Maybe but that wasn’t my point. My point is that a lot of people now invest a LOT of resources, being token, money, time, etc to invent the wheel again. Instead of relying on e.g. Drupal they’ll “generate” yet another CMS which will work (for a while, in theory) not because it’s a good idea (IMHO it’s not) but because it’s been marketed as doable and even “better” on some aspects (e.g. customizable).

And that’s why GenAI for code is gaining popularity.

It’s not because it’s better than free open-source libraries. It’s because it’s better marketed.

So ombudsman can be for “petty” things, like the belt of my e-bike, but also for much more “serious” things like political corruption, vote scams, etc where I imagine Congress might be correct. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsmen_in_the_United_States clarifies though there are ombudsmen dedicated to agencies but also state level or even city and county level. So I imagine the more precise you are picking the right one, the more likely it’s going to be treated, efficiently or at all.

No idea how it works where you are but in Belgium and in the EU we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman which according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_services_by_country is available in most places. Anyway I can tell you when companies receive an email from them, they don’t mess around. I’ve been waiting for a bike part for a year. I contacted the ombudsman, no cost, just 2 emails, suddenly my carbon belt was shipping the very next day.

I agree with everything you wrote but I’m not sure how it helps clarify what I said earlier. So… I think we agree?

On your final point I think the big difference between then (before LLMs) and now is that until recently a very demanding PR, in the sense that the person asking for the merge would have a good idea yet didn’t really get something about the project and thus needed a lot of guidance, it was seen as an investment. It was a risky bet, maybe that person would just leave after a lengthy discussion, maybe they’d move to their own project, etc… but a bit like with a young intern, the person from the project managing that PR was betting that it was worth spending time on it. They were maybe hoping to get some code they themselves didn’t have the expertise on (say some very specific optimization for very specific hardware they didn’t have) or that this new person would one day soon become a more involved contributor. So there was an understanding that yes it would be a challenging process but both parties would benefit from it.

Now I believe the situation has changed. The code submitted might actually be good, maybe not. It will though always, on the surface, look plausible because that’s exactly what LLM have been trained for, for code or otherwise, to “look” realistic in their context.

So… I would argue that it’s this dynamic that has change, from the hope of onboarding a new person on a project to a 1-shot gamble.

IMHO what it shows isn’t what the author tries to show, namely that there is an overwhelming swarm of bits, but rather that those bots are just not good enough even for a bot enthusiast. They are literally making money from that “all-in-one AI workspace. Chat - MCP - Gateway” and yet they want to “let me prioritize PRs raised by humans” … but why? Why do that in the first place? If bots/LLMs/agents/GenAI genuinely worked they would not care if it was made or not by humans, it would just be quality submission to share.

Also IMHO this is showing another problem that most AI enthusiasts are into : not having a proper API.

This repository is actually NOT a code repository. It’s a collaborative list. It’s not code for software. It’s basically a spreadsheet one can read and, after review, append on. They are hijacking Github because it’s popular but this is NOT a normal use case.

So… yes it’s quite interesting to know but IMHO it shows more shortcomings rather than what the title claims.

FWIW I remember a former colleague who recommended it to me and his argument was about the cryptocurrency you “earn” from it.

I asked him if he could withdraw it. I asked him if he tried. He said not yet but he would. He came back to me few days later saying something along the line that “it’s not straightforward” which was a polite way to say he didn’t manage yet. He worked in IT.

To be clear I’m not saying it’s a scam or that one can’t use the crypto “earned” from it but at least back then, few years ago, some people were just riding on the hope, or even faith, that it would amount to something yet it seemed made in such a way to just hold.

So… not a scam but not exactly empowering users IMHO.

Some contributions to Kwin

Link please

I eat food, and the food I eat doesn’t just walk to my place.

So… sure I’d rather have a lot less energy spent on agriculture and industry but if there is one place where I feel energy use is legitimate, it’s feeding us.

Meanwhile I do NOT want better tools for scammers, spammers and fake experts.

If you

• need discoverability, or
• don’t need anything composable

then sure GUIs are great.

OK you can hate HOMEwork and instead do everything at school or work, namely study there, but what genuinely matters for studying is that you DO do the work. You have to do the exercises, over and over again, more and more challenging, otherwise nothing gets through. You only get the “feeling” of understanding without getting the practice.

Learning without practice is like being a theoretical athlete. Hate homework all you want but learn to love studying by doing.

And rightfully so. They might not know much about Linux itself BUT they did dare try and for that they deserve recognition.

Back to LFS.

I feel seen.

So… I’m definitely cheering up for the lady in red.

Why? Am I an elitist asshole doing his best to sound smart?

Well yes, definitely BUT I also appreciate the power of the command line. The CLI isn’t “cool” because of the cryptic command, no the CLI is cool because :

• ls (list files)
• ls *.txt (list all files ending with the .txt extension)
• ls *.txt | wc -l (count how of them are)
• etc

and the “etc” is the FUNDAMENTAL part! Namely that no matter how smart the GUI developer is, they can’t predict how it is going to be used when done with OTHER tools. That’s the true power of the CLI. So yes if you stick to a single command, the CLI is unnecessarily cryptic but as soon as you start to combine commands, nothing comes close to it.

My usual reminder to consider “The Mouse that Roared - Disney and the End of Innocence” by Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mouse-that-roared-9798216263937/ i.e. Disney is JUST a very large corporation that sells whatever it can (plastic toys, parks, movies, food, etc) thanks to intellectual property laws it reshaped to capture more and for longer period of time to the most influenceable segment of the population, namely kids.

Disney is bad. This just makes it marginally worst. They don’t care, they just want to exploit kids more.

What the heck… https://openai.com/index/agentic-ai-foundation/

puking emoji it’s on OpenAI.com to talk about “Open Standards” or “Open Ecosystem” while they f*cking “donated” a markdown example while keeping the 1 thing they are seen as innovative for, namely GPT3 and above, as closed.

It’s absolute Newspeak.

Honestly it’s a good reminder of the positions between FSF/FSFE/etc vs the Linux Foundation which is basically just a BigTech club https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members where large corporations find new “open” ways to try to exploit the commons.

power outrage

New fear unlocked.

Capitalism.

That’s actually pretty wise, what if your then autistic dog outsmarts you now thanks to their autism? /s