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   Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 03-May-2024 03:19:33 JST Baldur Bjarnason

   React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:48:59 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     I postponed this post a day in the hopes I'd mellow down a bit and be able to tone the post down a bit. I failed. 😅

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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:06 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     • blabaere☑️

     @blabaere Possibly. Haven't looked into it enough to be sure but that feels plausible, at least for the old "write once, run everywhere" era of Java hype

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     blabaere☑️ (blabaere@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:09 JST blabaere☑️

     in reply to

     @baldur Do you think the same explanation holds for older stuff like Visual Basic or Java (before J2EE and Spring) ?

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     blabaere☑️ (blabaere@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:14 JST blabaere☑️

     in reply to

     @baldur It now seems to me that "labour arbitrage" and "democratization of tech" are two sides of the same coin.

     Except the coin is oddly shaped so the sides are not really symmetric.

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     Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:18 JST Baldur Bjarnason

     in reply to

     • blabaere☑️

     @blabaere Yup. Systems are complex and have both benefits and downsides that vary depending on context. No easy answers.

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     firebreathingduck (firebreathingduck@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:22 JST firebreathingduck

     in reply to

     @baldur outstanding.

     Another way to express labor arbitrage is "making engineers fungible".

     Daniel Sockwell has an interesting video on this with respect to programming languages. https://youtu.be/MCKozTfcWr4?si=dkk17B8hn9Sbefzh

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     Dan (embiggendata@c.im)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:36 JST Dan

     in reply to

     • firebreathingduck
     • codesections

     @firebreathingduck There are many great observations in the post by @baldur, and in this video from @codesections (about the goals of programming groups at big tech vs developers creating "free software").

     I see similarities in the tool stacks used in the #DataScience / #DataEngineering realm. It feels like there is a push to use no/low code, cookie-cutter, closed sourse, costly, inefficient, obfuscating tools that make it difficult to verify you're getting the "correct" answer, and a purposeful move away from craft and excellence. Commoditize, commercialize, and cross-#enshittify is the credo.

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     Demian (dgodon@mastodon.online)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:42 JST Demian

     in reply to

     @baldur really insightful piece! It’s been pretty obvious that recent layoffs and some of the AI hype has been about labor discipline but I hadn’t thought of how frameworks and technology choices also serve this purpose.

     Perhaps also related is how tools like LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor push a certain individualist framing of job market that claims to be about empowering workers but curiously bereft of any labor organizing. Know of any research or analysis on this topic?

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     Ethan Marcotte (beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:44 JST Ethan Marcotte

     in reply to

     @baldur Oh Baldur, this is just so, so sharp. Gonna be thinking about this the rest of the day. Thank you.

     (And I hope you know how downright humbled I feel, after seeing you closed with such an expansive endorsement of my little book. Thank you so much, Baldur — that really means a lot 💜)

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     rnlf :unverified: (rnlf@dosgame.club)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:47 JST rnlf :unverified:

     in reply to

     @baldur Some lines hit really close to home. After years of "we need to hire more people to do this right" and equally many years of "we can't afford that, CTO won't give us the budget", reading something like "They will let their own businesses suffer by shipping substandard software because they believe they can recoup those losses at your expense." is really painful to bear.

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     rnlf :unverified: (rnlf@dosgame.club)'s status on Saturday, 04-May-2024 23:49:52 JST rnlf :unverified:

     in reply to

     @baldur One thing I'm not certain about is what makes one piece of technology "okay", say, a C++ compiler, but others problematic, like a web component framework? Both do essentially the same, encapsulate knowledge and hide the dirty details from the developer.

     It's easier to hire C++ programmers than assembler programmers - yet I don't think many developers would say we should go back to hand written assembly.

     Is it only about how managers see these tools?

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