Yep, that’s exactly the sentiment I saw in people’s writing, that email has become almost centralized in practice, even though in theory it’s not. I saw this also generalized, that even successfuly promoted distributed/federated protocols still face the constant risk and challenge of becoming centralized in practice, when a major player manages to capture the majority of the field.
AFAIU, even Mastodon community needs to (and does) purposefully work on promoting alternative instances, so that not everybody ends up on mastodon.social…
Very interesting article, thank you.
From my experiences with paid models at work, tests were especially insidious: I had cases where a seemingly sensible test showed up to not work at all. I was planning to push it but I got curious, and decided to “break” the feature it said it was pretending to verify. Lo and behold, test stays green. I find it especially bad because nobody loves to write tests, even less to review them, it’s not easy to make them good, LLM oh so loves to churn them out, and I’m already tired reviewing the main part of the code.
As for docs, my personal take is that they may not be as good as you think. IMO it’s more that we are not taught to write good docs or even to properly care about them. So I claim it’s the same JS case here, just you have even less skill to evaluate it than you had with JS. Note, it’s not directed at you personally more than anyone else, and I may certainly be wrong, that’s just how I feel about the majority of the industry in the area of docs (even pre-AI to a big degree).
Your article spelled out some things in a nice new way for me, with an interesting new takeaway for me in context of what I want to learn (here I must especially be wary of “AI” as it can help somewhat but can also actively degrade/hinder/derail/anchor), vs. where I don’t - but then if I don’t do I have skills to evaluate its result and to what degree (e.g. on your example, IMO, c++ high, js medium, docs low). Thank you again!