Post #2340676

2026-05-06 05:00 UTC

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.

Replies (4)

@arclight@oldbytes.space 2026-05-06 12:57

Thanks to @meena@cathode.church for prompting this - it's not like I'm some sort of Superior Programming Being whose every line of code is elegant snd brilliant and not worthy of the sweaty masses. I'm a tediously average programmer. I detest status-driven gatekeeping. I would like to share my work so the effort can be leveraged by others to do new and useful work. I support some ideal of open source circa 1995 where useful decent quality tooling is freely shared and available. That is not the environment we live in today. Beyond the individual entitled ankle-biters that harass devs for not doing work they want for free, we now have this extreme corporate bullshit of "open source supply chain", that freely-provided _caveat utilitor_ code should be treated like code acquired under a commercial procurement agreement with formal specs, requirements, and standards for security, quality, and lifecycle management. I work in this space in my day job, I'm the one who sets and verifies those specs for our acquired codes, and I'm going to say flat out, that is that absent an explicit agreement with a supplier, all that supply chain and capital-P procurement activity is *solely* on the code user, not on the code author, full stop. Screw off with that CTO/infosec/bureaucrat thinking. Into the sea with you. For those of you in the back: _IF THAT PROCUREMENT AND ASSURANCE WORK IS IMPORTANT TO YOUR ORGANIZATION, YOUR ORGANIZATION NEEDS TO PAY FOR IT_. Further: _WITHOUT AN EXPLICIT AGREEMENT, NOBODY IS REQUIRED TO PROVIDE THAT SERVICE TO YOU AT ANY PRICE_. And finally: _WHAT PART OF 'USE AT YOUR OWN RISK' IS UNCLEAR TO YOU?_ I will curse all day long about research-grade software being built and distributed by organizations who explicitly know they are working on nuclear safety applications and do not perform adequate diligence in design, implementation, and testing. This goes beyond #ResearchSoftwareEngineering - it's production software engineering practice. These are organizations who absolutely know how their code is used (we have monthly meetings with them). I hold these organizations and individuals to a higher standard because this is quite literally our jobs. By contrast, this is not the job of @bagder@mastodon.social and expecting or demanding he do some corporation's or industry's V&V and SQA work is laughable, expecting him to do it _for free_ is arrogant, insulting, and delusional. But this is where we are now with sharing our code. Ethically, I believe anyone who puts their code in public bears some personal responsibility to ensure it's of a reasonable level of quality, functionality, and security. It's as if you were bringing homemade food to a potluck - the expectation is that it's edible and not spoiled or adulterated. You aren't expected to disclose every significant allergen, provide a list of ingredients, or a nutritional statement but you're expected to wash your hands, use clean utensils and ingredients of good quality, and ensure the food is cooked all the way through. That's gatekeeping, absolutely, and I won't apologize for setting that demand or an analogous one for "potluck" software. I am old enough to remember Matt's Script Archive and I have seen what happens when we don't do this sort of positive gatekeeping. For those unfamiliar, Matt was the Typhoid Mary of insecure internet software and his formmail.pl script was the poster child for bad and dangerous code you found for free on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt%27s_Script_Archive And while I appreciate he was a teenager when he posted most of that code, as an adult he was repeatedly told how damaging his code was and yet he kept distributing broken versions for YEARS.

Open ##2340677
@meena@cathode.church 2026-05-06 06:37

@arclight@oldbytes.space same: https://cathode.church/@meena/116456414299504464

Open ##2340690
@rob@social.afront.org 2026-05-06 08:04

@arclight@oldbytes.space — in grad school my buddy Ezra Sidran and I would argue over what fraction of programmers were actively dangerous. He said four in five, I said nine in ten. Over time Ez came to agree with me, which is why the resulting law ("ninety percent of programmers are actively dangerous") is the Hansen-Sidran Law.

Open ##2340691
@rjblaskiewicz@mstdn.social 2026-05-06 11:37

@arclight@oldbytes.space "anxious electrified sand" LOL

Open ##2340692