> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people

It is insane just how miserable the experience of FOSS hardware hacking in public is.

The expectation does not even the slightest match reality. You'd think "ah yes many eyes meaning all bugs get shallow", but instead you get worst of XDA-Developers and toxic wastelands where no sane person even answers anymore.

But this predates LLMs and was as miserable as it is now before as well.

In fact, I might even argue that LLMs made this _better_, because you can now avoid the "opening up in hopes of finding 1 helpful person below 99 annoying ones" through simple GPU compute.

Previously, you had to hope that through this self-inflicted horror, you'd find an expert that can augment you. Now that expert rests on huggingface.

It's still.. not perfect, of course. But it might be less miserable - provided that you adapt to the current state of things and stop with the "trawling for volunteers".

__

Of course, this does not help you against "skids let claude find bugs that you'd need and burn it for no reason" as per the twitter thread, but I wouldn't rule out that they would not have done that, if less information was public.

And.. that too was an issue before LLMs.

Information wants to be free, but so does your cat, and your cat gets run over by some crackhead in a 30 year old rusty pickup if you just put it outside without thinking.

So don't let it go out unattended.

That said, this "pep talk" is more directed at myself than at poor Andy. This must all suck big time.

It's the oldest unsolved problem of the internet: how to attract high-value people and keep out low-value contributors.

Isn't the problem just that open source, by it's very nature, is low quality since it comes from the unix-like ecosystem where everything is built atop everything else. So inevitably when the skid comes to you with a bug you can say "ah that's a bug in a specific build of your shell with these environment variables, myyyy code is clean as a whistle, minimal, and follows best practices" (if we ignore that in practice it depends on a billion different programs versions all of which are incorrect)

Complaining about the inevitable toxic noise when the same boneheaded development decisions are made over and over like everyone has gone insane. You don't have to build a death trap on the land your cat and children roam.