While I find your frequent use of 'it turns out' to remind me of https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out .. I do think there may be supportive logic to be had. A lot of software previously wasn't simply hand done, it was done along with implementing libraries of code or using snippet libraries. So, software engineers had already abstracted away coding a lot of the reusable parts between projects they will be now in-house developing with AI.
If so, it might be true that in many cases writing code wasn't as big of the story as some people think for some other people in the industry. I imagine there were many people though who toiled by hand a lot of code they didn't need to before for lack of experience or awareness, and so for them this a big increase in speed.
There has been for a long time. It used to be called Wineskin — Sikarugir is the successor to that project. There's also Porting Kit which helps setting up and installing the wrappers.
Underneath it all is Wine which is the open source compatibility layer project which Crossover contributes to.
I think this essay illustrates pretty well the value in indulging an experience not just for the sake of it but to try and truly know it emotionally.. and perhaps also given some of the responses, it is rightly counterbalancing a lack of appreciation and understanding for anyone doing just that.
I do wonder the prospects of any etsy-like outcome for largely hand crafted software though. While you can personally find stylistic expression in the craft i'm not sure how apparent the nuances of crafting code is to users of the product beyond the requirements of a UX design and vision. It's hard not to imagine generation industrializing a lot of this part of the craft of making software.
For me I think the important thing to not lose sight as we use generation more and more in software is our care for the work piece. It feels like care, and deep understanding are set up to become further valuable rarities in the future as we become less and less intimately involved and we have to be intentional about in order to keep.
I feel like there is some parallels here to industrial designers and their desire to hold on to obsessing about and understanding the details in the face of using industrialized tooling and being very much removed from the intimate feeling of crafting every millimetre. Deeply caring is still meaningful and valuable even if it isn't minimally required.
> I do wonder the prospects of any etsy-like outcome for largely hand crafted software though. While you can personally find stylistic expression in the craft i'm not sure how apparent the nuances of crafting code is to users of the product beyond the requirements of a UX design and vision.
The immediate example of something where good code DOES stand out to me is (one of my favorite games of all time) Factorio. There are lots of examples where I have been playing over the years and been amazed at the ability of the game engine to handle computationally complex operations at a really large scale. Coupled with a bunch of dev blogs explaining the little optimizations, its given me a ton of respect for Factorio as a piece of software.
That said, I am not sure it strictly invalidates your point. That’s the only example I can come up with, and it requires knowledge of the game’s design via those devblogs which the average user of a messaging app or something won’t have.
I think there’s probably a market for high performance consumer code, but the vast majority of what makes it to end users will just be good enough.
If I understand you correctly, there is a cool video on youtube that shows off a concept AE86 EV conversion that matches the driving experience of the original.
It feels like the problem here comes from the reluctance to utilize a negative sum outcome for rejection. Instead of introducing accidental perverse incentives, if rejected your stake shouldn't go to the repo, 50% could be returned, and 50% deleted. If it times out or gets approved you get 100% back. If a repo rejects too often or is seen doing so unfairly reputation would balance participation.
> No, the perverse incentive is that there will be RepoCoin, and the people involved will be incentivized to make the price of that as high as possible.
Isn't this problem unrelated to cryptocurrency?
There will be the US dollar, and the people involved will be incentivized to keep its value high, e.g. by pressuring or invading other countries to prevent them from switching to other currencies. Or they'll be incentivized to adopt policies that cause consumer and government debt to become unreasonably excessive to create a large enough pool of debts denominated in that currency that they can create an inordinate amount of it without crashing its value.
Or on the other side of the coin, there will be countries with currencies they knowingly devalue, either because they can force the people in that country to accept them anyway or because devaluing their currency makes their exports more competitive and simultaneously allows them to spend the currency they printed.
If anything cryptocurrency could hypothetically be better at reducing these perverse incentives, because if good rules are chosen at the outset and get ossified into the protocol then it's harder for bad actors to corrupt something that requires broad consensus to change.
Sure, but your average developer doesn't have a lot of agency in if the US invades another country in order to increase the value of the coin they got for having a PR merged.
