Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

Start early in the commit history, see if you can understand the general shapes and concepts the project was using at the start.

Then sort of binary-search your way forward in different sized jumps and see how quickly you can get to present day without sacrificing your sanity. Completely at least.

And those jobs are critical to the process of making new developers.

An important part of my education - the part that grad school can’t teach you, you have to learn it on the job - was being new and terrible, grinding on a simple problem and feeling like a waste of money. Any of the experienced guys sitting behind me could have done this thing in a few hours but I’ve been working on it for a week. “What’s the point? Any minute now they’re going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me I’m done, it’s time to go find another job.”

But that never happened.

Those early problems weren’t fun. At home I would have never chosen to work on them. I’d leave them for someone else. “But now that I’m collecting a paycheck for it, this isn’t up to me. I have to work on it. I can’t give up. I can ask for help, but I need to show my peers that I belong. I can solve difficult problems. I can persevere.”

As a mediocre professional developer, I had to struggle to learn that. I wasn’t getting far on my own, without mentorship and motivation. Homework, pursuing degrees, wasn’t getting me there. (And even now, I seem to have about two weeks of attention span, for projects at home.)

As a professional C# developer since 2012, I’d say a programmer needs four kinds of knowledge. As an organizational user of Github Copilot for a couple months, I’d say AI tools can help with one, maybe two of those.

Understanding language and syntax, so you can communicate the ideas in your head to the machine accurately: AI is fairly good at this, will certainly get a lot better.

Understanding algorithms and data structures, well enough to compare and contrast, and choose the most appropriate ones for each circumstance: AI can randomly select something, unless it’s a frequently solved problem. I don’t expect this to get better except for the most repetitive of coding tasks.

Understanding your execution environment and adapting your solutions to use it well: I don’t see the current generation of AI tools ever approaching this. I don’t think they have context for how a piece of code is used, when trying to learn from it. One size fits all is not a great approach.

Understanding your customer’s needs and specific problems, and creating products, not code. Problem domains and solutions are a business’s entire reason for existence. This is all kept confidential (and outside the reach of an AI training data set) for competitive reasons. As a human employee, you get to peek behind the curtain and learn these things yourself.

Clearly my comment annoyed you. What should I have done differently? Apart from switching away from Windows, what plan or idea should I have attempted to rally support for?

Ok that tears it. What firewall rules do I need to set so I get security updates and absolutely nothing else?

Do you keep a shopping list? A personal to-do or reminders list? You should stop because that’s a ritual and rituals are clearly bad.

I mean, no, you should keep the rituals that help you work better and discard the rest. Which is what successful agile teams are already doing.

I’d love to see this become something greater. Consider this challenging problem:

Suppose you have an instance with a community (“C”) that likes to promote subtle but wrong things.

Suppose there’s a community of fact checkers (“F”) who wants to promote actual, verifiable/falsifiable facts by responding to lies with compelling and relevant references. They want to help by directly replying to posts or applying tags in community C, but they are not permitted to contribute by that instance. The community C seems to want their lies to remain unchallenged.

And then suppose there’s some opted-in users (“U”) who want to receive help understanding when posts in community C are not factual. They would like to receive posts or tags from fact checkers, because people they trust have recommended they listen to these fact checkers.

I’d love to see a tagging system that can help “U” and “F” connect, even if the owners of “C” don’t want them to, when browsing content in “C”. Ideally in an extensible way that lets some future implementer come up with novel ways to organize and maintain the fact-checking side of things in response to new threats.

I probably explained this badly, and the letters are probably more pretentious than helpful. But I hope someone smarter can pick this up and run with it, because it’s something the world desperately needs.

Support from the CTO means he’s willing to pay for it. Test coverage is a paid-for feature that your team is committing to work on. Would they refuse client-funded work because the client might have to pay for rework later?

Maybe presenting it that way could get people past their hang-ups. Good luck.

RIP to a fellow OpenVMS hobbyist.

$ SET PROC /PRIV=ALL $ REPLY /ENABLE=AFTERLIFE %OPCOM-F-VALUERR, error occurred while processing the command term “AFTERLIFE” -LIB-F-UNRKEY, “AFTERLIFE” is an unrecognized keyword $

Oh well, worth a try.