That's literally what they tell you on the paid tour....
“She was a woman so sexism meant couldn’t be an architect. The only way she could live out her dream was just to build her own house over and over.“ isn’t nearly as fun.
The fact she was afraid of ghosts from people killed by her husband‘s invention just slots in so well as “evidence“. Add a crazy looking house and there you go, perfect tourist trap.
What was in full swing was Open Source, powered by scratch-your-own-itch. What was taking time was for the business world to learn the lessons by both carrot (Linux) and stick (Unix Wars, vendor lock-in, dozens of crappy competing standards). When Steve Balmer winds up using your language, you moved the ball.
Many ideas from The Cathedral & The Bazaar made it into The Lean Startup. The Cathedral development model was more related to waterfall. YC was already chugging along, but you can bet your ass PG was already steeped in the tea.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews (TMNN) was ESR's failed magnum opus, a solo netnews rewrite: long private work, one rough beta, then done. That is the isolated cathedral process CatB later criticised when it was other people's work. The tree from the historic tmnn7-8.tar.Z is here:
https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/tree/main
Read the LICENSE as evidence, not as law homework: anti-censorship language, FSF distancing, GPL-style terms, and a consulting pitch labeled as an unabashed commercial plug inside the license text:
https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/LICENSE
Then read fascist.c: real filename, FASCIST and COMMUNIST compile switches, suppress/deny and ADM/authorized rules for who may post or read. That is operator gatekeeping in code, not a metaphor.
https://github.com/SimHacker/esr-tmnn7-8/blob/main/src/D.new...
ESR talks in that LICENSE like the speech police are the enemy. In the same distribution, fascist.c is the speech police: it encodes who may post, who may read, site suppressions, and deny rules off an authorized file. That is not a subtle contradiction. It is the same person packaging a freedom sermon with operator-controlled posting and reading. Calling that anything other than hypocrisy is charity he did not earn.
"Gabriel argued that early Unix and C, developed by Bell Labs, are examples of the worse-is-better design approach." Whereas vibe-coding is not reviewing what code goes in, just judging it by whether it seems to work or not. I guess a common factor would be willingness to compromise on soundness.
Slime Mold Identification & Appreciation (amazing photography)
So the Unix-philosophy small tools that constitute an important part of the GNU project are excluded. Rather, it’s about any programs of significant complexity, like Emacs (and likely GCC) and many commercial products. While the cathedral model doesn’t imply closed source, it implies building “in […] isolation”, rather than in the open. It may or may not remain proprietary and/or closed source.
Linux demonstrated to ESR that complex projects can also be built in the open with many collaborators, and don’t necessarily require the cathedral; which inspired the essay.
The statement you chose makes a carve-out for Unix, not GNU. It doesn't support "not really."
GNU follows the Unix philosophy. ESR wrote The Art of Unix Programming [0] in which he writes extensively about it. GNU was envisioned to be a clone of Unix [1].
Most of my commits (hand written and AI) have delete counts that are 75-110% the added line count.
The point that many developers will probably forget to tell the LLM to run cleanup/refactoring paths is probably true though. (I’ve definitely found ghost-chasing bugfixes in all sorts of corners of LLM generated code).
Julia Morgan, Winchester's contemporary, was the first woman to obtain an architecture license in California in 1904 and had a very prolific career throughout the state including her most famous - Hearst Castle - commissioned in 1919.
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2024/08/the-truth-about-sallie...
PS: While I grew up in San Jose, my parents unfortunately took me on that tour once. It looked extremely staged and all about $$$ then and I was a dumb kid. It occupied a plot of land in a very busy area across what is now Santana Row and beside the original hemispherical buildings of the first Century 21 theaters that originally had massive parking lots that extended all the way to Winchester Blvd back when people went to the movies. The parking lot was only eclipsed by the nearby Winchester Drive-In in Campbell. Where Santana Row is at the corner of Stevens Creek and Winchester was the car dealership Courtesy Chevrolet.
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.
The problem is the cost is so wildly asymmetric. When everyone with a computer and a subscription can vibe code low quality features, when everyone can submit dubious security bug reports, no amount of funding will even that out. Producing submissions is essentially free while triaging and reviewing remains very expensive.
3 years ago the cost was asymmetric in the other direction. The cost of writing code was high. The cost of finding security bugs was extremely high. The cost of triaging and reviewing was basically the same as it is today.
Large corporations that are well funded are facing the exact same issues internally right now. With agent output so cheap, how do you deal with the deluge? It’s not practical or desirable to have your best engineers doing nothing but reviewing generated code, some of which is likely very low value.
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.
More funding for more development of open source is a good thing, but more money to ease the burden imposed by an ever rising tide of slop is not a solution.
Maybe adopting some hard constraints on code complexity that agents have to work within would help?
It's not all bad! It's also enormously fun. I've been able to work on things I'd been putting off forever. When I can use LLM agents, I less often feel paralyzed by perfectionism, which is probably the biggest productivity boost I get. My own code has not decreased in quality, and I think that for the truly important things, neither has that of my colleagues.
But LLMs don't make junior dev mistakes. They make "my brain has worms in it" mistakes.
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.
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.
Sure, but we're dealing in oral-folklore that's over a century old here. I don't see any reason to value the earthquake-theory over the ghost-trap theory.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Except, of course, that modern academia is opposed to accepting, or investigating, anything paranormal (see Wikipedia etc).
I first visited the Winchester house in 1985, as a child, and it sure felt ghost infested to me back then. You can't get more scientific than that. My sister (also a child at the time) peer-reviewed my findings.
As others have noted, the guides are full of tall tales. I grew up in San Jose and remember when the property next to the Winchester Mystery House was a drive-in theater, and before the House was fire-damaged. The B.S. was well-known even then. My father, who moved to San Jose in the 1950s, even explained it to me as a child after some friends who were into ghost stories told me about it.
I don't know if it's still there, but my favorite part of the site was the detached museum showing some of the earliest pieces developed by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. Easy to miss as it is not part of the house or the guided tour.
Relevant historical context: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
When Apple Lisa managers started requiring weekly line-of-code counts in 1982, Bill Atkinson had just rewritten QuickDraw's region engine with a simpler algorithm that was 6× faster and 2,000 lines shorter, so he submitted -2000 on the form. Management quietly stopped asking him to fill it out.
The Winchester house a developer builds is only worth something if it delivers tangible value. The market clearly thinks one way, but plenty of people are still skeptical. The cathedral and bazaar delivered value in different ways, and the need came before the solution.
Winchester Mystery Potemkin Village.
I think a lot of people in devtools could learn from this right now
Architecture is not that; MEP trades aren't architecture. If she used prefabbed wall assemblies or didn't do her own structural for critical parts the analogy would hold (I so not know if she did or did not either way). Plumbing is a completely separate trade the way trading stocks is separate from computing; it just happens to live in the house.
Humans are way slower than AI. If you want feedback as fast as AI you are going to need AI for that.
The Winchester mystery house is notable for becoming a public tourist attraction instead of a closed private piece of real estate. How do we evolve the Cathedral and the Bazaar to the modern era? I don't know. I know that my life on my computer is drastically improved by spending an afternoon a week building better tooling for myself, and I realize it's built on top of other's contributions to the world, but at the same time, I don't know how to contribute back under the new regime.
