On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 10:06:24AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote: > On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 11:40:30AM -0500, Pierre-Elliott B??cue wrote: >... > > I'm also really terrified by the cognitive decline that seems to arise > > with these tools. > > I'm worried only if any tool start out being cheap (for example, > $200/month for $2000 worth of AI tokens), and then it suddenly becomes > more expensive, people who started relying on any tools, only to have > them suffer a rug pull, it might be highly problematic. > > On the other hand, it's unquestionable that the fact that calculators > are incredibly cheap (a four function calculator runs for maybe $3 > USD) has meant that there has been a decline in the ability of people > to do math in their heads. > > As another example, compilers have *definitely* resulted in people no > longer as good at writing assembly language. There were some Unix > old-timers on a mailing list recently reminsicing about how way back > when, it was *assumed* that human-written assembly would always be > more better and more efficient than compiler-generated assembly --- > and these days it is pretty much self-evident that compilers do a > better job than what humans can do. Part of this is because how much > more complex modern CPU's have gotten compared to a PDP-11. But I > think it's more about people being less proficient at certain skills > that are no longer as important, and less about some more general > claim about "cognitive decline".
An example closer to Debian would be debhelper: debian/rules is a Makefile because everyone knows how to write a Makefile, and that's how everyone writes debian/rules. Or at least that's how it was 30 years ago. There were various steps of tooling, and now we have 3-line dh. There is a visible similar "cognitive decline" caused by debhelper, where many DDs are often lost how to debug and fix issues in their packages - knowledge about the internals of building Debian packages are often no longer required to package software, and then they start at zero when they encounter a problem. > Cheers, > > - Ted cu Adrian
