Don't Take the Black Pill [video] (youtube.com)
44 points by signa11 3 hours ago
spudlyo 8 minutes ago
So in case you're worried watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark.
Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workaround are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.
I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.
smalltorch 24 minutes ago
Generally agreed with most of the points.
Building software that serves you only...and then sharing with others is like serving others. It's good stuff and we need more of it.
I'm not sure how the deconversion of his faith needed to be conflated as related to the main ideas, especially when the next point was about weilding technology for good or evil in the next point as if these aren't pre-existing realities of our world or universe.
keinzirp 26 minutes ago
Does anyone know what the "discord alternative" is that Andrew says he's working on at the end[0] of the video?
[0]: https://youtu.be/zLZwpH5lCD4?si=45knBo2Hsy_6wjEM&t=2092
some_furry 25 minutes ago
kristoff_it 21 minutes ago
(reposting my comment from lobsters)
For anybody reading, the project tracks new Zig to get all the new async I/O goodies but was hit by some regressions in Zig's translate-c because it recently became fully independent from LLVM.
Other contributors and I took this as an opportunity to contribute some fixes to translate-c and in my case I also switched for a bit to my other projects, mainly https://zine-ssg.io, which I had neglected for a few months while going all-in on awebo.
I plan to resume development of awebo in a month or two, I just want to leave Zine in a good spot before switching again (I have a had time paging between different projects too often and prefer doing continuous work for a while before switching back).
keinzirp 21 minutes ago
Thank you!
mikewarot 2 hours ago
So, today I'm one of the lucky 10,000[1] who finally understands what "black pilled" actually means. (Edit: The video explains what black pilled means)
As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of.
The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time. I believe otherwise, and this might help convey that at some future point.
Currently my best hope is that the upcoming release of Genode offers a way forward. Their roadmap[3] features this line when describing the upcoming release
Sketch of a capability-based desktop environment
[2] https://garden.joehallenbeck.com/container/mappers-and-packe...
listic an hour ago
I expected the link [1] to be to the explaination of what "black pilled" means, but only because I already read and remember xkcd 1053.
fellowniusmonk 3 hours ago
Crazy to see how many people miss 26:15.
gregdaniels421 3 hours ago
This comment is on a part of the video on Free Software Disillusionment, where people don't want to have their code ingested and used by AI. Andrew's thingy is basically that if you don't participate in open source there won't be high quality code for others/yourself in the future.
People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without attribution. Two is that it feels like you are providing value for a soulless corporate machine without compensation.
If a person uses your code you get maybe happy that it was useful and maybe something cool gets made out it. If an AI uses your work it feels like you just did free labor.
I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
as1mov 2 hours ago
> I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
What they completely missed was that LLMs are a golden opportunity for the corpo-ratfuckers to completely work around the issue of those pesky OS licenses. Who cares if it's GPL/AGPL, just run it through the slop machine and everything is fine.
Open-source doesn't exist in a vacuum, they rely on inherently restrictive licenses to force corporations into contributing back instead of just sucking up everything.
fellowniusmonk 2 hours ago
This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it.
In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code.
I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business".
I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "anti american communism bullshit".
It's ok to be a humanist and not a corporatist.
It's ok to show generosity.
It's ok to reject the crab bucket framing.
Some of us are mature enough to be ok living in a better world even if still imperfect.
bee_rider 34 minutes ago
nz 2 hours ago
jagadaga an hour ago
I watched 8 minutes and feel like my time was wasted. Thank you. Yeah, we always knew how to build reliable software, but it's expensive.
dang an hour ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive, shallow criticisms? So far all 3 of your comments have been of this sort, and we're trying for more thoughtful conversation here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Note this one: "Don't be snarky."