The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.
Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.
Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.
If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.
There’s a smaller analog than a nation -
My grandparents had a saying? “Three generations shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves”, meaning that it’s difficult for a family to stay wealthy longer than that because the new generations rarely act to match circumstances.
We’re only in the third or fourth generation of programming. The fat years were like adaptive radiation, there’s a new resource, let’s try everything, it all works! But eventually that ends.
Maybe that was two analogs
@mhoye -
@waffles The combination of the long running and deep seated cultural expectation of working in the open, the fact that for many years IRC was the only suitable tool for that and that later alternatives were almost all proprietary or otherwise closed meant we held onto it for very good, values-forward reasons, for a lot longer than we should have.
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@denisbloodnok @waffles irc.mozilla.org was a public server, yes.
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@mhoye I just want to remind folks that ESR was already a nazi when he wrote CATB, and the entire framing was motivated and guided by his ideologies. I'm not sure we have the unadulterated historical memories to evaluate things untainted by that.
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@mhoye I have wondered for years what the point of licences for open source projects really was if it was trivial to ignore them and it only cost money to deal with it (which companies had and the authors did not).
Am I missing something?
@grmpyprogrammer
Guess having the necessary clout should've been the job of the fsf.
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@mhoye Something something cathedral, something something bazaar. Who's the priests now, Linus?
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@hllizi @mhoye I don't think it was pushing a specifically *nazi* agenda there, but he had very strongly held ideas about human motivation, how human beings organize their activities, and what sorts of organizing should be encouraged or discouraged.
Remember this all came around the same time of his mission to replace Free Software with Open Source and make the whole thing appealing to capitalists for the purpose of appropriating free (lowercase-f) labor.
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@mhoye Linus and his posse have been elitist unwelcoming jerknobs for decades though. If an alternative were to appear, I agree that people would leave them to wither and die. But so far no reasonable alternative has appeared. *BSD, Plan9, etc have all failed to gain traction.
Linux is a local optimum and the path to a different one leads through the valley of pain. Hardly anybody goes through the valley of pain unless much bigger pain awaits them where they are. And those that do mostly die there unless others join. I think that's the principle that explains most misery on this godforsaken planet.
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@hllizi @mhoye I don't think it was pushing a specifically *nazi* agenda there, but he had very strongly held ideas about human motivation, how human beings organize their activities, and what sorts of organizing should be encouraged or discouraged.
Remember this all came around the same time of his mission to replace Free Software with Open Source and make the whole thing appealing to capitalists for the purpose of appropriating free (lowercase-f) labor.
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Anyway: The worst thing an organization's leaders tolerate is what that organization becomes, and the blast radius of a single toxic contributor is huge and largely invisible. For everyone who speaks up to say this behavior isn't acceptable, there are dozens or hundreds of smart, competent people who peer into your community, see that this is how you live and move along without your ever knowing they exist, on their way to a better life somewhere else.
We don't have to live like this.
@mhoye this is also why ignore doesn't work in any community. New people assume the behavior they see is acceptable. You must actively remove people who exhibit unacceptable behavior.
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@jpaskaruk @mhoye Have you looked at Zig? The tag line is basically "C with proper tooling"
@cohentheblue I've heard it discussed on Linux Dev Time once or twice, but I had it jumbled up with Zigbee in my head.
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Anyway: The worst thing an organization's leaders tolerate is what that organization becomes, and the blast radius of a single toxic contributor is huge and largely invisible. For everyone who speaks up to say this behavior isn't acceptable, there are dozens or hundreds of smart, competent people who peer into your community, see that this is how you live and move along without your ever knowing they exist, on their way to a better life somewhere else.
We don't have to live like this.
A final, selfish addendum to this: I do consulting work around questions of cultural health, process improvement and accessible cultural change. If you'd like to have a conversation about that, let me know.
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
@mhoye I'm very much looking forward to supporting the new user Mosscap experience. Finally I get to help build a software community I want to be part of. And *nobody* with any pull *anywhere* cares about their new user experience.
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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
"If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking."
Quoted for truth.
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@mhoye I'm skeptical that "wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition" should be a goal anyone should be supporting.
That's the mindset that got us into the shit we're in: FOSS as a way to get one's foot in the door for cushy tech industry careers, not as a way to take a problem you understand and care about and make things better for yourself and others.
It promotes the same kind of behavior in FOSS as the Google "breaking shit to get a promotion".
@dalias @mhoye Redirecting that kid, and most importantly introducing them to basic notions of activism, autonomy, freedom & direct action (honestly just bringing them along to the local anarchist library) would serve them well in the long term.
The normative society is certainly doing its best to avoid introducing any of those concepts and rediscovering them from scratch by observation & thinking can take a while. -
for decades I'd always thought at least half of FOSS is just gig workers trying to build their CVs/portfolios to get paid corporate work, and seen (especially in AV/multimedia and telecoms) countless FOSS projects enshittify and commercialise as soon as they became popular and others gatekeep support/solution finding to nudge folk towards paid solutions (especially SaaS) to the point I've become cynical about the whole thing and often just stay on Windows as the cost of many proprietary solutions has plummeted (and some things like specialist automotive coding software and hardware simply don't have FOSS equivalents and likely never will..
@vfrmedia @dalias @mhoye For a while I thought what one did constructively was supposed to be considered impressive and help in that demonstration of skill.
(And one did those things, regardless of whether it would lead to a job, because they should be done.)
In retrospect, it is also clear that it did not in fact endear me to the corposcum.
(The entire point of the pro-corporate "open source" view had been lost on me, as I had already rejected its basis.) -
RE: https://woof.tech/@techokami/117439226690379216
The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign. It's the talking about planning succession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn, that's the sign.
Y'all the kernel is in deep, deep trouble. We saw what happened to Perl and the kernel is in deep trouble.
@mhoye "But, he cautioned, maintainers should not be telling their employers about those bugs before they are public; otherwise the project as a whole risks running into trouble with government agencies worldwide. Once a fix has been pushed, though, the embargo ends. " XDDDDDDD ehhh...
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RE: https://woof.tech/@techokami/117439226690379216
The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign. It's the talking about planning succession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn, that's the sign.
Y'all the kernel is in deep, deep trouble. We saw what happened to Perl and the kernel is in deep trouble.
@mhoye tldr; #LLMs are here to stay. People who actually deliver working solutions that shape the world have spoken. Measures to limit slop are being developed. #Linux becomes even more commercial.
I personally hope more open models will arrive, GPUs will become cheaper and universal income will help people who wont be able to find job in such toxic and draining field as computer science.2026 welcome in ultimate hell everyone! Dont forget to enjoy the ride!
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@cohentheblue I've heard it discussed on Linux Dev Time once or twice, but I had it jumbled up with Zigbee in my head.
