site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13205 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I realized, so many devs from all walks of life have completely ended their relationship with the text editor and now do literally everything through an agentic prompt.

Yeah, I am now at this point.

I am a very good programmer. I'm good enough that my time is kind of wasted programming. I now work as a tech lead/tech architect, with Claude as my worker(s); I describe what to do, Claude does it, and I rip apart its design and redesign it.

Which I do all the time, I do not vibecode unless it's something I don't really care about. It all gets reviewed.

I've just got better things to do than actually write the code.

I have no idea how the "training" part of this thing ends up working out; I'm good at this because I've done it, I don't know if I ever could become good at it with AI alone. On the other hand, I feel like this is similar to a lot of professions; how many digital artists end up not understanding precise brush usage? There are colors that literally cannot be expressed on a screen and we have an entire generation of artists who grew up never realizing that "violet" is a thing they can do, because they can't - how much of a problem is this?

Weird times, overall.

By the way this is something that happened in IT since the beginning. Programming evolved from Hardware level binary programming to assembler programming to structured programming to object oriented programming to todays Agentic AI programming. The same fear existed before - from programmers forgetting how to get most of the hardware, to bloatware memory hogs that loaded useless libraries to todays agentic AI which just moves it one step further.

I think it is inevitable, there will be some niche space for old school thinking, but it will resolve itself in time. For instance knowing some basic coding in Assembly from university is a good exercise and knowledge, but you will probably never use it outside of specific niches such as cybersecurity or firmware coding. Future good programmer will probably look quite differently from you now, but your skills would also be considered useless for programming Apollo 11 guidance system in 1969.

The same fear existed before - from programmers forgetting how to get most of the hardware, to bloatware memory hogs that loaded useless libraries

To be fair, these fears were 100% valid. The resources required by the average modern app are insane.

That's largely a casualty of Moore's law. There's no point in optimizing candy crush to run on the Apollo guidance computer when nobody is going to run it on hardware like that.

Nah, it's not just that. There's also a problem with what Casey Muratori has termed "pessimization", where careless devs don't do even the most basic things to make the computer not have to do the same work twice. It's especially embarrassing when the shittier way of doing it is harder to write than the non-pessimized way and retarded web dev monkeys do it anyways.

where careless devs don't do even the most basic things to make the computer not have to do the same work twice.

Exactly, because it's basically not worth it outside of actually high performance computing. Who's not going to use a product because it's 20% slower but otherwise better than competitors? Vim is way faster than Microsoft Word, but who cares?

It's especially embarrassing when the shittier way of doing it is harder to write than the non-pessimized way and retarded web dev monkeys do it anyways.

You'll have to provide some examples.

You'll have to provide some examples.

We had a project that gets some fields from the database. These fields were being cached in memory after retrieval because they literally only change once a year. The H1B code monkeys in Mumbai bypassed the cache and fetched them from the database every single time because they're retarded. They wrote a whole nother SQL query instead of just typing "SomeGloballyAvailableMemoryCache.Get("TheTaxFormFieldsThatGetUpdatedAnnually") or something like that.

Oh and they passed all these fields around in a stringly-typed DataTable instead of the strongly-typed object the cache would have given them. This is one of millions of examples, this shit happens daily in the software engineering world.

Did they intentionally bypass the cache, or did they not even know about it? It's not hard to believe that clueless programmers don't know that the value is in the cache.

The H1B code monkeys in Mumbai

Perhaps he's wondering why someone would sponsor a man for an H1B before employing him overseas.

Did they intentionally bypass the cache, or did they not even know about it?

No clue, when we asked them why they did it they didn't have any sort of coherent answer.

Perhaps he's wondering why someone would sponsor a man for an H1B before employing him overseas.

You're a big guy. And my mistake, I call them all H1B code monkeys even if they're still offshore employees.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats