Comment by saidinesh5
1 day ago
In the last couple of months people, with modern tech,
* Built really cool Photo, Video, Music editing/CAD software and released it for free
* Reverse engineered playstation 5 and started making more of our games playable on platforms we like
* Helped normal people remove adware, debloat their TVs and made them lot smoother.
These are just some of the fun use cases from people passionate about the topics I am interested in ... When i was younger, there were different passionate people making different cool things.. demoscene, geocities, reverse engineering software, making flash animations, running neural networks on microcontrollers etc... which was the modern tech back then.
Back then my parents didn't know what a filesystem was. Now my college aged nephews don't know what it is - even though they grew up in the smartphone age.
What I'm saying is ... I feel lot more optimistic about the "modern technology" now than back when i had to walk to a library and request a book about the topics I'm interested in and wait a week to get it ...
> Built really cool Photo, Video, Music editing/CAD software and released it for free
Built, really? From what I have seen, it is more like knockoffs, strictly worse than the original except that they are free, and unlike cracks, presumably legal.
I agree with the other two, though it is getting close to the cracking scene, which is certainly cool, but a bit different in sprit to what led to Linux and Wikipedia.
What we are seeing more of is "I had this specific need and I quickly vibecoded some software to do it". This is actually really cool, but it doesn't scale. These tools answer to the need of one person, they may break everywhere else but who cares, it does the job. But for a community project, it is not acceptable, everything has to work for everyone.
Software is not building a bridge; trying to peddle the effort as akin to 996 in a textile sweatshop is one of the cheesiest tropes of the IT industry
The amount of artisanal code slop expertly crafted by hand I have cleaned up suggests to me the human effort is just as big a mess; see all the unknown unknown security issues being spotted by LLMs