4 ms·

I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it This quote from the post resonated with me: > I want to get work done and it doesn't want me t

by DrammBA 5mo ago

I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it This quote from the post resonated with me: > I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software. The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?

lpcvoid 5mo ago
[flagged]
- ben_w 5mo ago
  Deeper than that, but likely also that. CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
  - jcgrillo 5mo ago
    When did every company become a feature factory? Was tech ever not like this, or is it just how it works? It seems like they all end up this way, and it's really dumb.
    - ben_w 5mo ago
      Software always was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law Hardware, I don't know. Possibly always was too, I think even non-tech hardware was pushing more features as an excuse for shorter product lives back around the Great Depression, give or take a decade.
- weiliddat 5mo ago
  I think it's more people are checked out (and AI is one part of it yes), made worse by orgs who don't know how to lead/manage/change effectively. FWIW, some people used to (or still do) say similar things that software is significantly worse because people use "unserious" languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. It brought about so much cool shit that I don't think it's worth saying we should've stuck with only C and Java.
  - nomel 5mo ago
    I don't know if it's just because I was young and bright eyed, but it seems like the "passionate nerd" is somewhat absent in modern tech orgs. Seems like, starting around 6 years ago, none of the new hires seem to give a fuck about anything anymore. That's definitely great for work life balance, and I don't think any less of them for that, but passion seems to be gone. I would be doing what I do for work if I was employed or not. That's how everyone I used to work with was. Now everyone seems to do the minimal, with the goal being more to direct blame than solving neat problems.
    - weiliddat 5mo ago
      I'm still optimistic. I think the number hasn't gone down, just the ratio. Software still offers a relatively well paid and comfortable career, so you naturally get people who just want to do a good job and that's it. Nothing wrong with that. Used to be nerds hanging out on IRC, distributing Slackware, hacking trialware, modding games, etc. that had the passion and problem solving determination to do software work, which used to be harder due to lack of access to information. OTOH what a great time for a budding engineer. I'm in my mid 30s, and no longer have the same stamina and passion as in my teenage/20s, but in the last 5 years I've learnt so many things I could not have done so back in the day. I learnt and experimented way more around random topics like compilers, OS, electronics, databases because of ease of access to information, AI (:shrug:), even though I have way less free time.
  - rplnt 5mo ago
    Github is going around boasting how many PRs they generate a day with Copilot with very limited human input. Whether that's true or not, it might have effect.
- yuvadam 5mo ago
  AI slop is downstream of enshittification
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- madamelic 5mo ago
  I disagree. Microsoft had been doing just fine at making completely awful and broken products before AI coding was a thing.
  - miyoji 5mo ago
    Yes, exactly. AI isn't some magic dust that you can sprinkle into your workforce and get more productivity and better results. It is at best a force amplifier for what you already have. If you're making awful and broken products, you will make even more awful and even more broken products at a higher rate than before. It's not a coincidence that every impressive result done using AI has come from someone with a track record of impressive results before AI. AI isn't magic. It doesn't make you good at stuff you're bad at.
  - bombcar 5mo ago
    Microsoft had a very specific niche of making completely awful software that wasn't actually broken - in fact, that was often the infuriating thing. If it just shat the bed completely, you'd have an easy argument to replace it with something else; instead, it would be technically competent (Hi, Raymond!) but covered in stuff that made it infuriating to use (Hi, Redmond!), especially if you didn't live in it day in and day out.
  - bmitc 5mo ago
    The .NET team is a counter example, aside from the GUI situation.
  - 6031769 5mo ago
    Homer: There's three ways to do things: the right way, the Microsoft way and the AI slop way. Bart: Isn't that the Microsoft way? Homer: Yes, but faster!
- bombcar 5mo ago
  It's slop from both sides, they're pretty obviously slopping their move to Azure, and at the same time being slammed with a Cambrian explosion of slop repositories. Too bad it's not reminiscent of the Hotmail purchase where they tried to move off the BSD servers and ended up with new accounts on the relatively unreliable Windows-based setup, and old accounts routed to the original BSDs.
- storus 5mo ago
