It appears to be regional. That’s the chiefly US pronunciation. Ext-raw-dinary is UK.

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Noted - evangelising and complaining are equally off-topic.

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My gut reaction is that I’m worried about seeing more and more low-effort and generative AI-centric content flooding the zone.

Yes, and I was similarly knee-jerk tempted to read this change as a loud contingent’s success in painting themselves as victims, but instead: (1) this is a compromise to keep enough people happy enough, as many moderation decisions are, and (2) on the flip side this may indicate to more people, who may have previously been filtering the vibecoding tag, that they should use the “spam” flag for submissions they view as “slop”. Time will certainly tell if this change steers this site closer or further from being just another tech link aggregator.

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Thing is, computer users have mechanisation already. We clearly just don’t know how to use it effectively yet. (The dismal efficiency:inefficacy ratio of the latest thing is further evidence.) Imagine yourself with the same amount of hindsight on now as we have on the printing press or loom, and tell me with a straight face the notable part is LLMs and not simply computers themselves. Buck Rogers’ history books will say, “In the early 2020s, the sixth or so attempt at AI served as a stark reminder to software practitioners just how immature their field really was”, and the next sentence will be about something else. Our pioneers are still alive is how new software development is compared to any other human endeavour. This isn’t the biggest upset so far or yet by a mile.

The dichotomy of end product vs process is bizarre. Sometimes, the end product is the process.

Indeed. I’ll go so far as to say the end product and the process are inextricably linked. It matters how a thing came into being. By-products don’t just vanish when you’re not looking at them. Which is why (tangent ahead!) the “means to an end” or equivalently “why can’t we just talk about the fun toy and not its effects on the world” view is so… childish to me - fully-fledged people have a responsibility to evaluate their actions in the context of their consequences. Just going, “yada yada externalities, can we gush about how convenient this is?” is some Farquaad “some of you are going to die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”.

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“Getting things done”, when contrasted with “love of the craft”, is actually more like “means to an end”, and as is standard with consumerism it turns out a lot of people aren’t bothered what the means actually are, or their wider effects, nearly as much as just having the thing in the end.

It’s definitely more of a spectrum; in between “just for the love of the craft” and “I don’t care just get me the thing” is a whole lot of “the end result is just another part of the process, and the process is what we need to do to feel fulfilled and satisfy our sense of purpose.”

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Super cool to peel open a 45-year-old doodad and pinpoint exactly where they keep the magic smoke.

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FWIW I’d never heard of this project before but found this super interesting and read through a good chunk of the backlog. I particularly enjoyed the random ports. Please share future updates to lobste.rs!

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Current-day models seem to have solved the “regression to piss-yellow ghibli” problem.

I know. Not the point. Substitute whatever uninspired “style” the things spit out at the time. Your competition is only computers if you completely lack thought.

I’ve been rather badly made fun of in an offline community […]

Being made fun of is awful, but why would the lesson there be “these people don’t respect me, they must surely have the correct opinion” and not “these people don’t respect me, time to find better ones?” There are as many people who celebrate effort and passion as there are consumers who only care about the end product.

but isn’t the entire point that nobody needs to teach or learn anymore?

I get the feeling you’re being told certain things by people with a vested interest and then simply believing them without stopping to critically assess this new information in the context of your own judgment and worldview. Stop that! Clearly my analogy wasn’t good enough vis-a-vis pressing a button and have the machine do all the “thinking”, but I opened my laptop to work on my project (thought-coded, of course, and I’m still fucking doing it despite all the money being thrown into trying to tell me it’s pointless, because I know there are people who care about more than just money), so you’re going to have to settle for these assertions instead.

Also like, we need to teach and learn and think and be challenged. It’s fundamental to our health, like exercise. A future where we have been successfully convinced we do not need to learn would certainly be a Brave New World.™

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Who gives a fuck that I can make a game when you can get Unity Spark or Google Playground to shit one out with no effort?

Unless you were planning on exclusively making piss-stained temu Ghibli videogames, I don’t think this is any competition, and I think all the game developers who are still making things would agree. (I still find it somewhat morbidly amusing to think back to the time people saw the Lovecraftian Will Smith eating spaghetti and clearly thought, “wow! I bet this can do my job better than me!”)

Sitting down and pixelling a pixelart work now only gets you ridiculed, as does writing programs.

Who is ridiculing you? Nobody here, that’s for sure. Are you still on twitter for some reason? Maybe you need to tend to your garden of online social spaces.

the years I spent teaching CS are now a source of deep shame and guilt

I’ve been thinking about the CNC machining analogy since it came up (again) the other day, so I’ll belabour it further here. So here’s the thing. CAM programs can figure out for you the most efficient way to program a certain type of cut into a certain type of material. But that won’t teach you anything. Nothing will better get you to actually understand what you’re doing, physically, how the material actually cuts, how blunt the tool is, all the actual stuff involved – than rocking up to a manual machine, grabbing the handwheels, and feeling how the machine responds, snapping six endmills, smelling the coolant, tweezing the chips out of your skin… so no, I don’t see how teaching CS could have been a waste of time. Unless everything I learnt $several years ago that wasn’t grabbing me by the jowls and screaming in my face, “this will help you in your future job in this precise way” was also a waste of time, which would be news to me.

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I deleted an approx. 25-year-old accumulated pile of code, (bad) art and short fiction, precisely because I was well aware that there was no longer any point. There is nothing I can do that will ever have any value to anyone anymore in an AI world.

This just hurts to read dude. I know all too well how hard it is to change a mind steeped in depression, but even if nothing else, all that code and art, all that passion and effort, had value precisely because it was made by someone. A computer will never make art or anything of any kind of value except monetary. It simply does not possess the will to do so. AI cannot replace you.

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Not passing comment on the analogy (unless…?) but the categories of machining work it makes sense to be CNC-only are not that broad. It’s just that there’s a lot of times you’d want 50-10,000 identical widgets. There’s always going to be a reason to pick up a file – and often that’s the best way to get the highest quality work. :)

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It’s an attempt to get people to focus on the disease, and not the particular symptom du jour.

When the symptom is the focus of the author’s consultancy I fear this piece may not be as anti-capitalist as you interpret. If the post is indeed about focusing on capitalism as a whole, if anything it reads more like an attempt to shift focus away from the thing people can potentially make a difference on right now.

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This post is basically “it’s always been this way” four times in a row, as if that means we’re not allowed to complain. As if everyone was happy with the state of software, or the world, beforehand. As if highlighting problems afresh is a reasonable excuse to accelerate them. At what point is this kind of post just capitalist propaganda?

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That⸻is a list.

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with no exceptions, my solution that had been found with the help of AI was not welcome

I don’t actually think that’s the case. This policy focuses on generated contributions more than anything else. If you read a generated description of the bug and its fix, then implement it and write the PR yourself, that isn’t explicitly banned. I don’t think that’s a shortcoming of the policy considering what I think is their primary focus:

We value contributions that are genuinely understood, created, and communicated by humans.

The overall message I get is: don’t use LLMs to substitute your own personal development (and definitely don’t use them to substitute actual communication).

I think the end of this paragraph is most relevant to this situation (emphasis mine):

If you are a new contributor, do not use LLM or AI tools to contribute at all; you do not have the trust or experience to take responsibility for what is generated. If you are someone who is familiar to the maintainers, and know that they already trust you to make high quality contributions, your contribution must still genuinely be understood and created personally by you, regardless of what tools you may use to assist you.

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