Yeah it’s just very poorly written, I was trying to be too charitable in my previous comment but I think the article deserves a lot more criticism, like about the random change of tone (ex: professional to swearing for no reason to professional again), missing explanations, and taking several paragraphs to explain that sometimes people do shit they don’t like for money, like, we’re human, we know that lmao

I also gave up reading it, but from a few paragraphs below, when they said knowledge work they mean stuff like marketing, finances and other relatively high paying jobs that most people aren’t passionate about but choose to do for money. I think it’s a weakness of the article that it isn’t upfront about what it means, so you’re not wrong for looking it up, but yeah, they meant that.

The article itself seems to be on alienation and stress, but as I said I didn’t finish it, as it’s quite long and not engaging enough, at least to me.

Programmers?

Make no mistakes

I had a senior in my last Ruby job who told me to keep metaprogramming to the minimum and after learning more about design and architecture I’m so glad he taught me that mindset lol. Metaprogramming is very tempting when you have a lot of repeated code that could be drastically reduced, but the whole team needs to be able to understand and work on it too, and not everyone is familiar with these features, nor should they.

How do you suggest they get paid? There’s a massive issue with most foss devs and maintainers being unpaid and burnt out while their work is used by corpos and more often than not they don’t receive a dime

than what an AI or cheap programmers from places like India or China could do.

People abroad making less money has more to do with the cost of living, different regulations and so on, not necessarily skill. I’m a mid developer with years of professional experience and my salary is shit for US standards, but it allows me to live okayish here, so that’s why we put up with it. Immigrants also often face a precarious position (such as a visa status being tied to their work, or prosecution by the authorities, or not being part of a union in an otherwise unionized industry, etc), so them getting paid badly is, again, not always related to skill. I’ve met Arab doctors who are cab drivers in Europe.

That doesn’t address the climate or jobs question though, both require organizing

I could write 1 million recipes and now they are mine and no one can use them if I don’t allow?

Isn’t that more or less what patent trolls already do?

Yeah copyright sounds good if the workers keep rights to their work but in practice it’s just corporations taking advantage of it and screwing over everyone.

But at least the lefty capitalist artist sold some key chains

Selling your shit and getting paid doesn’t make you into a capitalist. At most you’re an artisan, if you own your tools and you get paid for your final product rather than your labour hours.

To be a capitalist you necessarily need to own capital. In the example you picked you’d need to own a factory where you underpay people to and keep the surplus from all the keychains they produce.

And regardless of what you meant, you’re absolutely barking at the wrong tree here, market consolidation and monopolies predate the internet, and they would have always had the final say in how we shape our infrastructure and share shit online under capitalism.

I think it’s a matter of volume, it’s extremely easy and quick to publish large amounts of generated code, and by far most people won’t go searching your codebase in depth to see if the code is decent, if it works as advertised they don’t have a reason to look into it further. If you add a third party to vet all code then you’re still giving massive amounts of work to whoever has to review the mountains of slop.

It’s not like we didn’t have an issue like this before, about people copy pasting without understanding anything, but these tools made it more accessible and streamlined, and the worst part is that vibe coders believe sharing their slop is of value.

Agreed. I see some good use cases for the tech but the surveillance is obviously disproportionately bad.

I was taught by my teachers years ago that it was great that I wouldn’t have to pick up C thanks to higher level languages and I trusted them, and I regret it deeply. It took me years of curiosity and reading unrelated stuff to parse some stuff that would have probably taken so little time if I had simply started with C.

I’m maybe less optimistic but I agree we need to recognize that to some degree this tech is here to stay and we need to plan accordingly to reduce harm. Shaming people for their consumption only causes suffering. We need to grow more communities to be more resilient and help whoever we can.

And watch the billionaires nod in agreement to more child labor lol

Did you read the whole thing? It’s about a lot more, such as corporate control, economic hardship, and alienation. It’s not a long read and you don’t have to care or agree with the author, but this is a disservice to their post.

To a degree, sure, but going out of your way to go against convention even for the language itself is also to blame if Kelly is right. It’s less about whether you add type annotations to python, and more about following conventions and writing python in a way that a random developer with enough python experience would be able to understand and contribute to the codebase. I’ve seen anti patterns in a handful of languages I know well enough and it’s easy to tell the other person didn’t bother practicing enough and learning basic conventions.

Thank you for your service

Let’s hope after this is done we can have more productive conversations. There’s so much potential for all of us to learn, or at least definitely for me.