  Managers now try to "extract value" quickly, leaving ruins behind them and not caring about the future as the immediate payouts allow them to stick to the "F*k you, I got mine!" paradigm.
OtomotO 5mo ago
(Needless) complexity is going on. KISS and you sleep better. That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: "It's done" without reinventing everything every couple of years (trends again) Sounds too easy? It is of course simplified, but the core still holds true. GitHub just worked, but they had to migrate to React because "that's what everyone else uses"... Pure Enshittification.
- stabbles 5mo ago
  After yesterday's outage they admitted that their elasticsearch index for issues/prs lost data. They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index. I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two. As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.
  - jrochkind1 5mo ago
    Yeah, I have been noticing weird things with Issues and PRs, including outdated state, for months now. When the outage happened yesterday I sort of figured it was something I had been noticing building up or something.
- SoKamil 5mo ago
  What? React has nothing to do with current state of affairs. In fact, React on GitHub currently exists in mere islands, i.e. in Projects and recently in Pull Requests. Most of the frontend is still Web Components[1] paired with Turbo[2] for hot reloading. GitHub is still as slow even with JavaScript disabled, try it yourself. Backend just serves stuff really slow. In fact, there is an alternative GitHub frontend (no affiliation) that feels snappier and is written in React.[3] With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure. [1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/how-we-use-web-components-at-github/ https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho... [2] see html source for tags [3] https://my.githero.app/ https://my.githero.app/ [4] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/ https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
realo 5mo ago
Microsoft, Greed, Outsourcing to low-cost-countries who couldn't care less and rotate entire dev teams on you every few months or so, etc... No AI needed at all. Only humans.
- rvz 5mo ago
  The harsh reality, but now it is humans using AI agents which is why we cannot have nice things.
- osigurdson 5mo ago
  I suspect it isn't even really "greed". It is just the slow mold growth of an org chart optimizing comfort for itself instead of value for customers. Generally, startups / founders are the only anti-bodies against this type of behavior.
  - a1o 5mo ago
    I think org chart the impact is how the individual person can advance their career while doing good work. If they only get rewarded for new things, service and maintenance suffers.
  - bavell 5mo ago
    What a weird time for our industry. On one hand, small teams have never been able to move faster than right now. On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing. Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness. Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?
    - pocksuppet 5mo ago
      This is not just the tech industry. It's easier than ever to make your own furniture. IKEA is bigger than ever. It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever. It's easier than ever to 3D-print tractor parts. John Deere is bigger than ever. It's easier than ever to switch to solar power. The petroleum industry is bigger than ever. One person reverse-engineered Coca Cola, made an exact taste-alike and published the formula. You can make some at home. Coca Cola is bigger than ever. Something fundamental is wrong with the economy.
frevib 5mo ago
Enshittification has become the winning strategy for companies. If you don’t enshittify you will lose.
- BizarroLand 5mo ago
  This is my darkly optimistic take on enshittification: Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did. They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process. It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.
  - frevib 5mo ago
    > It's not "enshittify or lose" I think it’s “find natural monopoly and reduce costs (aka enshittify)”. Github is a natural monopoly and users cannot go anywhere. Unless you’re famous like Mitchell Hashimoto.
    - ahartmetz 5mo ago
      Depends on how strong a moat really is, but it can be "enshittify and lose", too. Enlightened (as opposed to short-term) self-interest may pay off after two years or twenty, depending, and in the latter case, it may as well not pay off at all as far as a public company are concerned.
      - frevib 5mo ago
        I think Microsoft’s home game is “monopolize and enshittify”. They are the masters and know the exactly what amount of enshittification is too much. E.g. Hashimoto quitting GH is probably totally worth the 10 SREs they fired. Us plebs cannot go anywhere.
ngruhn 5mo ago
It's move fast and break things.
- butterlesstoast 5mo ago
  I can't help but think it's a bit more complicated than that. GitHub back in the day was a healthy version of "Move fast and break things". I wonder what's different.
  - weavie 5mo ago
    The idea was, move fast and break things - but then pick them up and fix them. Companies realised they didn't really have to fix them properly as the users still stuck around.
