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The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

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Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#151
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made the change consciously for ethical and moral reasons with no interest in "setting myself apart" or "feeling better for not 'being like those others'" by this decision We all believe we do what we do for good reasons, yet we are wrong most of the times. So, when I hear you saying that you are motivated by pure moral reasons, but not stating those reasons, I can't help but think "this guy is lying to himself",…

> So, when I hear you saying that you are motivated by pure moral reasons, but not stating those reasons, I can't help but think "this guy is lying to himself", sorry. ??? I didn't say more about these things because I felt my comment was long enough already on a tangent to the HN submission itself, and that I'd made the intended point. Not that I owe you or anyone else any convincing that I'm not delusional, but sin…

Well, I'm glad I've asked because I very much enjoyed reading your answer.

I had a different experience of vegetarians though. In my mind, based on my experience, a vegetarian is someone who, when you invite in your place, or when joining a coliving or a mere picnic (was not thinking of a restaurant, that's another matter), will insist that he can't touch any food with meat, or any food cooked in a pot that had just also been used to cook meat, really like it was a taboo rather than a practical decision about a very earthly thing, and not willing to give any more explanation than "it would be offensive". To me the proselytism is even more important than the choice not to buy meat (which is itself more important than the choice not to eat meat).

It seems that you are of a different blend and that I might have over-estimated the number of vegetarians-by-religion; maybe many are just tired of explaining indeed.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#152
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While I don’t read the implementation of anything any more unless there’s a hard algorithmic problem, I do make an effort to read and document APIs thoroughly. I have some questions. Are you doing this for client-facing production code? It seems you believe painting over APIs with some amount of documentation will guarantee the implementation is correct and well designed. Am I misreading that? You say you still rea…

> Are you doing this for client-facing production code? What's "this"? We're talking about multiple things here. But presumably yes: I'm working through agents, and all I do is read and prompt. I don't manually write code except Markdown and occasionally Nix code because it's sufficiently high-level, and I rarely read the Rust code. The Nix code is based on templates I wrote by hand, and the Rust code is based on cra…

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