Some popcorn-fun things are happening in technology. Two articles, very different, worth discussing.

Fun thing 1

The first is this summary from Simon Willison about LLM’s role in “clean room coding”, as applied to a recent – and, as of this writing, still very much unsolved – open source fracas.

To sum, a famous person made a widely used open source library that was LGPL-licensed. Future versions of LGPL-licensed code also need to be LGPL-licensed. Famous person retired two years later, handed the code base to others, and those others did good by it for 15 years until a new point version came out that was a complete LLM-assisted rewrite under a new license. Famous person unretired, said “hey, that’s illegal,” and the new head of the project wrote something very, very long in response that amounted to “no.” (It also looked LLM-assisted, which I think is very funny; and it got ratioed, which is funny in a more objective sense.)

When reading any writing that’s a response to a firm, clear boundary, my first impulse is to look at its length. This is because any responses that are, in effect, “no” tend to run exceptionally long. This is no exception.

I am no lawyer and I don’t swim in open source all that much, but as I see it, the current maintainers could:

• Publish the new version as a fork under a new name & license, and use that instead.

• License the new version under the old license.

• Go to court.

Fun! I love fun.

Fun thing 2

Another fun thing was sent to me by a reader, and it’s also about LLM but more about design, and a little more spiritual in nature, which is probably why it got sent to me. It touches on many points, most of which I agree with.

The first, and most important, is that design is everywhere now. We come to expect it. Everyone thinks they can practice it. So over time, the idea of design as specialization is likely to go away:

After a design turn toward design as a liberal art, there are still designers doing design, but there are fewer of them (with fair critiques of elitism permitted). Instead, most people become design literate and are able to participate in the discussion and criticism of design, without designing.

The author goes on to say that he doesn’t like this because it threatens his profession. But it is also the cost of design winning.

Related to this is the idea that most professions are converging on the same idea of doing tech, which is to say practicing the elements of tech that no computer can replicate, no matter how sophisticated it may happen to be. Strategic, customer-focused, business-centric work is evergreen. It’s consultative in nature, which is why we like it so much. But we also recognize that more and more people are trying to do it.

The author speaks of design literacy as a potential liberal art. If tech professions are indeed converging on a single point, then the design-development distinction is collapsing. And if that’s happening, then design matters less than technology. All of it.

So I would go one further and say that technological literacy needs to become more of a thing. We should all collectively learn what deceptive design is and how it manifests. We should be suspicious of businesses that prey on their customers. We should rework our ideas around consumer education to think more deeply about how we mediate with technology and how technology affects us.

All of this is separate from whatever new technological developments do to my profession, which I love dearly and don’t want to see go away. But it is more important. Within it is the real work.

Fun & “fun”

Both of these pieces speak to a not-yet-imagined future, the same future, and we’re all just kind of waiting anxiously for all of it to unfold. The bubble could pop and we could not think about this for a while. Or mass layoffs might come for everyone and power would concentrate. Or we might experience some sort of industry rebirth where everybody gets hired again and we all use robots to work four-hour days. That one feels less likely, but hey.