Induane 5mo ago
Way overcomplicating design is one challenge that keeps getting worse. Another gigantic unspoken issue is that people have started building tons of stuff with React on purpose for some reason.
- pc86 5mo ago
  This is surprising to me, I would have bet money that all the people who actively engage in this type of language/framework war discourse were all drawing Social Security by now.
  - 12_throw_away 5mo ago
    There's a big difference between a war between two somewhat equivalent things that make different choices (editor wars, language wars, etc.) vs pointing out that certain things are really fundamentally ... not good. IMO we all need to be much louder and clearer about how bad things are, and how much better they could be. This is, in fact, on topic: github actions seemed to me like a bad idea from the start, to me, but I let my co-workers and "network effects" convince me that I was being grumpy and that it was fine, and so we've adopted it. And now ... here we are. It was exactly as bad I thought it was, and it reflected a broken engineering culture.
    - DangitBobby 5mo ago
      That's what I've been saying this whole time! My hatred of Vim isn't a preference, vim is just fundamentally "not good"! Finally an intellectual.
    - pc86 5mo ago
      It is certainly possible that you are brilliant and your co-workers and the industry writ large are all morons. That you were right all along, and chickens roosting and all that, though it seems at least equally as likely that this is not the case.
      - 12_throw_away 5mo ago
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
palata 5mo ago
> I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it I think the "ridiculously dramatic" part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration. And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I'm not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.
- nicr_22 5mo ago
  The difference here is _creative_ work vs consumption. Craftspeople like Mitchell feel passionately about the tools they rely on to build. Github has also been a social place for builders. I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...
  - palata 5mo ago
    Again, I am not criticising the feeling. It's okay to feel the way we feel. I am just saying that when Mitchell mentioned it being "ridiculously dramatic", I think he was not talking about the frustration but rather about the fact that he cried about leaving GitHub. It's okay to feel sad about something and to also feel that it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about it. Thanks for the downvotes though.
munificent 5mo ago
> it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc. My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that's left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.
- bombcar 5mo ago
  And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. We can't really change the tide lest we be King Cnut - but we can at least take the time and effort in the things we do to fight against entropy - bring more order and durability into our lives. Or perhaps another adaptation: God, grant me the serenity to accept the enshittification I cannot change the courage to improve the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
  - mmooss 5mo ago
    We can; the tide changed to where it is now and can change again - and somebody will change it. People need to stop bemoaning it, and think and do something. The enshittification is an idiotic, failing, extremely short-sighted strategy. It's a huge opportunity - your competition has stopped investing in its product, fired its talent, treats its customers with utter contempt, and is managed by imbeciles. Who is a better target for disruption? Hire the talent, market your quality, treat your customers with respect, point out the BS your competition does every time they do it. Stop staring at your navel.
    - bombcar 5mo ago
      That's the whole point - it's too easy to sit around on HN and bitch about enshittification - which just is enshittification! We each have to work on our areas of quality - and when everyone starts doing that, the world changes.
psychoslave 5mo ago
>The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on? Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite. Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say. Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.
- DrammBA 5mo ago
  > Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? I take it you're agreeing with the sentiment since you had to go back 40-50 years to make your point.
  - psychoslave 5mo ago
    Yes somehow, in a the sense that there are always things that we can observe as annoying when the representation of a situation where these issues are not present is easy to fantasize. But making actually disappear these annoyances is the hard part, plus the new situation have great chances to be bound to different annoyances that phantasms didn't anticipate. So the NP hard problem is being critique of our anticipations to try to avoid paths to bigger troubles, and keep steady effort on waking the path all while also paying attention to current sensory feedbacks of the situation on the road.

