Hetare King

In order to be able to get information on the web, people need to put it on the web first. And for that to happen, there needs to be something to motivate them to do so. What those motivations are is going to differ between people and situations, could be a pure desire to contribute to the commons, could be part of how they make their income, could be any other number of things. But if putting something on the web means accepting that you’re going to be helping vile companies achieve their goals and the way most people may see this information is in a perverse form, riddled with falsehoods and with no attribution (or maybe worse, mostly falsehoods attributed to you), and there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s going to put a damper on a lot of those motivations, and the ones that aren’t tend to be the less desirable ones.

And it’s not just information that’s on the web, it’s also collaborative efforts like open source software. Why do people release source code under licenses like the GPL? Because they believe those constraints lead to a better outcome than if they had just put it in the public domain. That their contributions to the commons lead to more contributions to the commons, even from people who may not be inclined or incentivised to do so. If it becomes trivial to undermine those licenses (and for the record, those licenses do get enforced and there have been companies that had to release the source code of their products because they violated the license), that may undermine the reasons for many to contribute to the project.

You can be all cool and cynical about how social contracts are made up and whatnot, but let’s be honest here; if someone beats you to a pulp because they didn’t like the way you looked at them, you’re not going to just coolly accept your broken nose and displaced ribs as just the way things work.

Unfortunately, all I can say is that the link in the post works for me and it doesn’t appear to be forwarding to anything. Somewhat ironically, it’s on the Internet Archive, though, so maybe that works for you.

There’s no need to pave a road to hell if you’re already in hell because you’ve surrendered to bad intentions and now they’re all that’s left. The logical conclusion from acceptance is that it’s in nobody’s interest to put anything on the web (or anything equivalent) and have it become even more of a consumption-only medium than it already has.

Also, what’s happening right now is, in fact, the flow of information being controlled; to primarily flow towards a few powerful entities, that is. You’re neglecting to consider the effects of power differentials. Those powerful entities need to be constrained for the flow of information to actually be free.

Granted, the solution proposed in the blog post seems a bit too technical and high-friction to really be feasibly, but at least people are thinking about it.

I have no dog in this race as far as Claude is concerned, but this is pushing a false dichotomy. Not using, say, WinForms or something, because it’s too limiting or because you don’t want to make a unique UI for every platform, doesn’t have to mean strapping an entire web browser to your frontend, there are plenty of other options.

The reason frameworks like Electron are popular is that we’ve spent a long time hammering a square peg into a round hole and there are now a whole bunch of tools for designing on top of web technologies and a lot of designers with experience with those tools. And of course, the fact that code can be reused between the web app and the desktop app helps too. But it does have a performance cost. The fact that you can have poorly performing and bloated native UIs too doesn’t change that no matter how well-optimised your HTML+CSS+JS is, you can create something of the same complexity that is faster and leaner using native widgets. And when people opt for the desktop app instead of web app, they typically want something that performs better than the web app.

I’m not sure that analogy works. The machines used for making clothes are reliable and produce repeatable results that are good enough. I recently had to throw away a 15 year old T-shirt because it was getting a bit too ratty, but it still technically functioned as a T-shirt. Also, mass produced clothing in standardised sizes didn’t actually replace the bulk of tailor-mode clothing, that was always something for the rich, but that’s getting too deep into it.

In comparison, LLM-based code generators are inherently unreliable and by their very nature incapable of ever becoming able of producing good enough results, at least with the current dominant paradigm. Many execs may not feel that way, but that’s very much a FAFO situation, because unlike clothing, where poor quality may cause it to degrade faster, but that still takes time, the effects of degradation of quality in software are immediate. Of course, it’s very difficult to dislodge a dominant software product from its place in the market, because people are willing to tolerate a lot of quality degradation if the cost of switching to something else is high, but there is an upper limit of what people are willing to take, while there is no limit to how bad their software can get if companies keep riding the LLM bandwagon.

I’ll say this much: people don’t have to work for a big, publicly traded corporation. There are still smaller software houses out there where the executives aren’t little more than the shareholders’ fluffer and trust devs to know how to do their jobs, though you may need to look outside of mainstream applications. Whether they have the collective capacity to absorb everyone who wants to be a professional programmer, I don’t know. But in a world of slop, being able to provide even somewhat reliable software may be a gap in the market that could be exploited and allow for that capacity to grow.

“Mikan” on its own typically refers to citrus unshiu, but it’s also the name of a larger family of citruses that includes oranges (in fact, oranges are on the chart: of the four surrounding the big one in the middle, it’s the one on the lower left). It’s like how when you say “onion”, you probably mean the bulbous vegetable with the papery skin, but “onions” also includes green onions, welsh onions, leeks etc.