9 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 52 minutes 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...

  • gerikson 1 hour ago
    The "cathedral" in ESR's essay wasn't proprietary closed source, it was the GNU project.
    • fulafel 1 hour 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 47 minutes 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
  • 7rirdnj 1 hour 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.

    • jrm4 52 minutes 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.

  • 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 7 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 9 minutes ago
      Refactoring w/o removing all dead code.
  • jFriedensreich 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      I think the graph is getting cut off for you - for me it reads "Agent Teams"
  • 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.