The irony of leaving a community where "most of the content is obviously bot generated, which is just depressing" to going full-on into zero community bot-generation via LLM is fascinating.
It does sound paradoxical, but it's the difference between steering information to things that serve you, versus having others steer the information you see to things that serve them.
Reddit right now is in a very bad place. It's passed the threshold where bots are posting and replying to themselves. If humans left the platform it would probably look much the same as it does now.
The result is a noticeable uptick in forums moving to discord or rolling their own websites. Which is probably a good thing for dodging the obvious commercial manipulation, propaganda and foreign influence vectors.
At least you get to prompt the llm, as opposed to consuming content where you don’t know what the prompt was and could have been intended to misinform.
At least the response doesn’t have an ad injected between each paragraph and is intentionally padded out so you scroll past more ads…
Works on firefox mobile too, just have to go to extensions for all firefox (as opposed to the default mobile firefox extensions page), and add it from there.
I was generalizing to more sites than just reddit.
Mostly I see a ton of ai slop that pollutes google search results, you’ll see an intro paragraph that looks vaguely coherent, but the more you scroll, the more apparent you’re reading ai slop.
With LLMs, I'm viscerally aware that it's a bot generating output from its pre-trained/fine-tuned model weights with occasional RAG.
With reddit, folks go there expecting some semblance of genuine human interaction (reddit's #1 rule was "remember the human"). So, there's that expectation differential. Not ironic at all.
How is that ironic? If I was in a place with Indian and Thai restaurants and then it turned out all the Thai restaurants have only Indian food, I would rather go to an Indian restaurant for the food. That's about the most non-ironic thing ever.
Yep, exactly, but there isn't any. The places saying they serve Thai food serve Indian food. If so, I'll go get my Indian food from where it's actually done well.
This is a fascinating and seemingly unusual development that will look obvious in history.
I find “BDFLs” and open source communities so incredibly interesting. Especially in the context of geopolitics and state entities. Linux!
This stuff is PHD material for sociology and polisci post-grads and I’m so interested in following the progression of history with these types of things.
I don't think BDFLs are a problem. Nobody questioned, say, guido design of python or matz' design of ruby as such. The issue here is primarily about who controls the ruby ecosystem. Interestingly python also had a somewhat similar discussion in the past; you can see this indirectly if you look at pypi:
I feel like BDFLs are akin to the concept of village elders; they're not immune to corruption or scandal, but they often have this beloved status that can paper over a lot of cracks. That's probably dependant on their leadership style - the hard headed (Linus, DHH) vs the grandfatherly (Matz, Van Rossum).
Which, going back to your note on geopolitics, leads me to wonder: Is it just that more power corrupts more, or is it that (modern-day definitions of) democracy require a desire for power? I guess as the "FL" part of "BDFL" comes to bite more of the communities, we'll see better how different succession styles have different effects. I also wonder if the analytical nature of the individuals within the "populations", and inability to police defectors will mean uprisings will be more successful, either in causing BDFL attitude adjustments, or just overturning the community completely (for example, there's already a lot of momentum for a complete fork of Rails)
(Edit: having submitted this, I now see others have had very similar thoughts! Definitely an excellent conversation topic)
> I feel like BDFLs are akin to the concept of village elders; they're not immune to corruption or scandal, but they often have this beloved status that can paper over a lot of cracks.
I think a lot of this is due to how so much is a scandal these days, for better and worse. (I'm obviously going to keep politics as much out of my response as possible.)
A few decades ago, people could have political views without ostracizing roughly 50% of the global population, or generally causing a ruckus at the holiday family dinner. (Obviously politics + holiday dinners has been an issue for a long time, but back then it was just something people tried to sweep under the rug. Now? Holiday dinners are getting cancelled or families are splitting up.)
It used to be that a scandal in the OSS community required you killing your wife (thinking back to ReiserFS). Now, a remark on Twitter is all it takes.
Again, I am absolutely not taking sides here. I'm just noticing a difference in the times, and agreeing that it is indeed interesting to watch.
