alt Hacker NewsEdit: 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.)
(Still continuing ...)
> I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after.
So he acknowledges how his own analogy is tainted. If Weimar worked so well, why would the Nazis have had success? Yes, people are stupid, you see it with Trump voters or ultra-right voters in Europe; many vote because of having lost in other areas, in particular the economy right now (very similar to 1933 in many ways), but the main point is that Weimar nowhere near as much was a success model as the author of the article tries to show. And I don't see why any of that has to do with DHH and his Kool Aid preaching style. I find it a lame style but that may be just me.
> Why, of all the things we now can do in Ruby, do we choose to do Rust vibe- > rewrites?
I don't. Then again I am not a DHH fanboi so ...
> It would be a pain to generate a PDF with layout - there were no libraries
Prawn was ok. hexapdf is even better. I regular try to get the hexapdf to improve the pdf-autogeneration part. Hexapdf is very good, so ... there were no libraries? Well, when exactly? Prawn is old: at the least 2008
https://rubygems.org/gems/prawn/versions/0.1.0
> You could no longer build native GUI applications - there were no libraries
Well, ruby-gtk worked, even on windows by the way. Since then it has decayed. My modifications of GTK core classes no longer worked. I tried to get kou to think about this problem some years ago. Nothing changed, all my old code is dead. So I decided to call it quits and no longer use ruby-gtk. Also because of GTK5 going to abandon xorg-server. I fail to see why I want to support their wayland-only crap future. Let's see whether this will succeed though:
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
and:
https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng
Granted, there may be a lack of developers for both, but do we really want to be locked down by corporate hackers that try to control the downstream situation? Both QT and GTK have this problem, for different reasons. I am absolutely tired of corporate shenanigans leaking into ecosystems and ruining them.
> And a lot of people would just throw up their hands in desperation and > utter The Spell Of Dread:
> Nobody does this sort of thing with Ruby anyway.
Thankfully I could not care what others say. Unfortunately, Ruby is also declining, and has been in the last years. There is no way to deny it. The numbers are strong here. If you google for "ruby is dead", you will find things such as "no, it is aging like fine wine". People simply try to deny the reality - that's interesting. But it is not an analysis.
> a Rubyist willing to produce PDF files from their Rails app would be facing a choice of a number of options, all equally unappealing
Interesting how he does not mention hexapdf. Now, I am not claiming hexapdf may be able to solve all rails issues here, but what is interesting is how he does not even know all possibilities in ruby. Is he a rails guy or something?
He mentions:
Gotenberg, Ferrum, Prawn and wkhtmltopdf.
I stopped reading there. IMO if you critisize DHH, and this is well-deserved after the damage he caused in the ruby ecosystem, followed up by him hating on wolves and then casually ... mentioning how immigrants are like wolves (I have no idea what DHH is thinking; I think he is roleplaying the promo-role and in reallife probably acts totally orthogonal to the crap he writes in general), then you really really need to be super-sound in all arguments. Be it the comparison to Weimar (and then kind of wanting to omit how Weimar in some ways, not all, but some, helped build up the Nazi idiots) or not knowing hexapdf ... I am sorry, but that means you failed at doing your prior research.
Personally I already find hexapdf to be better than prawn. And you can also try to convince the hexapdf author to improve hexapdf; he was willing to do so when he has time and the suggestion made sense.