As much as I pretend to be one, I’m not really a fighter. I think this war may not need me to be one. The time to respond has already begun, and while front-line protests aren’t my strong suit, supporting protestors in my community is the place for me right now. If a greater conflict escalates, I’m probably not like doing the active fighting, but I can sure as shit help with supply lines as well as helping people who need to recover in the backlines. If I ever need to be in a fight I intend to be prepared, but there’s a lot more to do in a war than fight. And by the time anything like that would happen, I hope to have a resilient community around me who can support each other through hell. The fight’s already begun to an extent, and it’s important to remember that our best place may be “back-of-house” so to speak.

While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply. On the one hand, yes you can tell people their ideas do not gel with the vision of the project, and sometimes that’s the right call. And sometimes doing this a lot is best for the project.

On the other hand, even if a majority of the work is coming from one person, not only does your community learn your project, they also spend time contributing to it, fixing bugs, and helping other people. I feel it’s only to a project’s benefit to honor them and take difficult suggestions seriously, and get to the root of why those suggestions are coming up. Otherwise you risk pissing off your contributors, who I feel have the right to be annoyed at you and maybe post evangelion themed vent blog posts if you consistently shut down contributors’ needs and fail to adapt to what your users actually want out of your software. And forking, while freeing and playing to the idea of freedom of choice, also splits your userbase and contributors and makes both parties worse off. It really depends on the project, but it pays to maintain buy-in and trust from people who care enough to meaningfully contribute to your project.

I used Copilot for a while (in a Rust codebase fwiw) and it was… both useful and not for me? Its best suggestions came with some of the short-but-tedious completions like path().unwrap().to_str().into() etc. Those in and of themselves could be hit-or-miss, but useful often enough that I might as well take the suggestion and then see if it compiles.

Anything longer than that was OK sometimes, but often it’d be suggesting code for an older version of a particular API, or just trying to write a little algorithm for something I didn’t want to do in the first place. It was still correct often enough when filling out particular structures to be technically useful, but leaning on it more I noticed that my code was starting to bloat with things I really should have pulled off into another function instead of autocompleting a particular structure every time. And that’s on me, but I stopped using copilot because it just got too easy for me to write repetitive code but with like a 25% chance of needing to correct something in the suggestion, which is an interrupt my ADHD ass doesn’t need.

So whether it’s helpful for you is probably down to how you work/think/write code. I’m interested to see how it improves, but right now it’s too much of a nuisance for me to justify.

I see that Simulation Swarm tho 🥹

GILAAA! GILAAA! GILAAA! WOOOOOO

I love how divergent those two popular interpretations of AI are, too. One is all Skynet and scary and all-powerful and the other is being refactored for the umpteenth time because navmeshes broke and all the enemies are T-pose floating 10cm in the air.