by DrammBA 5mo ago

lpcvoid 5mo ago

[flagged]

ben_w 5mo ago
Deeper than that, but likely also that. CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
- jcgrillo 5mo ago
  When did every company become a feature factory? Was tech ever not like this, or is it just how it works? It seems like they all end up this way, and it's really dumb.
  - ben_w 5mo ago
    Software always was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law Hardware, I don't know. Possibly always was too, I think even non-tech hardware was pushing more features as an excuse for shorter product lives back around the Great Depression, give or take a decade.
weiliddat 5mo ago
I think it's more people are checked out (and AI is one part of it yes), made worse by orgs who don't know how to lead/manage/change effectively. FWIW, some people used to (or still do) say similar things that software is significantly worse because people use "unserious" languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. It brought about so much cool shit that I don't think it's worth saying we should've stuck with only C and Java.
- nomel 5mo ago
  I don't know if it's just because I was young and bright eyed, but it seems like the "passionate nerd" is somewhat absent in modern tech orgs. Seems like, starting around 6 years ago, none of the new hires seem to give a fuck about anything anymore. That's definitely great for work life balance, and I don't think any less of them for that, but passion seems to be gone. I would be doing what I do for work if I was employed or not. That's how everyone I used to work with was. Now everyone seems to do the minimal, with the goal being more to direct blame than solving neat problems.
  - weiliddat 5mo ago
    I'm still optimistic. I think the number hasn't gone down, just the ratio. Software still offers a relatively well paid and comfortable career, so you naturally get people who just want to do a good job and that's it. Nothing wrong with that. Used to be nerds hanging out on IRC, distributing Slackware, hacking trialware, modding games, etc. that had the passion and problem solving determination to do software work, which used to be harder due to lack of access to information. OTOH what a great time for a budding engineer. I'm in my mid 30s, and no longer have the same stamina and passion as in my teenage/20s, but in the last 5 years I've learnt so many things I could not have done so back in the day. I learnt and experimented way more around random topics like compilers, OS, electronics, databases because of ease of access to information, AI (:shrug:), even though I have way less free time.
- rplnt 5mo ago
  Github is going around boasting how many PRs they generate a day with Copilot with very limited human input. Whether that's true or not, it might have effect.
yuvadam 5mo ago
AI slop is downstream of enshittification
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
madamelic 5mo ago
I disagree. Microsoft had been doing just fine at making completely awful and broken products before AI coding was a thing.
- miyoji 5mo ago
  Yes, exactly. AI isn't some magic dust that you can sprinkle into your workforce and get more productivity and better results. It is at best a force amplifier for what you already have. If you're making awful and broken products, you will make even more awful and even more broken products at a higher rate than before. It's not a coincidence that every impressive result done using AI has come from someone with a track record of impressive results before AI. AI isn't magic. It doesn't make you good at stuff you're bad at.
- bombcar 5mo ago
  Microsoft had a very specific niche of making completely awful software that wasn't actually broken - in fact, that was often the infuriating thing. If it just shat the bed completely, you'd have an easy argument to replace it with something else; instead, it would be technically competent (Hi, Raymond!) but covered in stuff that made it infuriating to use (Hi, Redmond!), especially if you didn't live in it day in and day out.
- bmitc 5mo ago
  The .NET team is a counter example, aside from the GUI situation.
- 6031769 5mo ago
  Homer: There's three ways to do things: the right way, the Microsoft way and the AI slop way. Bart: Isn't that the Microsoft way? Homer: Yes, but faster!
bombcar 5mo ago
It's slop from both sides, they're pretty obviously slopping their move to Azure, and at the same time being slammed with a Cambrian explosion of slop repositories. Too bad it's not reminiscent of the Hotmail purchase where they tried to move off the BSD servers and ended up with new accounts on the relatively unreliable Windows-based setup, and old accounts routed to the original BSDs.
storus 5mo ago
Managers now try to "extract value" quickly, leaving ruins behind them and not caring about the future as the immediate payouts allow them to stick to the "F*k you, I got mine!" paradigm.