No, I agree. That said, I think a lot of that particular shift is down to a) increased individualism b) an emphasis on the healing power of personal boundaries and c) the rejection of unity as an overriding good.
People are far more happy to cling to the tribe they choose, and the tribe that has their back, over the tribe they were born to. Then, there are those who see that trend as dangerous to society (where, in many cases, society is really just a proxy for their own power or social status - ironically as viewed through their own chosen tribes more than the tribe they were born to)
That is to say, I don't think it's the political views that are splitting the families. Individuals have decided that care for each other should come secondary to those political views. I feel like there used to be a certain amount of care in the "sweeping under the rug" - it was the tribe against the world, it was protecting the family image as much as it was protecting the individual from society. These days, being a thing "in private" means being a thing alone, and that's no longer a compelling thought when external tribes are willing to embrace you.
Which probably applies to software tribes just as much as family ones.
>A few decades ago, people could have political views without ostracizing roughly 50% of the global population
This is ahistorical.
Not only was it the norm forever to ostracize entire sections of your society (protestant vs catholic and lots of other religions, black vs white, any form of non-hetero behavior, the Roma people and any form of outsider)
It often was the law
Americans shot their family members over whether we should own black people or not.
My french and white ancestors were expelled to Louisiana, intermarried with black people, and then when the US bought the french land, they introduced laws that made such families illegal.
Reagan made a hobby of publicly claiming his coworkers were communist. Thought that maybe we should be allowed to form unions? 100 years ago that was enough to get you investigated by the senate. Americans voted for him so hard the Democratic party is still floundering to have support. "We should allow unions" or "we should regulate companies" is still half-verbotten.
Do you know how many kids are still kicked out of their homes for the crime of being born gay?
This idea of "You used to be able to hold diverse opinions in public" is outright wrong. This past never existed.
Weird Christians in the US have tried to cancel things like Harry Potter and halloween for gods sake. They took a teacher to trial for teaching evolution. They made playing pen and paper RPGs a sin! When preachers molested kids, they shunned the kids
Being too chummy with another guy in public was a scandal! Being a woman who wanted an education was a scandal! Getting pregnant out of wedlock was a scandal that would tear apart families. Getting divorced was verbotten. Expressing support for social policy could get you fired, or murdered
Bush Jr literally said "You're either with us or against us" about supporting a criminal war and America pitched a globally public fit when other countries did not pledge allegiance.
> I find “BDFLs” and open source communities so incredibly interesting. Especially in the context of geopolitics and state entities. Linux!
The diference is that with an open source licence, the comunity can just fork the project (assuming they have enough developers), so the BDFL must master the art of herding cats.
A country has clear phisical borders and tanks, and people can't fork them and ignore the old power structure.
I think you're absolutely right. We are starting to reach the age where a combination of large cooperative non-corporate tech projects and the Internet (that, partially at least, enabled them) are putting us in a place where the actual mortality of project owners matters. The "L" in BDFL is a finite constraint.
I think there's going to be an interesting and complicated churn as several major projects under the BDFL model have their Ds succeed at passing the torch, struggle to pass the torch, struggle to realize the torch needs to be passed, or take the torch and do their best to burn the whole project down so it can't outlive them.
Symbolic here refers of doing math with place holders, be it letters or something. Ancient world had notations for recording numbers. But much less so to do math with them. Say like long division.
Always count on Tenderlove for a detailed technical deep dive! I've missed your blog.
Tangential story - 12-13 years ago I was a burgeoning and super eager software dev that moved to Seattle to be closer to "the scene." tenderlove's content was a major reason for me going there and I poured through his posts learning way too much about Nokogiri, Active Record, and much much more.
I went to every Ruby meetup I could get to out there and I remember one in particular, a Seattle RB meetup, in the Substantial office. It was a pretty small group, at most 15-20 people.
I was with a coder buddy but knew nobody else. We were all just drinking pints of Manny's beer and eating pizza from Big Mario's or something. Ryan Davis (the creator of minitest among other things) was doing a presentation on Unicode.
Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) was cracking jokes at every opportunity. At one point I asked a relatively naive question and Aaron _tenderly_ answered in joke-form response. I felt such a _part_ of the scene then. Aja Hammerly was super engaged in the presentation, I think even Ryan Bates and/or Geoffrey Grosenbach were there.
It was quite surreal to be in this dream-like state around giants and heroes just doing what they were doing and being so inclusive. It seemed so normal but became a core memory.
Thanks for everything Aaron, you've truly been an inspiration!
This is a really shitty take. „Can’t please everyone, might as well piss off the creators and show it as a badge of pride!“
Personally I will never use this software and would actively advocate against it if only to counter the attitude you’re presenting.
But mainly because artists should be able to make a living and it’s already hard enough with the meager pennies or less they get from current PAID streaming services.
Artists, especially on bandcamp, are often the underdog. Being proud of not paying them is like being proud to watch a street artist "for free", because fuck them for doing it in public. My ethics say: "If you don't like it, ignore it and walk on, if you liked it enough to stop and watch you give them something."
Meanwhile most online ads are supporting multinational corporations that already may earn money with your browsing data and try to manipulate your choices every step. All while delivering their ads in a way that makes it a threat to not block them. That isn't remotely the same. If you need my money to survive, give me the choice to pay instead at least.
The exact same software could have been marketed as something to discover new music, for free and the musicians would be mostly okay with it.
Artists making a living will in no way be impacted by the use of this software. The only way for artists to make a living through their art would be changes through IP/copyright reform (politics and policy, which will take years if not decades) and the operation of platforms where they can get a more fair share of compensation [1] [2]. One can think a musician's response to this software is absurd and still believe they should be able to live comfortably and with dignity while creating art. Pay these folks UBI if we have to, but the problem is not this software is my point.
One can be angry for symbolic reasons as well. If your CEO told you to "Get your code on github, it is free", you would probably rightfully question whether they understood the reasons why people develope and maintain open source software in the first place.
Similarly here. It is not about the act of people listening to the music for free. If this was a problem, a musician would just restrict access to those tracks. It is about a spirit of taking without giving back, which could be understood as: "Haha you idiots, thanks for providing it for free, I am not paying then". A bit like stopping to watch a street performer, and instead of clapping and (eventually) tossing a coin going like: "We are in a public space, I don't need to pay, idiot. Your own fault!".
Technically correct, but ethically wrong and shows they don't value the work of artists. This is just about words and showing some respect, not about money. And since words and showing respect literally cost nothing this makes the insult even greater.
Ethically wrong to watch a street performer but not toss a coin? I do agree that it is ethically virtuous to toss the coin, but ethically wrong not to? I'm not seeing it.
Everything exists in thousand shades and ethics is one of those fields where in the finer shades people can and will differ in their assessment. That is in the nature of the thing.
I am not saying anyone who listens voluntarily for 30 seconds and doesn't pay a handsome amount is a monster. What I said is that listening, enjoying it and then telling them: "Stupid musician, their fault for giving me the choice to pay, so I don't" makes you a bad person.
There are a thousand ethically sound reasons why you wouldn't toss a coin, you could not have one, you could be broke, you could misunderstand the situation, you could have a cultural background where this is uncommon and street performers are getting their share in a different way etc.
But enjoying the fruit of their work and then maligning them for giving it to you for free is not only rude, but yes: ethically wrong.
I had a problem with signing up for max with the wrong email, then thinking I didn’t actually do it, so I signed up with the one I wanted.
Saw the double bill and contacted them, I had a full refund in a couple days and a nice personal note thanking me for being a max user.
This was a couple months ago so it’s possible they’ve had a huge influx of requests that made it difficult to respond fast lately but I had a good experience with their customer service.
It still implies possibility of failure, but in the example of the commenter above, that possibility is almost low enough to the point of expectation (but not quite) and "try to" would increase that possibility in the direction of failure. Nuance!
