Loyalists

can we start calling things human slop. i'm so sick of people acting like their code or math proof is inherently more valuable because they slaved away making it themselves. especially when the field is so fucking deterministic and we can actually check whether the result works. what gets me even more angry is when it's a thankless effort like oss. someone spends their valuable time making something for you, for free, and you think it's okay to criticize how they go about it and half the time, if they hadn't found an easier way to make it, the thing wouldn't exist at all. there isn't some "lovingly handcrafted" alternative waiting in the wings there's just nothing. each person being able to do way more means problems that wouldn't even have been given a thought can finally get solutions. somebody with a one-off bug in a game can go ahead and patch it themselves. somebody with a rare genetic condition could get together with a small group of people and have a real shot at contributing to research that nobody was prioritizing, without needing billions of dollars behind them just to get started. people can finally do things they couldn't do before, including things nobody else was ever going to bother doing for them, and your first instinct is to get mad about how they did it. i think that's so self-serving. when you'd rather something useful never existed than accept that somebody had an easier time making it than you would have, there's something genuinely ugly about that