Even if your tool learns to talk and to make decisions, it's still a tool, not a person. You're the person and the one responsible for the decisions you make based on your tools.
Going back from the analogy, the problem is that we conflated software <engineers> with "coders".
A lot of people thought their job was to create code, we gave them a tool to generate a lot of code fast, and they truly think that "more code" = "more good"
I interpreted it as: if you include all hobbies and games made by humans in history, I'm pretty sure most of them involve a set of cards made of paper, some others involving wooden figurines (chess, checkers) or even drawing on dirt with a stick.
A computer is many, many orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than that.
This isn't said with the intention to demonize expensive hobbies if no one is harmed because of it.
But I do sometimes wonder if my hobbies are too dependent of a power plug. Even reading, which I do with a e-reader.
Linux is different. Decades of being tied to x86 made the OS way more coupled with the processor family than one might think.
Decades of bugfixes, optimizations and workarounds were made assuming a standard BIOS and ACPI standards.
Specially on the desktop side.
That, and the fact that SoC vendors are decades behind on driver quality. They remind me of the NDiswrapper era.
Also, a personal theory I have is that have unfair expectations with ARM Linux. Back then, when x86 Linux had similar compatibility problems, there was nothing to be compared with, so people just accepted that Linux was going to be a pain and that was it.
Now the bar is higher. People expect Linux to work the way it does in x86, in 2025.
Sometimes it does change and when that happens is for the worse.
Some developers suddenly realize that X system is old, and then they try to redo it from zero.
And when they do that, they throw decades of feature development down the drain:
- Xorg: Was Wayland worth the 10+ years of manpower needed to catch up?
- Synaptics: Now we have libinput, less configurable and with way fewer features
- Gnome: Something that happens when the devs think "If Apple can, then we can too" but without the money to invest in good UX (Gnome2 had actual UX research done by Sun)
- Systemd: I'll concede that nobody liked SystemV. But we also had OpenRC and strangely got ignored.
Sometimes "developercracy" is terrible, and we spend years arguing if Rust or Not, instead of trying to make good software
The idea behind the parent comment is not that they can't compete, but they are specifically made not to.
Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count.
While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think that's the doom of Mozilla.
Puppet or not, their tangled codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're not being paid a salary for it.
Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser", deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory" software, not unlike Java or Vscode.
Software that's made by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate development and support the project will become a zombie in no time.
My take is that the book also works as a source of authority for aspiring SSR and SR devs.
Comments about code style are usually subjective, and, they can be easily dismissed as a personal preference, or, in the case of a Jr dev, as a lack of skill.
Until they bring up "The Uncle Bob book". Now, suddenly, a subjective opinion from a Jr dev looks like an educated advice sourced from solid knowledge. And other people now have a reason to listen up.
All of this is totally fabricated, of course. But it's like the concept of money. It's valid only because other people accept it as valid.
Once you see a few, it becomes obvious