jmoiron plays the blues

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: It reminds me of free software idealists trying to avoid closed source/encumbered software in the early 2000s. You either go to extraordinary lengths that undercut your basic ability to participate in the culture, you make convenient carve-outs (eg. firmware), or you acknowledge ...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I don't know about you, but I've been finding it hard to explain to people outside of tech how thoroughly LLMs have already transformed software development. The only holdouts at this point are people with strong ideological opposition.
@jmoiron.bsky.social Just a few weeks ago, Tesla demoed their latest production vehicle, an invite-only car whose active down force lets you go 0-60 in your driveway and whose passenger seat has been replaced by a 400L pressure vessel so it can fly for 5 seconds.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Yeah I guess I implicitly endorsed the placement and design of the arch even though I find his taste appalling and I don't really feel that positively about it, but on the idea of building new monuments I'm in favor. On the specifics there could be more than one problem with it f...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: And look, I don't hate waffles, obviously there are more important things worth spending time/effort/money on, but it's become clear since the WWII era that the profit motive does not provide us with great public spaces and public works, and I think we can make room for that.
@jmoiron.bsky.social My hot take on the Triumphal Arch is that it is only bad because Trump obviously sees it as a monument to himself. Public monuments, properly dedicated, are "good, actually" and we should build more. They enrich civic life, remind us of our ideals and inspire us to try to live u...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: What the discourse needs is people saying "Talarico has real Julian Mintz energy"
@jmoiron.bsky.social I just can't get used to established, respected political pundits posting about LoGH or Chrono Trigger. Yes, this is a hot cup of tea for my elder millennial soul, but also wtf is going on. (complementary)
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Yeah, we agree. I meant the minimum comfortable vote lead for Peltola would have to be at least the vote count for fake Dan Sullivan, assuming many of his votes were confused people who just put them both 1 and 2.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: You'd imagine she has to at least clear the other Dan Sullivan candidate.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: 95% sure it'l be Schumer & Jeffries in leadership, the "decorum & normalcy" wing of the Democratic party. I'll be happy to be presently surprised (corruption and "we hate the gestapo" were salient issues) but they failed to truly prosecute Jan 6 and I'm not convinced they learne...
@jmoiron.bsky.social Eagerly awaiting a "here's why a crushing electoral victory is bad for Democrats" take. NYT/WaPo/Atlantic start your engines.
@jmoiron.bsky.social Perfect example of what @jamellebouie.net calls "school shooter vibes", feels like a missing page from the journal of Klebold or Harris. Nothing super new wrt Anakin here, Alan Moore absolutely skewered this type of guy with Rorschach, so of course people turned around and worsh...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: As time goes forward, I see people who are resolutely anti-AI have an understanding of AI's capabilities that are more and more divorced from reality. They are in an echo chamber of bad information because, in part, they take pleasure in dismissing the people with good informati...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: There's a lot of schadenfreude out there, especially among artists, about people in software being eaten by their own creation. I understand this, but no profession is a monolith. There's a lot of outrage among engineers over how carelessly these things have been unleashed.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: But, so far at least, there doesn't seem to be a lot to have come out of it, and I think a big part of that has been how AI has degraded the social aspect of software and especially of open source software. If there's no one around to even appreciate your work, that's a big disi...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: AI has vastly expanded the number of people who can contribute to the software ecosystem, a goal that I pursued through social means for most of my career. With these new capabilities in hand, we should be expecting a wave of new software that nobody thought to build before.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: But LLMs are building software using languages, tools, libraries, almost exclusively developed by humans. They follow design patterns and the fundamentals of engineering developed by humans. When humans stop making software, they stop making these breakthroughs too.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Similarly, there's barely been any innovation in the past 3 years outside of AI adjacent tooling and techniques. I've held this as a cautious criticism the past few years because LLM tools are such an earth shattering innovation that it's perhaps silly to say "yeah, but what els...
@jmoiron.bsky.social One way to understand this is that the amount people write about software building techniques has really gone down, not just because they are no longer practicing them, but because they just don't seem very relevant. Who needs to read something like this these days? jmoiron.net...
@jmoiron.bsky.social The Republicans spent the entire 2022-2024 cycle investigating Hunter Biden and then won a trifecta.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Still big conversations to be had about the ethics and legality of the training, impact of data centers on power prices and local communities, externalities regarding education, its effect on social inequities, etc. But saying it turns everything to slop and has no use is just i...
by jason moiron, 2026