If they hadn't bamboozled and captured the regulatory systems that are supposed to govern data protection, vehicles-for-hire, product safety, directories of personal information, etc. into letting them do whatever they want as long as "with computers" is tacked on, there would have been a lot less value to extract and the main applications of software/computing would be making legitimate business processes run more smoothly without needing to outsource control to predatory service providers (by having stuff be so easy your on-staff folks can do it, ala excel), not disrupting society.

There’s another aspect to this (which is why I get a bit obsessed by end-user programming as a concept): to build a thing today you need skills X, Y, and Z, but no one has the time to learn all three, so if Y can be factored out you can teach X to people who know Z and enable entirely new things that they actually care about.

I haven't used Amaranth or SysemVerilog, but my (little) experience of HDLs is that most of the skill is in your head (and transferable to other HDLs), not in the characters you type. Making it easier to learn the former without the latter seems closer to accessibility than de-skilling.

Similarly, I wouldn't count BASIC as de-skilling even though it demonstrably made it easier to write programs (but I'm not sure how much it was used commercially; maybe some companies used QBasic specifically so they could treat workers as replaceable).

i guess i need to think about it more as well...

i ... honestly i don't know. i don't have an answer. if anything, the past month i have been devastated by vibe code that satisfies "functioning" and nothing else like "understandable" (by *anyone*) or collaboration (instead it has thousands of loc to paper over problems)

maybe it's not a perfect match, but i don't think writing in a higher level language is a "deskilled" way to draw gates or write instruction bits. it produces a different *kind* of product, that is itself amenable to various different processes, some manual and some automatic. it's not just "bits with extra steps".

llms on the other hand promise to let you avoid all the thinking. if i may philosophizd a bit - llms promise to let you avoid expressing yourself in terms of mental labor. maybe some like this, but i know i don't. [cont'd]

Re the degradation of the "open-guild" position of the RTL designer; I also don't know how to feel. Removing footguns is marginally deskilling, but it's such a social good that I can't object to it.

Other industries have unions to smooth the social consequences in changing labor values. Govs and LLMs are both tools that seek to bypass that, it's not unreasonable to form guild-like closed systems of practice in response.

@xgranade

@xgranade

I think you're misunderstanding my point. The FSF decides to promote the creation of Free Software (a goal I agree with) by creating complex licenses.

Developing software reusing software under any license requires understanding the license. The FSF's licenses are sufficiently complex that I have had multiple conversations with lawyers (including some with the FSF's lawyers) where they have not been able to tell me whether a specific use case is permitted. This places a burden on anyone developing Free Software using FSF-approved licenses, because there are a bunch of use cases that the FSF would regard as ethical, but where their licenses do not clearly permit the use.

It places a larger burden on people doing things that the FSF disapproves of. They have to come up with exciting loopholes. Unfortunately, it turns out that this isn't that hard and once you've found a loophole you can keep using it. The FSF responds with even more complex licenses.

EDIT: To be clear, the FSF and I have very similar goals. I just think that their strategy is completely counterproductive. Complex legal documents empower people who can afford expensive lawyers. We're increasingly seeing companies using AGPLv3 to control nominally-Free Software ecosystems.

lol yeah, seems paradoxical, but very likely true

I didn't come up with that; it's a rephrasing of a very good post on the topic I've read and subsequently neglected to bookmark

But like I said, I've been building it to help people like me and I think it's succeeding at that. And it generally makes me happy seeing people use it successfully.

> such a high quality that no commercial entity would possibly purchase them

lol yeah, seems paradoxical, but very likely true

But sometimes, people like to pretend, and/or make laws about pretending, that some don't, or mustn't, or "it's impossible to cross this abstraction boundary, so anybody who does it must be harshly punished" kind of thing. Likewise, some design cultures^[1] like to build elaborate wrappers for hiding abstraction leakages, because of the simplistic notion that such leaks are bad design.

^[1] Particularly the "enterprise software" school of thought, in what I've seen. But the idea can also be seen outside big corporate environments.

@xgranade

@xgranade