OtomotO 5mo ago

(Needless) complexity is going on. KISS and you sleep better. That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: "It's done" without reinventing everything every couple of years (trends again) Sounds too easy? It is of course simplified, but the core still holds true. GitHub just worked, but they had to migrate to React because "that's what everyone else uses"... Pure Enshittification.

stabbles 5mo ago
After yesterday's outage they admitted that their elasticsearch index for issues/prs lost data. They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index. I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two. As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.
- jrochkind1 5mo ago
  Yeah, I have been noticing weird things with Issues and PRs, including outdated state, for months now. When the outage happened yesterday I sort of figured it was something I had been noticing building up or something.
SoKamil 5mo ago
What? React has nothing to do with current state of affairs. In fact, React on GitHub currently exists in mere islands, i.e. in Projects and recently in Pull Requests. Most of the frontend is still Web Components[1] paired with Turbo[2] for hot reloading. GitHub is still as slow even with JavaScript disabled, try it yourself. Backend just serves stuff really slow. In fact, there is an alternative GitHub frontend (no affiliation) that feels snappier and is written in React.[3] With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure. [1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/how-we-use-web-components-at-github/ https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho... [2] see html source for tags [3] https://my.githero.app/ https://my.githero.app/ [4] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/ https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

realo 5mo ago

Microsoft, Greed, Outsourcing to low-cost-countries who couldn't care less and rotate entire dev teams on you every few months or so, etc... No AI needed at all. Only humans.

rvz 5mo ago
The harsh reality, but now it is humans using AI agents which is why we cannot have nice things.
osigurdson 5mo ago
I suspect it isn't even really "greed". It is just the slow mold growth of an org chart optimizing comfort for itself instead of value for customers. Generally, startups / founders are the only anti-bodies against this type of behavior.
- a1o 5mo ago
  I think org chart the impact is how the individual person can advance their career while doing good work. If they only get rewarded for new things, service and maintenance suffers.
- bavell 5mo ago
  What a weird time for our industry. On one hand, small teams have never been able to move faster than right now. On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing. Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness. Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?
  - pocksuppet 5mo ago
    This is not just the tech industry. It's easier than ever to make your own furniture. IKEA is bigger than ever. It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever. It's easier than ever to 3D-print tractor parts. John Deere is bigger than ever. It's easier than ever to switch to solar power. The petroleum industry is bigger than ever. One person reverse-engineered Coca Cola, made an exact taste-alike and published the formula. You can make some at home. Coca Cola is bigger than ever. Something fundamental is wrong with the economy.

frevib 5mo ago

Enshittification has become the winning strategy for companies. If you don’t enshittify you will lose.

BizarroLand 5mo ago
This is my darkly optimistic take on enshittification: Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did. They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process. It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.
- frevib 5mo ago
  > It's not "enshittify or lose" I think it’s “find natural monopoly and reduce costs (aka enshittify)”. Github is a natural monopoly and users cannot go anywhere. Unless you’re famous like Mitchell Hashimoto.
  - ahartmetz 5mo ago
    Depends on how strong a moat really is, but it can be "enshittify and lose", too. Enlightened (as opposed to short-term) self-interest may pay off after two years or twenty, depending, and in the latter case, it may as well not pay off at all as far as a public company are concerned.
    - frevib 5mo ago
      I think Microsoft’s home game is “monopolize and enshittify”. They are the masters and know the exactly what amount of enshittification is too much. E.g. Hashimoto quitting GH is probably totally worth the 10 SREs they fired. Us plebs cannot go anywhere.

ngruhn 5mo ago

It's move fast and break things.

butterlesstoast 5mo ago
I can't help but think it's a bit more complicated than that. GitHub back in the day was a healthy version of "Move fast and break things". I wonder what's different.
- weavie 5mo ago
  The idea was, move fast and break things - but then pick them up and fix them. Companies realised they didn't really have to fix them properly as the users still stuck around.

