I don't see how disallowing viewing "age-restricted" content through Discord without giving them your ID would have any impact on the spread of disinformation, outside of like, disinfo in the form or pornographic or gory images.
IRC does not support group voice & video calls, which is one of the primary features of Discord (and previously Skype, from which everyone migrated to Discord in the first place)
It's a viable system for the many open source software projects that collaborate over chat. Expo, Typescript, and Effect are relatively large examples. I'll participate there if available and I get locked out. Otherwise, I'll just use the stuff without contributing, no problem.
IRC exposes your IP and you can't even access history unless you're willing to self-host your own bouncer, which costs time, money, and risk even if you already know how to do it, which most people don't. Being IRC only will exclude a lot of people who want to contribute to your project while also adding a lot of friction to the mere act of sharing screenshots, which is problematic if you have any software which renders to something not text.
I grew up on IRC and still use it, I have my own bouncer set up, etc. But the devs on Discord and not IRC probably aren't the devs with the skillset and resources to host their own server and bouncer. IRC just isn't in the running to fill the Discord shaped hole.
That hasn't been true for decades, and even if it was, it sounds like Hollywood's idea of a problem.
>IRC only will exclude a lot of people
If they can't figure out how to point a client to an IRC server, their contribution is worthless. It's the most trivial barrier to entry possible.
>sharing screenshots
Print screen > paste to image host > share link. Not hard.
I get that the Discord experience is slick, if you're willing to give up any sort of privacy or confidentiality. IRC is lightweight and simple, and its shortcomings can be worked around without too much effort. Discord is bloated, malicious, evil - I will gladly suffer some inconveniences of IRC.
Keep in mind that I am an IRC user, and I am not advocating for staying on Discord. I'm just stating that IRC is not - and probably never will be - a contender for "Discord alternatives", even among developers.
I can still see other peoples IPs on IRC today. When writing this comment, I can see people on major IRC servers with IP addresses that appear to correspond to consumer ISPs.
Another benefit of not being on IRC is that they don't have to interact with people who will disregard their contributions as "worthless". That's so dismissive of other people that I can't really take your comment seriously on the topic of interpersonal collaboration and communication.
And yes, even sharing screenshots becomes difficult. What host would you use that works in every country the IRC server operates in, works with people using any given VPN, and has a ToS and PP that is at least not worse than Discord's? Keep in mind this excludes Imgur and Catbox.
IRC is not simple and its many problems are not trivial.
I haven't used an IRC server implementation in 20 years that doesn't do host masking. (IE; cloaking of client IP addresses).
That said, I'm biased as I have been running an IRC community for 22 years or so... but I prefer to have video/voice in it's own system. (mumble/jitsi)
XMPP and IRC are great and all but a massive part of what people use Discord for is group voice calls with screen-sharing. I'm not sure what the alternative is for that. TeamSpeak is the closest I can think of but it's not a 1:1 replacement for a number of reasons.
it's possible to integrate jitsi in such a way that the chat has a function that will open a jitsi room and share the link to that. on irc this could be a bot. for people used to irc that's seamless enough. for something more convenient you'd want to integrate that feature into the chat client interface such that it can track who is in which jitsi room, etc...
It sounds more like you want to have bigger, cooler things, not build them? The joy of building is what the person you're replying to is talking about AI abstracting away
I am still getting joy out of building things. If anything, I have a bit more joy than I used to because I can accomplish small things faster. I still find the work to be mentally demanding and interesting, and there are a lot of new interesting problems to solve.
I empathize and understand that not everyone has this experience.
Are you saying you were forced to go into management because you felt like you couldn't be an effective engineer without working overtime? I'm confused. That sounds more like your work environment was terrible
You're spot on. And maybe I've only ever worked in terrible eng environments which is an interesting thought for me. I'll have to reflect on this. Sounds like you've had the opposite experience?
My workplace at least values work/life balance and buys into the idea that workers who aren't burnt out are more likely to stick around long-term and do good work (which I've found to be true in my own experience so far.) If we can't get done what we need to get done in a 40h workweek, then that's a failure of higher-level planning (or that we're simply understaffed), not that ICs need to be working overtime.
> "The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here"
What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.
> "I don't get the sour opinions."
The reasoning for folks' "sour opinions" has been very well-documented, especially here on HN. This comment reads like people don't like AI because they think it's slow or something, which is not the case.
> What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.
I don't know what jobs have been impacted yet, but there will likely be pressure for all content creators and knowledge workers to use the tools to get more work done.
We'll probably start seeing this in software development this year. The tools finally feel ready for prime time.
> This comment reads like people don't like AI because they think it's slow or something, which is not the case.
I am familiar with the most common arguments in opposition - stealing training data, hallucinations, not understanding logic (this is why "engineers in the loop" matters), big corps owning the tech (I really agree with this one), power usage, etc.
It feels as though the downvotes are from people that "dislike AI" for any of the aforementioned reasons. In the face of the possibility of losing jobs to engineers that leverage AI to get more quality work done, however, I don't know why HN engineers downvote anecdotes about real world usage. This is vital to know and understand. I would think one would want more evidence to consider about the state of things.
This is a quickly developing story. Your jobs are or will be on the line.
It doesn't matter what your personal misgivings are if your job will soon require the use of AI. You can hate it all you want, but if people are getting 10x more work done than you, you really don't have a choice.
This will be the same in every career sector with AI models that can be deployed to automate work -- marketing, editing, film, animation, VFX, software, music production, 3D modeling, game design, etc.
I don't think the jobs are going away, but I do think they're going to change. Fast.
> I don't know what jobs have been impacted yet, but there will likely be pressure for all content creators and knowledge workers to use the tools to get more work done.
You claimed that it already happened to illustrators and artists, and while I am sure they use it one way or another, I don't think it transformed the industry. Now, I am not saying that it won't amount to anything in software, I just don't think it is ready as of right now outside of greenfield projects, mostly because the scope is limited.
I am pretty positive that at some point we'll have a tool which will automate the generation -> code review -> fixing (multiple loops) -> releasing without people. Currently people are the bottleneck and imo a better way is to exclude people completely outside of initial problem statement and accepting the result. Otherwise it is just too janky, that 10x comes with a huge asterisk that can unironically slow you down after all said and done.
I think fundamentally this approach is flawed for anything more complex than a simple endpoint. AI is already really good for throwaway code, that is very clear, it is also decent if you watch it like a hawk.
However, the complexity is still not handled super well, as you need to spend more time in code review and testing to make sure all edge cases are covered and the general module interconnection is decent. Ideally we want to modularize and make the breaking surface very small, but often it is not possible.
I think the next step is to fully remove people as accepting changes manually is just too brittle; I also think it is probably possible to do with the current tools but needs a very different approach from the current meta of highly specific docs.
> What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.
large part of formerly done by humans graphics is now autogenerated
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