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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
For the past couple of years DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), best known as creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy Linux, has been accused of being a fascist, a supporter of genocide, etc. Usually on the basis of extremely minor things, like refusing to fire people for joking about certain foreign names sounding funny.
Well, he still hasn't come out as a supporter of fascism and genocide, but he has officially gone full chud by recommending Camp of the Saints after witnessing the chaos currently going on in France (DHH himself is Danish, but I can see why he'd see something like that in western Europe as striking close to home): https://x.com/dhh/status/2105982071747604545
Now I disagree with DHH on plenty of things (Ruby and languages without strong type systems generally are dogshit, change my mind). And DHH's opinions aren't really my focus here. But such a prominent voice in tech going openly in favor of remigration strikes me as a sign of a growing rift in the world of tech. We already saw the beginnings of this with all of the big tech CEOs that decided to back Trump in 2024 (Musk in particular).
The world of software development has traditionally been split into two main camps: open source borderline communist hippies, and mercenary enterprise software people. There's exceptions in both camps (Eric S. Raymond is a good example), and software devs as a whole often fall into gray tribe as opposed to red or blue. But there seems to be a seismic shift in this world, with new lines of allegiance being drawn daily. AI has been a big divider, with the borderline communist hippies in the open source world largely coming out against it, and the corporatist mercenary crowd in favor (at least if you listen to the loudest voices on either side).
Software/tech has been one of the biggest drivers of significant social, economic, and political changes for the last half century. AI seems poised to be the biggest change yet, and the more chud-aligned faction seems to be the biggest supporters. So my question is, do you see the same sort of shifts occuring? And where do you see these shifts leading to in culture, governance, etc.?
EDIT: Palmer Luckey was another tech guy known to be rightwing, but it appears he has gone full chud as well: https://x.com/PalmerLuckey/status/2106469826189574369
I recently watched a podcast episode in which DHH got to plug his new Omarchy Quattro. He seemed almost manic at times. I think there is a phenomenon online in which Grey Tribe people get harassed by leftist extremists to the point of becoming extremists themselves, of demonstratively placing themselves in the opposite camp. I worry that we are witnessing a similar downturn here as what happened with Jordan Peterson. DHH slowly descending into increasingly extreme and uninformed opinions as he removes himself from any position where he might otherwise agree with the mob. In the process doing less of what he is good at, to instead say stupid shit on podcasts.
I think for a long time, there has been growing frustration in the tech world with having to kowtow to any demand made by leftists, or risk losing your entire network. DHH gets a lot of slack from non-leftists because he is proof that you can be a highly successful engineer who still has his own opinions about the world. And he is trying to make a space for other programmers who are tired of this. But for this to work, he needs to keep doing what he is good at first and foremost, which is to actually create things.
Jordan Peterson could have been a voice for reason in the world of education and psychology, but instead turned into a podcaster. DHH has a similar choice to make: Will he continue being an actual counterweight to the woke culture in open source software? Or will he change into someone who makes his money from pandering to Chuds?
I think it's a little more than almost manic.
I have unlimited tokens. We can fix everything, we can do anything.
I'm increasingly believing that not having enough resources to fix the backlog is a really really happy accident. Now that we actually have a button to press that completes all the backlog tickets, we're seeing that pressing the button does more harm than good; that tripling the size of the codebase for a miniscule sliver of functionality that nobody uses is not worth it.
This one PR is way past premature optimization. The correct time to do this optimization is never. I'm the greatest hater of bloated software there is, I hate all that electron crap, I hate my ram being hoovered up by bs, I hate stuff loading slow. But the cpu cycles it takes to do an ascii animation in python is something nobody has ever complained about and nobody ever will. Heck I bet you could even run these animations on circuitpython on the smallest potato you could find and it would be fine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link