by KronisLV | 2025-11-11 14:16:37+00:00
> If I am eating a delicious meal but the people preparing it had a miserable time, or it was prepared entirely by robots controlled by nefarious people using the profits to harm society, I don’t want it.

Unfortunately I feel compelled to express the doomer take here, but I don't think most people care how their fast fashion or iPhones are made. And very few find it practically doable to boycott a company like Nestle. People trying to go full Stallman (sans the problematic stuff, rather along the lines of FSF) also find it just difficult.

Most people are just happy that the boot is on the other foot or someone else's back and that they have enough convenience and isolation from the rest of the world not to care. Or honestly it's hard to get by for them as well and all of those trinkets and unethically made products help them get through the day.

> Human society and civilization is for the benefit of humans, not for filling checkboxes above all else.

I really wish that was the case, instead of for the extraction of what little wealth we have by corpos and the oligarchs (call them whatever you want), to push us more towards a rat race of sorts where we get by just barely enough to keep consuming but not enough to effect meaningful change most of the time. Then again, could be better, could be worse - it's cool to see passionate people choosing to make something just for the sake of the experience and creating something unique, not always with a profit in mind.

In regards to software development in particular, I'm reminded of a few specific paragraphs in https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world. This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty. Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.

You don't really get that Good Code with AI that much, or at least I haven't felt that way looking at it. Then again, I could say that about most code written by other people, not sure what that means. Maybe I just have an odd taste in code that so little of it seems pleasant.