Induane 5mo ago

Way overcomplicating design is one challenge that keeps getting worse. Another gigantic unspoken issue is that people have started building tons of stuff with React on purpose for some reason.

pc86 5mo ago
This is surprising to me, I would have bet money that all the people who actively engage in this type of language/framework war discourse were all drawing Social Security by now.
- 12_throw_away 5mo ago
  There's a big difference between a war between two somewhat equivalent things that make different choices (editor wars, language wars, etc.) vs pointing out that certain things are really fundamentally ... not good. IMO we all need to be much louder and clearer about how bad things are, and how much better they could be. This is, in fact, on topic: github actions seemed to me like a bad idea from the start, to me, but I let my co-workers and "network effects" convince me that I was being grumpy and that it was fine, and so we've adopted it. And now ... here we are. It was exactly as bad I thought it was, and it reflected a broken engineering culture.
  - DangitBobby 5mo ago
    That's what I've been saying this whole time! My hatred of Vim isn't a preference, vim is just fundamentally "not good"! Finally an intellectual.
  - pc86 5mo ago
    It is certainly possible that you are brilliant and your co-workers and the industry writ large are all morons. That you were right all along, and chickens roosting and all that, though it seems at least equally as likely that this is not the case.
    - 12_throw_away 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

palata 5mo ago

> I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it I think the "ridiculously dramatic" part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration. And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I'm not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.

nicr_22 5mo ago
The difference here is _creative_ work vs consumption. Craftspeople like Mitchell feel passionately about the tools they rely on to build. Github has also been a social place for builders. I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...
- palata 5mo ago
  Again, I am not criticising the feeling. It's okay to feel the way we feel. I am just saying that when Mitchell mentioned it being "ridiculously dramatic", I think he was not talking about the frustration but rather about the fact that he cried about leaving GitHub. It's okay to feel sad about something and to also feel that it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about it. Thanks for the downvotes though.

munificent 5mo ago

> it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc. My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that's left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.

bombcar 5mo ago
And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. We can't really change the tide lest we be King Cnut - but we can at least take the time and effort in the things we do to fight against entropy - bring more order and durability into our lives. Or perhaps another adaptation: God, grant me the serenity to accept the enshittification I cannot change the courage to improve the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
- mmooss 5mo ago
  We can; the tide changed to where it is now and can change again - and somebody will change it. People need to stop bemoaning it, and think and do something. The enshittification is an idiotic, failing, extremely short-sighted strategy. It's a huge opportunity - your competition has stopped investing in its product, fired its talent, treats its customers with utter contempt, and is managed by imbeciles. Who is a better target for disruption? Hire the talent, market your quality, treat your customers with respect, point out the BS your competition does every time they do it. Stop staring at your navel.
  - bombcar 5mo ago
    That's the whole point - it's too easy to sit around on HN and bitch about enshittification - which just is enshittification! We each have to work on our areas of quality - and when everyone starts doing that, the world changes.

psychoslave 5mo ago

>The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on? Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite. Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say. Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.

DrammBA 5mo ago
> Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? I take it you're agreeing with the sentiment since you had to go back 40-50 years to make your point.
- psychoslave 5mo ago
  Yes somehow, in a the sense that there are always things that we can observe as annoying when the representation of a situation where these issues are not present is easy to fantasize. But making actually disappear these annoyances is the hard part, plus the new situation have great chances to be bound to different annoyances that phantasms didn't anticipate. So the NP hard problem is being critique of our anticipations to try to avoid paths to bigger troubles, and keep steady effort on waking the path all while also paying attention to current sensory feedbacks of the situation on the road.