies are really needed. It seemingly costs nothing to import a dozen packages that rely on two dozen more behind the scenes. They've been taken in by the cult of DRY and velocity and they don't know how to operate in an environment where free fast internet access isn't available. And here the problem isn't lack of connectivity or bandwidth, it's the rapidly decaying trustability of third-party code. Between bad actors and AI(+) we're getting to a point where network doesn't matter because nothing on the network can be trusted. (+) Cue Pam: "These are the same picture."
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@45c3IF85N@mstdn.party 2026-05-06 06:11
@arclight@oldbytes.space > More and more I feel that software is something that's inflicted on me > rather than something I create or control that serves me. It's yet another spying tool. You write prompt in public service of big corporation and they already know what interests you have and natch commercials on youtube, etc.
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@mlanger@mastodon.world 2026-05-06 13:57
@arclight@oldbytes.space I have been thinking similar thoughts for a while. I think it's one of the reasons I use my computers a lot less than I used to.