iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 15h

this is not to denigrate wxwidgets, they're a successful, feature-rich and battle-tested project. I am just aiming at a different target: "the smallest thing that does this job".

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 15h

sure I guess it is like a very very minimal version of that, minus 171 transitive rust dependencies plus all of wxwidgets. the wxdragon `simple` example is 14MiB and, with wxwidgets-sys, takes 2 minutes to build. the rungui `hello` example + lib is 787KiB and takes 4 seconds to build.

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Reposted by Graydon Hoare

atomicker.bsky.social @atomicker.bsky.social · 20h

"Tell your MP: De-list the Pacific Link pipeline" Carney's pipeline "carries significant risks and impacts for the wildlife, ecosystems and communities along its route (…) These risks and impacts are not in the national interest, and neither is this project" #Canada #CDNPoli #ClimateCrisis #BCPoli

wcel.org

Tell your MP: De-list the Pacific Link pipeline before it's too late

On October 1st, the federal government designated a costly new west coast oil pipeline and tankers project as a project of 'national interest.' It's not too late for the government to correct its mist...

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 18h

I guess. on a simple 1-to-10 I expect I wind up uncomfortably far along the evil axis. I guess I like to think that my abstraction from the evil I cause and the relative lack of leverage I've had in life may mitigate my otherwise poor score. my family are all public servants; I'm clearly the worst.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 18h

leverage is an interesting one, that I think trips up computer people. we see computers amplifying our power while programming so we think this extends to the world. but they mainly amplify the power of their owners, who are mainly not us. if we try to redirect them we are quickly overruled.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 18h

I guess I mean I might want something like a 2D ethical grid where one dimension is evil cause and the other is evil effect? proximity vs. outcome? or maybe 3D, since there is also a question of amplitude / leverage. one banker can cause a million landlords to act.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 18h

I'm not asking this question rhetorically just to try to disarm the subject. I think it is similar to the tension at work in boycotts, or "consumer activism" for example. surely there is some pass-through. but how much? the abstraction serves to distance cause from effect.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 18h

one thing I struggle with when thinking about the ethics of actions under industrial capitalism is its intense tendency towards abstraction (literally: distance) from action. like the landlord does the eviction but the landlord "works for" a bank. is the banker directly culpable? their shareholders?

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 19h

(and, well, I guess: I've chosen to strike this balance as "do what I need to to remain employed", up to a certain choice of which sorts of jobs to take vs. refuse, etc. basically choosing my position on the class-traitor scale? which I suppose some will interpret as very out of balance.)

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 19h

For sure! Don't take my statements here as denying the virtue of (some) self-sacrifice. Life consists in large measure of navigating tradeoffs between help-self and help-others, which implicitly means "probably help-others at your own expense fairly often"! It just requires balance.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 19h

it is here too. though I don't know quite how to stretch that analogy. I don't think a person writing GUI libraries for fun is ever going to count as a computer vegan. maybe an LLM vegan? I can imagine the hobby-part of computing splitting in two over this question. it kinda seems to be doing so :(

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 19h

As a squishy liberal sellout, I'd offer other thoughts: that it can also be good to prioritize survival over self-sacrifice changing the world. Even more traitorously: maybe the world-system we have is bad, but others might be worse? I truly don't know, I have great ambivalence.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

ok. just to be clear -- I know my words can carry more weight than they should -- I'm sorry for any discomfort I've caused in this act or conversation. I know it's a bit off the cuff and at times prickly, but I don't want you to feel cornered or dunked-on or anything. I'm just some guy, often wrong!

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

if it's just an aesthetic or philosophical line, knock yourself out. lisp programmers won't touch C++ already, y'know? everyone has aesthetic and philosophical preferences. likewise personal-ethical! though the ethics seem a bit murky and arbitrary, maybe there's an "LLM veganism" that makes sense?

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

in a non-industrial, craft capacity I can see some room to act against the industry's priorities -- to "use computers for our own purposes" as hobbyists often do -- but I question the benefit of drawling some line around LLMs here, they can be put to lots of fun and weird uses too?

