Ah, I never read the book. Sounds like it could be entertaining.

cry harder

still entertaining, and does describe how large corps work internally fairly accurately based on my experience

so brave

I was complaining about copilot specifically, which is an embarrassingly terrible product

🤣

I’ve heard about this kind of shit, but never seen it myself.

yeah most companies don’t even bother with the courtesy email anymore

The talk is reality check for anyone who thinks open source is still in its honeymoon phase. He basically argues that we have been living through a Gilded Age of open source from about 2000 to 2020 where everything looked like rapid growth and success on the surface while the foundation was actually rotting. Just like the original Gilded Age had its robber barons and railroad monopolies he points out that we have traded genuine freedom for the convenience of proprietary platforms like GitHub and Slack. He is pretty blunt about the fact that the industry has shifted from community driven passion projects to venture capital backed rug pulls where companies like Redis or HashiCorp just swap licenses the moment they need to squeeze more profit out of users.

He highlights how the XZ backdoor and the Log4Shell mess exposed that the entire internet is basically held together by three tired volunteers in a trench coat and how new regulations might actually make those people legally liable for bugs. He also goes off on how AI is being shoved into everything not because it helps developers but because VCs want to replace them, and he is clearly not a fan of how companies like Red Hat and Fedora are tying everything to AI tools now. It is a really sobering look at how we stopped caring about the principles of free software and just became pragmatic consumers who are okay with locked down ecosystems like macOS or Android as long as they are shiny.

He thinks we can still fix this but it requires us to stop being spectators and actually start mentoring the next generation on why these values mattered in the first place. He basically says that if we just treat open source as a way to get free labor for corporations it is going to end up as a dead hobby like ham radio. The main takeaway is that the era of easy growth is over and if we actually want a future where we control our own computers we have to stop picking the convenient path and start fighting for the principled one again.

Right, it’s the lack of any double checking that’s shocking. I use LLMs to make mermaid diagrams of code all the time, it’s super useful, but you have to actually read through what it generates.

Honestly, that’s the most amazing revelation here. Turns out there’s no human reviewing what the agent does, and no testing environment to make sure stuff that gets pushed to prod is even minimally working.

when life imitates art, amazing how that was made a decade ago too

Indeed, it is.

Technically, they have software that sometimes decides to lobotomize other software.

Not that I’ve seen.

I honestly kinda prefer older civ games because they were simpler and more focused. For me, Civ3 might really be the peak of the series.

it looks nearly identical to a cube I had at one of my jobs as well, I think even the phone is the same

The funniest thing for me is that humans end up doing the exact same thing. This is why it’s so notoriously difficult to create organizational policies that actually produce desired results. What happens in practice is that people find ways to comply with the letter of the policy that require the least energy expenditure on their part.

you have to download the repo and you need python installed, in the project folder you’d run

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

and then you should be able to run python create_map_poster.py --city <city> --country <country> [options]

Not necessarily, the models can often be tricked into spilling the beans of how they were trained.