alt Hacker News> Much has been said about the DHH keynote that he gave at RailsWorld.
First, it has to be said that Ruby on Rails is not Ruby, in that the two communities at best are overlapping, but in reality, they are separate communities. I never managed to get into rails; I bought two books and did not complete either one. Despite all the promo, I always found rails horribly boring. I also did not see the need for it. At that point ruby itself already handled all my web needs (I wrote quite a lot of stuff in PHP; my latest project called "web", originally "cyberweb" when I was still using rubygems.org, came from the things I used and learned back then in PHP), so I never really fully understood the hype train. It took me a while to realise that this is how DHH operates - he is a business man first and foremost, not a programmer. He tries to build up hype. That's largely how rails got successful in the first place, in 2006 or so, give or take. So when he now promotes AI and Rust, I have a deja vu - he is on the promo tour again. (Note: I am not saying there is zero value in rails. Evidently there is, but I am focusing here on the promo, and DHH is a business man, not a programmer.)
> To me, it was the voice of a person in an existential crisis, but also a very jaded one.
DHH is annoying, but I don't think he is in any existential crisis. Now I think he lost the plot after his hate-entry against wolves, and casually linking shooting down animals to hunting down immigrants here:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
And no, I am not interested in any right-wing nuts trying to sugar-coat this. Before I used ruby I studied countless books about strategies (strategems, in particular chinese one, from Senger in particular), many psychology books too (various influence-centric books, both with a positive connotation and a negative one, e. g. "how to win friends and influence people", as well as the six core aspects of manipulation and so forth) - so I am not interested in white-washing campaigns about DHH anymore. His dislike of wolves showed it too clearly: he switched sides and is now on the Big Tech Bros side. This was already made clear when shopify rampaged through the ruby ecosystem - see how numerous devs were expelled by the ruby core team (Hiroshi Shibata, who acted under command by someone else, we all know that; and the reason for that move, was due to financial influx into the ruby ecosystem, which brings us back to shopify and its evil influence on the ruby ecosystem. byroot will soon say "no, we need more shopify companies!!!" - and while that has some logic in it, no, we really don't need MORE financial addictions and kick backs in the ruby ecosystem. Ruby needs more independent developers, and unfortunately it is now stuck in a death spiral. I don't see how it can escape it, even though ruby, as a language is really well designed - people need to separate the criticism, including criticism of DHH. DHH is a nut; ruby as a language is well-designed)
> “Look how I don’t care anymore, and you should not care either” is not a great message when you are the headline speaker at the conference - let’s call it CareConf - that you have, yourself, lobbied for.
The thing is: DHH's promo tour is logical if you connect the fact that DHH is now an AI promo agent. That's why he has no problem promoting Rust. It just sustains the AI agenda now. DHH is like a tool for AI promo. I pity the man - he is just a shell of his former himself now. He talked about things other than rails. You know all know that rails is dead. DHH did a post-portem here on rails. It's one of the more surprising things to witness. AI is the new rage - rails is dead.
> The message from the supreme leader was clear: we vibe-rewrote HEY in a more performant way, it worked great, we neither need nor care about Rails anymore.
That was not the main message though. The main message was that DHH joined the AI hype train. Rails is not relevant anymore. Even Omarchy is just a promo tool for AI. And, interestingly, the promo by DHH actually works. I am fascinated by that. Some of the clowns promoting it are paid shills clearly, but many people genuinely like Omarchy, for whatever the reasons. I don't fully understand it, but again, it reminds me of the rails hype. People LOVE hype. I don't know why; for me it never worked since I could not care less about what others are interested in (for the most part; I do "follow" some clever people. Follow is also such a strange word coined by antisocial media).
> he could have just left the toy he no longer loves - including its community - in peace.
But he is now an AI agent. So he promotes AI. He no longer cares about rails, that is true, but to him rails is a platform to promote AI. Same with Omarchy.
Big Tech Bros already pumped in millions here. It is a promo tool, similar to Anthropic claiming all problems in biology have been solved by claude (or will be, soon). They infect EVERYTHING now. It is the ultimate skynet slop. Just look at the ruby core team: claude is the main designer now. Does anyone feel like contributing to this AI slop? And, surprisingly: some people do. It's really interesting how AI changes people's mind. It's like in the old (two) movies Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But shit.
> But here is the thing: the rich and famous losing interest in the good stuff does not oblige the rest of us to. If anything, it frees up the room.
That is partially true, but ... can you generate as much hype and interest?
Many projects by solo devs fail here. Not everyone has the patience to do what, e. g. DHH does. You can dislike his methods but at the end of the day you will rate success somehow. One is by money. The other (or an additional one) is by interest by people.
I think DHH, as much as I think he is an AI tool, succeed in both. I am not interested in what this ultra-right nut has to say, but you have a bubble here of influencers and people listen to them a lot. Or, at the least, some do. Even matz said "I see no issue with blog entries of shooting down wolves and then randomly talking about migrants". Well, I have an issue with that, but it kind of means that politics and money infiltrated a lot of the discussion - on both sides, by the way. I am not so naive to assume that all criticism against DHH is genuine or honest either.
Edit: Hackernews has text restriction in place, so I have to continue via the reply here.
> 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.)