Notices by Avdi Grimm (avdi@hachyderm.io)

I don't understand why more of the conversation around LLMs isn't about the fact that past the honeymoon, 99% of people's interaction with them will be ad-supported, meaning full of sponsored content.

I can promise you advertisers have their eye firmly on this future.

If there's one thing that's more and more clear to me over the course of my career is how much of developer culture is dedicated to making ourselves complicit in our own exploitation. Witness the absolute mindless doublespeak that passes for engagement on LinkedIn.

It's canonical that managing programmers is like "herding cats". This is more a more apt metaphor than folks realize. Owning a cat is about coddling a creature and treating them like a regal little Primadonna who "runs the place" - as an amusing fiction. Which is exactly the relationship the financiers have with developers.

SV culture is an experiment in "what if instead of controlling the workers with Pinkertons, we engaged them in a vast shared delusion that they are colleagues with the bosses?"

For a long time I had trouble with the concept of unionizing programmers, because it felt like we're already so privileged compared to blue-collar workers.

What I realize now is that all that privilege vanishes like a mirage the moment people start talking about unionization. Or the moment interest rates go up.

We have to talk about unions, because the way "great employers" like Apple start actively persecuting people the moment they start comparing salaries reveals how flimsy the fiction really is.

We have to talk about unions because talking about it pulls down the green curtain.

And this is going to be hard because a LOT of programmers would very much like to keep imagining that they rule the home from their cat-tree. Even if that means imagining that their present state of unemployment is an issue with their skills rather than a meaningless externality of investor games. *Especially* if it means believing whatever they are working on is "innovation" rather than "an investor enthusiasm attractor".

If you make $30k a year you have 99% more in common with someone who makes $300k than you do Jeff Bezos.

If you make $300k you have 99% more in common with someone who makes $30k than you do with Jeff Bezos.

Stop worrying about being a class traitor if you acquire the means to be secure. Stop being mad at the person with a brand new Honda, unless it's to be mad at them for thinking they have more in common with Bezos than with you.

We can eat the rich AND get comfortable. There's enough.

Thoughts on coding with GPT-4 so far:

1. (Begrudgingly) this is insanely cool.
2. I have a bright consulting future of untangling codebases that were hacked together out of ChatGPT suggestions

Documenting my research: There seem to be three major Mastodon forks that are (maybe?) more open to contributions.

- Hometown, a lightweight fork reflecting one person's preferences
- glitch-soc, intentionally favoring "kitchen sink" over stability
- ecko, interesting for being governed according to Pieter Hintjen's C4 social contract for open source projects

I'd be interested in hearing from people who are contributing to any of these. The fact is I got really excited about digging into t contributing to a major public Ruby project, and now I'm kind of sad