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cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:
I was rereading Wirth's "A Plea for Lean Software". As I was reading, this evocative quote from Ellen Ullman came to mind.[2]
"We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
Then I see people unleashing "petulant" "AI" on open source projects complete with a ranting blog post.[3][4]
It occurs to me that many of the practitioners of building computing systems want to skip the step of building anything on top of ruins and want to just go straight to laying ruins on top of ruins. Automating it so it is "efficient".
What a mess.
(Also, I assume github probably has the equivalent of sockpuppet accounts? Imagine defending the rights and feelings of a program used to harass an open source community.)
[1] https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210428114927/https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature%5F321/
[3] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132
[4] https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-two-hours-war-open-source-gatekeeping.html