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

within the computer industry I don't see much hope for solidarity against automation; it is too contradictory with our very role as automation engineers and our historical class alignment with capital. it's not even old. show me a cohort of young programmers that isn't full of wannabe "founders".

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

I don't think we're uniquely evil or uniquely privileged. We're in a similar boat to many sorts of financial or military technicians: skilled and valuable but replaceable if we make a fuss. "Class traitor" is a bit of a spectrum; but we're certainly no friends of the proletariat! Maybe quasi-PMC?

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

But if you want to try to bring anarchist calisthenics to the workplace and see how it goes I guess I don't disapprove and can't stop you. I'm sorry if my little hobby GUI wrapper library works against those goals. I just wanted a thing to help me write other little hobby programs with GUIs.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

IME management has no problem whatsoever firing everyone. And management is itself replaceable. As are corporations themselves, and the funds that own them. Capital is a whole layer cake of ownership relations, each of which can fire/sell/dissolve the one below.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

it is a another step in a long ladder. if it fails, capital will take a pause and fire a bunch of people and write off a bunch of bad loans and otherwise carry on with its normal behavior. it is already the most powerful.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

We get high salaries so long as we go along with management, and if we rock the boat much or annoy someone they just push a button and you're locked out of the building. We literally helped write the system that locks us out of the building. That's our whole thing. Helping capital.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

I'm sorry to be blunt about the workplace thing but programmers have collectively just about zero labor rights and have in fact resisted unionization or regulation of any sort my whole career. We tend to side with capital! It is a tragic fact but there's no shortcut to undoing it.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

I suppose two things: (1) it seems to me to have unclear political goals and/or be unlikely to be effective and (2) many attempts to make make a fuss over something at work will just get you fired, and it's worth being intentional about when and why you want to take that risk. You too must eat.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

I don't think programmers have anywhere near the leverage I hear some imply. We are all at-will employees in a competitive market. Nor do we have any history of intra-industry solidarity, much less cross-industry. We've collectively resisted unionization and even workplace regulation my whole life.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 20h

by all means be loud about your political beliefs. here is one of mine: LLMs are a small sideshow relative to the major political problems of our time, and LLM-use-for-programming is a sideshow within that sideshow. so I am perhaps a little tired of colleagues treating it like The Main Event.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 21h

it's an idiosyncratic choice, like deciding what to study in school or which city to live in or job to take, I can't tell you "where to put your energy", it's up to you. but I suggest doing it with clear eyes and not pretending the computer business is a magical world exempt from tradeoffs.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 21h

I don't wish I was a farmer; most farming is also industrial, and subsistence farming is awful. I'm saying that there's no way to avoid deciding how you're going to engage with (or conscientiously decline participation in) capitalism and empire. and the consequences are what they are.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 21h

hmm. do you think that, by my using or sharing code written by such a tool, I am showing a complete disregard for concerns about them? I too have concerns! as I have about many things I participate in. I genuinely don't know what you're asking of me. "just don't use them, for my own good"?

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 22h

but I am also a guy who has argued for software liability this whole time. so like if we do start down that path, I'll be broadly supportive! I do not mean to dismiss it, just note the incongruity of the impulse with the past. but maybe the time has finally come! maybe all the rules are changing.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 22h

I do think it's a bit much for the FOSS world to suddenly take an overriding interest in the responsibility of the publisher for quality, after decades of shipping anything we post on an "AS-IS BASIS WITHOUT WARRANTIES INCLUDING FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE", you know?

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 22h

I agree there is a question here; one I am trying to grapple with, as everyone else. An interesting fact is that I also had it write what looks like a decently thorough fuzzer for itself, because why not? But also: clearly effort is no longer proportional to output. Is it to quality? I don't know.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 22h

(you can see this reflected in the split of LLM adoption rates; the more some software is just consumable churn-ware, the more unqualified the rush to LLM adoption / lack of concern about LLM defect rates. there's a lot of stuff that has, since the advent of consumer software, always been slop.)

