Paul Moore

@simontatham REALITY: "Automating this 5 minute task is way more fun than doing it, so I'll spend all day automating it"

@davidism Sigh. That's really depressing. I genuinely believed that Astral were trying to do the right thing in spite of the pressures of VC backing. Looks like I was wrong 🙁

@ancoghlan@mastodon.social @nedbat@hachyderm.io There's also a sense (to me, at least) in the term "project environment" that it's singular - *the* project environment. And with tools like tox and nox, projects often have multiple environments associated with them.

@nedbat@hachyderm.io Disagree. I use them all the time for things that aren't projects.

@ancoghlan @mitsuhiko This analogy works for corporate adoption questions, but doesn't work at the personal level. And "people exploring the space" are doing so on an individual level, where they have to adopt the technology (thereby abandoning the ethical principles which cause them to have reservations in the first place) in order to *do* that exploration. Particularly if enthusiasts insist that "honest exploration" requires using the paid models.

@mitsuhiko How can "actually trying" AI make any difference to a person's position on whether basing the technology on extreme resource consumption and ignoring copyright is acceptable? My deep discomfort over these matters won't be altered by using AI tools - does that mean I'm somehow unable to have a "measured position", whatever that might mean?

@ancoghlan @glyph @eevee For me, the only feature of Firefox I care about is that it still supports ublock origin. Apart from that, there's essentially no difference for me in UI, performance or features. The AI situation is making me wish there was an alternative I could switch to, but "supports ublock origin or something at least as good" is mandatory for me.

@ancoghlan @mitsuhiko Good analogy. Although personally, I think the "offshoring" subset of outsourcing works even better as an analogy - even more ethically dubious, even less effective in practice, and tends to cause reputational damage to companies who embrace it. But discussions about whether it can be made to work can be had in spite of these issues.

@mitsuhiko @ancoghlan That makes no sense to me. Outsourcing/offshoring is literally the same proposition as AI - "let this other party do this task for you, and stuff will be better" with no regard for the ethics of engaging with that other party.

@pradyunsg yeah that's where I was thinking of going next, just wasn't sure if there were other options. It sort of feels like I'm reinventing the whole "how do I lay out my project" wheel, but I don't want to overthink things and end up with a node based monstrosity...

@nedbat@hachyderm.io To give you some specifics - environments used to run scripts with dependency metadata, throwaway environments to experiment at the REPL with an interesting looking library, environments to use a library like symptoms as a calculator, etc... The majority of my environments are created in $TEMP.