When I hear this, I think of the philosophy, system of laws, language, etc. in America - and not the percentages we get when we segregate the American population by their ancestors.
Also, more importantly IMO, the corpus of open source and free software leans _hard_ towards things _programmers_ find interesting/useful.
The further from “I use this everyday to program” you get - the less concentrated/competitive open source and free software solutions are.
All programmers are programmers (this is almost as close to a tautology as you can get). Finding programmers who will write programs as an unpaid hobby to improve their SDLC experience when they program is substantially easier than finding competent UI/UX/icon designers who will do the same. The ecosystem of software under their icons is entirely inaccessible to them - the source being “free” or “open” is irrelevant to them, they can’t program so they can’t modify the system in the same way a programmer can.
My spicy take on this is that the free and open source software ecosystems have failed to deliver on their goals in any meaningful way for non technical people. The world around programs has gotten _objectively worse_ for the common man while the corpus of free and open source software has grown. The world runs on OSS and yet the world’s data is all owned by SaaS companies. Everyone has lost agency over their digital lives but at least we have Automake and emacs.
I can’t say I understand this new current of culture/writing. It’s something like: get angry, turn small acts into grand acts of social defiance, and signal your social ingroup by referencing other things we are angry about.
“Do you remember that JK Rowling lady we all hate because she’s an evil witch? Haha, yeah. Anyways, I’m British and I’m going to keep writing like I’m British.”
Edit: I agree with the thesis. You have a culture; don’t filter it. Differences are beautiful. I’d rather live in a melting pot. Etc. Separately this new communication style is hard to stomach. Ive seen it growing in popularity in the U.S. - seems like there too?
This is slightly different than web fiction. Text generation is arguably the cheapest and most “ready” medium for content production in the current AI wave.
You can speak a world into existence, entirely customized to you’re preferences, and interact with it.
Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?
Dollar value aside, if the argument you’re making is that the land now called NYC would have equivalent or greater value if it were today as it was then - that the subway system, roads, schools, hospitals, restaurants, apartments, etc. have no increased relative value over the undeveloped land - you’re likely to be considered ignorant by most of the inhabitants of the developed world.
I’m not sure I agree with this but maybe I just lack self awareness?
There are large portions of my codebases that are essentially extremely verbose grunt work. My UI stack, IaC YAML, thin CRUD routes, etc.
I know what the code is supposed to look like when it’s done being written, but it’s going to take me for freaking ever to type it all out.
I can just few shot it now in an hour. Plan -> feedback loop -> build -> review loop.
Does it try to do weird stuff? Yeah. And then I’m just like “that’s weird, no, the components should be broken up like XYZ” and then it’s not weird anymore. Occasionally (1% of the time) I just do a quick refactor myself instead of trying to tell the agent harness what to do.
I can get something fairly close to the ballpark of what I would have done but in like single digit percentage of the time.
And the result is that I can spit out a bunch of purpose built tools (personal tools, internal tools for teams, etc.) that I never would have been able to justify building otherwise.
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