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[Microblog] RE: toot (hachyderm.io)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/microblogs@piefed.social
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RE: toot.cafe/@baldur/117614251587I very much agree with Baldur’s line of thinking here. In my own framing:Arguing over whether the •single smoking gun• in the Microsoft or FAA fiasco is vibe coding or layoffs (or whatever) misses the big picture — and the big picture is dire.Working that out a bit in a thread.1/

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[–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago (9 children)

Even without knowing all the gory and confidential details, however, and even without looking for a single root cause or smoking gun, we can usefully assess the •landscape•. And if we do, we see serious problems — ones that are alarming, but also ones we can address.4/

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

    Was it layoffs? Was it reckless vibe coding?Ask instead: what kind of industry / socioeconomic environment are we in right now that these things are so very likely to be among the causal factors?If orgs are chucking people out the door at the same time they’re rolling codebases they don’t really understand into production, what does that say about the management environment? The financial and political pressures at play?I was riffing on this yesterday:hachyderm.io/@inthehands/117615/

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

    A lot of the riffing happening on engineering social media right now can look like cynicism or gallows humor, perhaps, but I think it’s also something deeper and much more positive: it’s people in the trenches recognizing and resisting an environment that is dehumanizing and psychologically oppressive and broadly harmful.When @grimalkina talks about how we treat software creators as “brains in jars” (see her book The Psychology of Software Teams), she’s putting her finger on both psychological experiences •and• systemic forces:6/

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

    “Brains in jars” is how you get management leaping like kittens at laser pointers any time somebody promises a way to commoditize developers.“Brains in jars” is how you end up believing that you can ship mountains of code that reflect no careful thought and that nobody actually understands (vibe coded or otherwise).“Brains in jars” is how you get Microsoft conducting mass layoffs with no apparent managerial understanding of the cost of lost institutional knowledge and damaged relationships, or the concrete risks that creates.7/

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago (5 children)

    Mix “brains in jars” with a version of capitalism where extreme wealth inequality means that investors and not customers are the ones with the money and power, and mix that with anti-trust law being effectively nonexistent, and mix that with a right-wing lurch toward corruption, and…well, there you have our present moment.A few other things belong on that list, I’m sure. Point is, the •kind• of failures we’re seeing the last few days — particularly the slow and strangely confused recovery — are symptoms of large systemic forces.8/

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (4 children)

    So LLMs and layoffs aren’t the root cause, because there is no such thing as a “root cause” here. And maybe they don’t even turn out to be one of the proximate causes.But if they’re not causes, they’re comorbidities.9/

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago (3 children)

    I quipped yesterday:When termites are eating the whole structure, can you identify which single specific beam made it fall? •That• is the framing I’m advocating in this thread.10/

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago* (2 children)

    So I say yes, do complain about vibe coding, do complain about layoffs, point that finger, mock, cajole, crack those jokes, post those memes — not because everything would be better if only the vibe coding would just vanish, but because it’s a way of drawing attention to the termites in society’s structural wood.All the meming and gallows humor is good if it is part of recentering and refocusing on humans.Let’s build and do great things by being kind, by being humane, by never losing sight of the value of the humans who touch and make every part of these messy systems that are breaking so badly right now.11/

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    P.S. Apologies to termites, they are cool creatures, this is not an anti-termite account, these pernicious societal forces are way worse than termites; the metaphor works only inasmuch as you don’t want termites eating your home.

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