11 comments

  • MBCook 1 hour ago
    I’d just like to thank the author for giving the correct t reason for the Winchester Mystery House instead of just blindly repeating the “she went crazy” line story as truth.
  • gorfian_robot 1 hour ago
    as an aside the lore about the "Winchester Mystery House" is all made up hogwash. here is one place where it is debunked:

    https://skepticalinquirer.org/2024/08/the-truth-about-sallie...

  • 7rirdnj 2 hours ago
    > Which is why maintainers feel like they’re drowning.

    How about actually funding opensource project mantainers? We have non profit orgs, that eat billions of public funds. We spend biilions for influencing hardly measurable metrics, with very nebulous benefits in far distant future.

    Direct sponsoring of critical projects would have far better and concrete benefits.

    • dpark 5 minutes ago
      We should fund them, sure, but that’s not enough.

      The problem is the cost is so wildly asymmetric. When everyone with a computer and a subscription can vibe code low quality features, when everyone can submit dubious security bug reports, no amount of funding will even that out. Producing submissions is essentially free while triaging and reviewing remains very expensive.

      3 years ago the cost was asymmetric in the other direction. The cost of writing code was high. The cost of finding security bugs was extremely high. The cost of triaging and reviewing was basically the same as it is today.

      Large corporations that are well funded are facing the exact same issues internally right now. With agent output so cheap, how do you deal with the deluge? It’s not practical or desirable to have your best engineers doing nothing but reviewing generated code, some of which is likely very low value.

    • jrm4 1 hour ago
      This plus accountability is the way; and what I think I mean here is "accountability for those who choose to USE (maybe not create) the software in a way that may be harmful."

      If you'd like to push that accountability to the developers, that can work, but they should be paid or otherwise compensated accordingly for the risk they take on.

  • jonah 28 minutes ago
    Too bad Winchester didn't become an architect.

    Julia Morgan, Winchester's contemporary, was the first woman to obtain an architecture license in California in 1904 and had a very prolific career throughout the state including her most famous - Hearst Castle - commissioned in 1919.

  • gerikson 2 hours ago
    The "cathedral" in ESR's essay wasn't proprietary closed source, it was the GNU project.
    • fulafel 2 hours ago
      Most of free software (incl the BSD stuff) was like that. The bazaar was an attempt to characterise the new linux style way of doing it.
      • TeMPOraL 1 hour ago
        Makes me realize that "Worse is Better" was, in today's terms, apologism for vibe-coding.
    • TZubiri 1 hour ago
      It wasnt one thing, gnu is a case of cathedrals. Corps are usually more cathedrally than bazaary because of their hierarchical top down structure, but ymmv, an elon musk or steve jobs company will be more cathedral than a conglomerate like unilever or a google or microsoft
  • The_Goonies1985 1 hour ago
    >"Sarah didn’t build her mansion to house ghosts, she built her mansion because she liked architecture."

    That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades. Specifically: Sarah Winchester built the house because she was told that the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester guns would haunt her unless her house was sufficiently labyrinthine, and endlessly expanding; to confuse them.

    Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.

    This is more akin to a programmer consciously obfuscating and expanding a codebase to make it impossible for their angry-users to ever finish auditing it, or to determine its author.

    • jcranmer 35 minutes ago
      > That quote from the article directly-contradicts what multiple tour-guides at the Winchester Mystery House in California have told me over many decades.

      The house is run by an organization that has a very vested interest in playing up the supernatural element of the house. Some tour guides have gone on record discussing their frustrations with having to repeat known falsehoods to guests.

      > Visit the house (the tour is rad) and see for yourself the architecture. There is no reasonable explanation for internal doors leading to sheer-drops, throughout the house, and other bizarre 'traps', apart from Sarah legitimately believing she had to confuse the ghosts.

      Parts of the house were damaged by the 1906 earthquake and were not rebuilt. A lot of the weird path-to-nowhere stuff is "the destination collapsed during the earthquake", nothing particularly mysterious there.

    • kbutler 38 minutes ago
      Refactoring w/o removing all dead code.
  • jFriedensreich 2 hours ago
    Does anyone know what “agent tea” is in the second graph? There is a paper about a protocol but it seems a bit obscure to be featured in this context and the other two points on the graph are models.
    • jffry 2 hours ago
      I think the graph is getting cut off for you - for me it reads "Agent Teams"
  • PaulDavisThe1st 25 minutes ago
    I'm pretty sure that I could consistently spew 1000 lines a day/per commit if it was mostly cut-n-pasting of existing code, that I had complete access to, with some minor variations.
  • DonHopkins 1 hour ago
    >Gary Tan’s personal AI committee gstack is a Winchester Mystery House constructed mostly from Markdown.

    Winchester Mystery Potemkin Village.

  • sitagosan 2 days ago
    The cathedral and bazaar simply isn't the magic this article treats it as. And ESR, a human molerat who publicly premeditates murder on his blog, certainly isn't either.