I’d be interested to know where you draw the line of code ownership. Arguably FOSS is the place where projects are most likely to become a Ship of Theseus.
From my perspective AI slop is pretty unusable as it comes out, but can be an approximate starting point. It seems generous to call an LLM a coauthor, I’d be more likely to have a long list of Stack Overflow commenters as coauthors first.
For the reasons you are stating the snapshot is actually a boon. More than I’d like to admit I’ve had to write something that has been done so many times before with some slight structural differences. And of course there isn’t a library flexible enough nor enough time to write that library. Instead of just busywork mindlessly writing something that should just exist already. You can just slop it out quickly then spend the time it would have taken to write that, to refine it into something maintainable with all the new changes that are actually interesting and useful improvements. I see it as raising the bar of starting point.
That said, I just license my own stuff as MIT because I want to raise the bar for everyone, though I know it’s likely the AI companies haven’t respected the wishes of those who don’t do/want that.
In a way I understand him, the culture is too one sided in its values. There isn’t a balance or a good middle ground. If you appreciate irony, it’s too optimised for “features”. For which I generally agree. So the people upholding these values are too lazy to find the balance.
As an aside, every Dev I know would love to endlessly iterate and improve a single thing. So I understand finding that balance isn’t easy either.
Unless it’s Teams apparently, that’s the last Electron app I want to install.
How is that mindset lazy? Unhappy customers also have a cost! At my last job the customer just always bought hardware specifically for the software as a matter of process, partly because the price of the hardware compared to the price of the software was negligible. You literally couldn’t make a customer care.
Oops, forgot the AI step
Optomisation often has a cost, weather it’s code complexity, maintenance or even just salary. So it has to be worth it, and there are many areas where it isn’t enough unfortunately.
Part of that problem is developers are drawn to Shiny too. So things people may want, start working in a random distro first. Then when you are comparing these features people want to Windows, it’s often a catch up game.
But I think the framing the whole thing even to just the comparing the lagging features of a stable and usable distro to well… Windows is still a pretty good light.
Well have to accept that “Linux can’t X” and keep all the (um actually) caveats hush until it just works. Then hopefully with enough traction and resources that time gap will shorten.
If you feel like you need to reinstall Windows anyway, Trying out Linux is a pretty low bar if you’re curious. In that situation I think everything Linus did seems plausible.
You framed is as a non ideal philosophy. But acknowledging the things slowing down breaks and taking the time to make a calculated step so things don’t break anyway when updating can be appealing. I see it as a slightly faster stable. Inefficient maybe, but that’s just a difference in values. In practice it sounds like this hasn’t worked for some, guess I’ve been lucky. There maybe be other distros that do this better now, I couldn’t tell you, but from a, comparing philosophical differences point of view, Manjaro seems like an option.