But with crypto they do. See for example all the BAGS coins that get created for random opensource projects and the behavior that occurs because of that.
Just use a stablecoin, don't float a "utility token" those things are stupid. Have a smart contract receive a USDC deposit. If the maintainer "times out" reviewing your PR, the contract returns all the deposit. If the maintainer does not accept your PR, the contract burns 0.5x of the deposit and returns the rest. Maintainers can decide to turn off the time-out for very popular projects where you probably would have devs trying to spam PRs for fame/recognition, but hopefully the deposit price can accurately reflect the amount of spam the project gets.
Utility tokens are fundamentally equities and you need to firewall equity from an organization the same way companies in most market economies are regulated.
The average developer also doesn't have a lot of agency with respect to how major chains like Ethereum are run either, but they can use them.
Creating your own chain just because you can rather than because you actually have a reason to implement the technology in a different way than anybody else should be disfavored and viewed with suspicion.
It's a huge shame that crypto has been so poorly-behaved as an industry that almost nobody is willing to touch it except for speculation. It could be useful but it's scared away most of the honest people.
The fact that people around the world are trading hundreds of billions of dollars of stable coins [1], with India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Brazil in the top five countries [2], not least of all for the purpose of "greater monetary stability" [3], I think points toward the revolutionary usefulness of its inherently non-speculative properties (as referenced in positive applications of crypto in above comments).
It really has been a shitshow of get rich schemes, and yet crypto keeps not dying, instead increasingly getting applied to extremely valuable real world every day use cases, which I think is evidence of the value of the inherent technology.
My point is that despite the incredible greed and desperation it not only doesn't die, its practical uses are growing. The numbers say that the actual value exceeds the grift.
I think there's value in the homepage placing these things less prominently, while making more prominent the other things we want the culture here to be about - despite those things being less generally engaging and obviously popular.
For when someone is a new person here, they'll then first get mildly introduced and familiar with the expectations and aspirations of space through more neutral discussions. After their initial impression they're always free to seek out these hotter discussions on /active once they realize they happen here.
In theory I like the idea of prediction markets but how they are done right now makes a bunch of markets too insecure to put much stock into or informationally unvaluable to inform other decisions
There is little incentive for someone with significant information, reason, or intuition to reveal it early leaving the market dumb for most of its existence or also open for someone influencing the outcome late.
They also aren't currently that reliable for gauging the wisdom of the crowds for situations where trust in the market effects its outcome. It's easy due to the scale of them for someone to just burn money to skew the perception of it for rhetorical and influential benefits.
I feel like there is no getting off this train though because news media companies are still desperate for revenue. Gambling around news will either increase advertising revenue for them, or if they do real information uncovering journalism, drive subscriptions because there's now incentive for getting news early on more than just financial news.
This part of the situation is the interesting thing to me.
Is this US administration establishing itself as the effective dictator of Venezuela indefinitely? What does running that country have to look like directed by the US president and what changes will they make to restrict the position to prepare it for transition? Is the plan to make no changes to the position and then forever make a mockery of their elections by only letting people run in the future who suite US interests? It feels like this situation has the potential to turn into a colonial-like relationship always under threat of direct US military intervention.
The question to ask when tracking to optimize reoccurring bills for home and grocery is if there is even any room you can give anyways.
You'd probably find the easy end actionable changes better by tracking the amount and which food spoiled before eating, or by testing your standard basket item costs at different stores you are willing to go to. But all of this isn't something you need to do continuously. Once you figure it out, you should be good for some period of time.
With numbers like this, it feels like OpenAI is selling at this point the value of an IPO if everyone consolidates around OpenAI more than on the competitive value of its product.
For every extra company they get effectively exclusive usage with the more believable the strategy becomes. As it wouldn't be the first time that beating out competitors in enterprise distribution led to users making what they are used to using at work what they use personally.
If so, it might be true that in many cases writing code wasn't as big of the story as some people think for some other people in the industry. I imagine there were many people though who toiled by hand a lot of code they didn't need to before for lack of experience or awareness, and so for them this a big increase in speed.