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 22h

perhaps one aspect of the historical context is hard to swallow is the split in capitalism's interests between infrastructural software-that-must-be-reliable (a cost center) and consumable software-that-must-be-made-in-volume (a profit center). both want cheapness; only one wants quality.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 22h

as it has compelled which specific software gets written and which hardware gets built, which business models and academic grants get funded, which projects move ahead or stagnate. my personal hobby horse -- higher integrity code -- has military and finance backing across the board. always has.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 23h

does it matter what my personal feelings are? I dislike sitting in a chair all day performing wage labor programming for capitalism, far more than any distaste I might have for this tool or that; and yet the historical context has compelled me to do this for 30+ years.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 23h

in a more personal view, I do happen to find them useful too, and would choose to use them (as I choose to use computers more generally) for lots of tasks regardless of historical context. but this is mixing the personal and historical perspectives, which is perhaps muddying the discussion? unsure.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 23h

I do not think LLMs have "merit" in this view beyond the fact that capital and empire want them, so they will continue to happen. we may or may not choose to engage with them, or find other more pro-social uses for them, as with all computers. but their nature is continuous with the whole project.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 23h

and if we're talking about responsibility, it feels to me somewhat irresponsible when my peers (as they often do!) stick their heads in the sand about this subject, wishing for computers to remain pure personal playgrounds of skilled programmers, without acknowledging how they function in the world.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 23h

so that was a while ago! it is certainly the fact that anything I've written about computers is from this perspective, far before LLMs. it is one I think clarifies and illuminates, makes the whole history of computing make more of a unified sense than zooming in on individual phases or developments.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 23h

Ok. I don't mean to say computers "stopped being interesting", nor that your youth implies naïvety or my age (turning 50 next year!) implies cynicism. but I was around your age when I came to believe that computers _are_ capital (and empire) and that those are the driving forces (and employers).

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I find LLM writing annoying too and I don't want to minimize the difficulties they bring. but I can't imagine anyone giving them up at this point, and people worked for literally 70 years to make something like them work, so I think they're what's for dinner now. I'm trying to adapt to that reality.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I mean, I have never had non-dread-filled feelings about computers. the idea that there was some utopia of good software-writing time before LLMs seems odd to me. it has always been a train wreck. now it's an industrial train wreck with exciting power tools. will the bug backlog grow or shrink? idk.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I am excited that I can easily knock out irritating little wish-it-existed projects like this in an evening now. but if it makes you feel better, I'm still a bundle of sad anxiety most of the time about everything. this is just a little glimmer of fun on the side. I'll try to sadden-up the README.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I don't mean to misrepresent it! it's 20kloc, fits in context and is just bridges to decades-old native APIs that never change. On the other hand nobody else wrote it after 10+ years of waiting. I doubt it'll need maintenance but if there are bugs they should be quick to fix. What should I say here?

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I don't even know how software works anymore but I was curious if it was maybe time to get a robot to write this and it seems like maybe? crates.io/crates/rungui

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I wholly and un-ironically believe that versioning ought to make up a significant fraction of any formal training in computers. Multiple full year courses in your degree. And there should be a set of journals and conferences on it, endowed chairs, advanced research institutes, the whole nine yards.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

In a head to head arrogance competition I am not sure I would put Kay in second place!

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I read this as a lament: that the tragic set of market failures that currently passes for "the software industry" does not _allow_ most people employed in it to do work they have pride in.

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Reposted by Graydon Hoare

Shriram Krishnamurthi @shriram.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I've never not had an insightful interaction with Quinn Wilton. This talk, "The Graveyard of Good Ideas", is an absolute delight. I can't describe it; just listen to the first 5 mins and if it doesn't grab you…I dunno, you're just not my kind of nerd. (-: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovlQ...

youtube.com

The Graveyard of Good Ideas - Quinn Wilton | ElixirConf US 2026

YouTube video by Code Sync

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