Readit NewsWe're not actually entitled to know the exact details of someone's job ending. They worked there. Now they don't. That much is the bit we're entitled to.
In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn that this reporter was fired and yet Ars Technica doesn’t publish a snippet of an article about it.
There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues and being forthright with actions and consequences. In this age of indignation and fear of being perceived as weak or vulnerable due to honesty, I would’ve thought that Ars would be or could’ve been a beacon for how things should be talked about.
It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level.
This has been done very professionally. They pulled the article. They handled the personnel matter. They didn't try to pretend it hasn't happened.
Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an attempt to hide something. They literally replaced the whole text with a note from the editor saying "this article was bad".
It was so easy to get the terminal functionality going with `libghostty`. Most time was spent building the functionality around it.
Thanks for making it.
People rely too much on other people's infra and services, which can be decommissioned anytime. The Google Graveyard is real.
Fast forward a few months, I never received a refund and they claim they have no record any more. I could chargeback my credit card but I imagine I'd also be permanently banned from Amazon - so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...
(if anyone from Amazon is reading this, my email is in my bio!)
For code that is meant to be an expression of programmers, meant to be art, then yes code formatters should be an optional tool in the artist's quiver.
For code that is meant to be functional, one of the business goals is uniformity such that the programmers working on the code can be replaced like cogs, such that there is no individuality or voice. In that regard, yes, code-formatters are good and voice is bad.
Similarly, an artist painting art should be free. An "artist" painting the "BUS" lines on a road should not take liberties, they should make it have the exact proportions and color of all the other "BUS" markings.
You can easily see this in the choices of languages. Haskell and lisp were made to express thought and beauty, and so they allow abstractions and give formatting freedom by default.
Go was made to try and make Googlers as cog-like and replaceable as possible, to minimize programmer voice and crush creativity and soul wherever possible, so formatting is deeply embedded in the language tooling and you're discouraged from building any truly beautiful abstractions.
Chaos, sure, but beautiful chaos.