> It is abundantly clear that the LLMs are here to stay, that typing every single line by hand is no longer sustainable, and that the scales have shifted profoundly.
I disagree.
Ultimately via LLMs you become dependent on those who control LLMs. Not everyone wants that dependency.
And there is value for knowledge to be had regardless of LLMs as well. I agree that LLMs shifted the situation a lot in their favour, but I don't think AI skynet has won yet. You can find many people who really dislike LLM and are motivated to not get assimilated by the AI slop.
> What made me depressed was just how little care there was about the Ruby ecosystem and community, and the disdain with which David flushed the entire Rails and Ruby culture down the drain for the sake of “running it on a single Raspberry Pi”, as he put it.
That is true. It was clear when Hiroshi Shibata nuked all prior developers from rubygems.org. They built https://gem.coop/ in response - I am not sure how much momentum the latter has (remember that ruby right now is in-fighting more than gaining grounds, you can also see that on TIOBE, as bad as TIOBE is), but time will show.
This is not all DHH's fault only, though; neither only of Shopify. There are clearly people who never thought about the issue of money tainting an ecosystem, but it became more apparant the moment money became scarce suddenly. Why does a community need money, anyway? I am not paid by any of these companies. I don't want to, either. I want them to stop tainting the ecosystem via money and blackmail. Sadly shopify already tried so, and I think it is time to expel shopify from the ruby ecosystem as counter move. Unfortunately this alone won't really fix things; a lot of damage resulted from this. It'll take quite a while to recover from this.
> The “Roaring Twenties” of Weimar Germany also produced an incredible number of great, whimsical, fascinating artistic movements.
Ok he omits a lot here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic
Weimar lasted from 1918 to 1933. 1933 was when the Nazis already took over effectively in power. See Trump's ICE idiots trying something similar but failing hard (other than, of course, shooting down US citizens willy-nilly style - no civilized democracy would tolerate Sturmtruppen kill citizens like that, remember the ICE guy who stepped before the car, to have a casus belli to shoot; the other ICE guys stood next to the car. This is a 100% dead give-away of intention to kill someone).
So what did he omit? Well, the Nazis operate via psychology too, and people could feel a financial backlash and depression, in part due to reparation and other financial contributions they had to do, in part due to poor planning and execution of the government. The Nazis made everything worse, but they lied to the people about it, e. g. "we built roads like nobody did before", and many more propaganda shows. You can all read it up how they operated systematically via lies. I mean, the "Brausebad" disguise as gas chamber alone is a dead-give away. But people are easy to fool. So, no, the Weimar republic was not all that great. If it would have worked better than the Nazis would not have had a real chance. (They organised their coup well though: Night of Broken Glass in 1938 required those ~5 years or more. The time before 1938 is actually MUCH more interesting if you think about it. Hitler in 1938 already committed to war and eventual failure, but the main turning point came a few months before Stalingrad was cut off by the russian army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad - the loss came in 1943, but IMO the battle there on the whole front was already lost in late 1942. Stalingrad was just more the obvious defeat, but the defeat came mostly due to logistics issues.)