I think there’s a bit of “whoosh” happening…

I said in another comment but basically the left have a tougher message to sell than the right. The right says that the system works but it’s the foreigners/benefit thieves/refugees stealing your money/house/jobs. That is inherently quite easy to understand without much thought or critical thinking. The left on the other hand have to tell you all about Thatcher, Reagan and neoliberalism before we even get to the point of solutions which are usually incredibly radical like changing the fundamental economic model we’ve all been operating under since the 80s. Inherent in that is a fear that the left’s solutions will take assets and wealth away from people. While the right promises that your assets, wealth and property rights are sacred and that it’s the “other” that will have their assets, wealth and rights taken away. Again, very easy-to-understand messaging for the right versus the left.

Genuine question, where are the extreme left rising? I haven’t seen any but that might be the algorithms/my news sources talking.

I totally agree that neoliberal economics are essentially what we understand to be economics now. To be clear, I’m not blaming the left, I think it’s a case of they have a more difficult message to convey. To explain the problems that neoliberal economics has and to propose a solution to them is a really hard task compared with “it’s the foreigners at fault”. It’s a much clearer, more concise and seemingly solvable problem compared with “we need to overhaul the global economy”.

So I didn’t make a statement about that. I’m making a statement about what these results might tell us, admittedly in a very simplistic way.

Far right parties gaining significant popularity especially in France and Germany. It’s not great for the neo-liberal centre who created and perpetuated the economic downturn we’re all in and indicates a failure of the left to present a coherent alternative. There’s a lot to unpack about it. France has already dissolved their parliament and triggered an election because of these results.

I’ve been programming for too long, my brain just autocorrected the typo so initially didn’t get the joke…

Again, this existed before AI. Typo squatting, supply chain attacks, automated package uploads, CI pipeline infection, they’re all known attack vectors. That’s not to say this isn’t a concern, just that it’s a known risk and the addition of “AI” doesn’t, to my eyes, increase that risk. If your SSH keys don’t require a password, you have taken the decision to make those keys less secure but more convenient to use. That’s pretty much always the tradeoff in security.

The risk here is slightly overblown or misrepresented. Just because a fork exists doesn’t mean that anyone has even read it, let alone run it on their system. For this to be a real threat they would have to publish packages with identical or similar names (ie typo-squatting) to public package repositories which this article didn’t have any information on but which is a known problem long before AI. The level of obfuscation and number of repos affected is impressive but ultimately unlikely to have widespread impact to anyone besides GitHub.

I think for most people it’s whatever you got used to first. I agree the hatred the GUIs get is overblown. I would always recommend people learn the command line but if you want to use a GUI, go for it, doesn’t affect me unless your commits are bad, in which case the CLI wouldn’t have helped anyway.

I’ve heard the argument as a positive of learning vim and while it did finally force me to touch type I can’t say that it had any impact on my programming speed.

I agree with those saying mailing lists are intimidating. I don’t know if others are using dedicated tools or something but I find web based mailing list UIs just incomprehensibly bad and difficult to navigate.