Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here, and that he is just spelling out the reality that developers are, or shortly will be, facing. For many this will be deeply uncomfortable to hear.
It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
> Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here
One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias where a person spots major errors in a media report on a topic they know well, yet completely forgets that unreliability and trusts the rest of the same publication on unfamiliar topics.
Yes. I am broadening the definition of "media" and "publication", maybe, though it is posts on his own publishing platform and performances at his own breakaway conference.
But if someone misrepresents deliberately on a topic of polarising importance, why would you spend any time listening to them on any other topic?
I would (still) listen to him if I did not know he wrote stupid wrong things on other topics in bad faith.
Apparently somewhere between a third to a half of American scientists believe in some kind of god. Not to denegrate those who believe, but that's some kind of compartmentalization going on. Politics isn't any different. I dunno, I guess I don't have much issue listening to people with whom I disagree. Some people just get stuck on things. I do to, and maybe I'm the one that's wrong.
Respectfully, your comment I replied to was very much this. Your dismissal is based on the person rather than the substance... on the basis of their political opinion in a completely unrelated field. Being wrong, and an asshole, about one thing doesn't make one wrong about everything else by association.
Ignoring dhh because he's offensive is totally reasonable and if that's what you meant well that's different.
> Your dismissal is based on the person rather than the substance…
It's fully based on the substance of the point as well. DHH's view is not just wrong, it's wilfully misleading, on a topic of enormous significance, to further a bad faith point. He could have retracted or amended it when presented with the facts; he has not. So this is a problem of substance as well as person.
From there yes, I get to a point about the person. IMO it is a useful practical definition of madness to pretend that someone acting in bad faith can be trusted to do it only on a single divisive topic.
Given two people, one a manipulative antivaxxer and one not: are you saying you don't factor your view on their anti-vaxx thoughts into their recommendations on other fact-based topics?
For me, these people simply get deleted from my brain, as far as possible.
These are simple judgements about the likelihood someone's opinion on a topic I do not know about is going to be good. When I know that their other opinions are clearly wrong and held in bad faith, I am going to take that into account.
(Where religion comes into things is where it becomes mostly a question of personality.)
Do you automatically dismiss everything someone says based on their opinions on other topics not relevant to their main job? Is everything always absolutes?
DHH or anyone else spouting opinions on social media is hardly qualified to be setting policies for countries. Social media is also hardly the place to have any sort of debate on those topics.
Aha, the common HN tactic of expanding someone’s argument until it appears ridiculous and then attacking that. But I will bite.
It tends to only be when someone is egregiously wrong or (as in the case IMO) acting in deliberate bad faith on a topic of massive public concern, like this. Because these people are a waste of psychological resources.
I totally write off proselytising antivaxxers who I think should have reason to know better, I tend to write off climate change deniers who should know better, and yes, I tend to write off educated people who mislead with statistics to create intellectual cover for xenophobic, bigoted thugs and their antisocial campaigns.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good one. Other people who get written off tend to have a nasty streak on a topic of some divisiveness. For example I am not religious but not anti-religious; I am anti being deliberately or loudly cruel, posturing or nasty about it either way. People who are like that can be like that, but they will not get to tell me about their professional interests as if their awful behaviour is just a quirk.
YMMV, but I am now middle aged and I don’t have the time for this anymore. Freedom of speech isn’t without consequences for loss of respect. If you think my position awful or lily-livered you are fully within your rights to let it colour your judgement of my opinions on technology.
Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_. In this case, DHH is (according to some) an expert on software but it's much less clear he's an expert on politics. So I'm not sure Gell-Mann amnesia applies here, it's maybe more like Nobel disease, where you're an expert on one thing and assume it "transfers" to other fields.
I have a background in sociology and urban planning. It's very clear that DHH is not an expert on politics. His blog posts demonstrate a very elementary understanding of the topics he covers. He doesn't even understand statistics.
People say "background" here, because the default assumption is HN readers have software expertise, but it's frequently unclear what else, if anything, they have here.
I do agree "background" is vague, but I generally assume the minimal threshold to say that is something like a previous career, undergraduate degree, or graduate degree in the background. I personally wouldn't say I had a background in something I was only an amateur enthusiast of.
---
That being said, what on earth gives you the idea a substantial background in sociology WOULDN'T be relevant here?
Because I understand what sociology is and isn't, since I too have "a background" in sociology and urban development. As well as statistics, history and even futurology.
Appeal to authority is a bias for a reason. In this case it wasn't even that well executed.
A "background in software development" (an HR or a marketing girl in the website design sweatshop) does not give enough relevance and authority to speak about the technical details of Linux kernel. Vice versa.
I'm glad you found that interesting, whoever you are. KingMob is right, though: I have college degrees in those subjects, and I work in urban planning. However, that doesn't make my post an appeal to authority. He discusses topics that have been very thoroughly studied over the course of decades, and he seems unfamiliar with these studies. He seems to go for a "it's just basic logic, right?" approach in many of his posts. It's not very effective writing - but perhaps it is if you have no background in these subjects?
Anyway, all I was saying is that reading his posts as a somewhat informed reader leaves me with the impression that he doesn't have a deep understanding of these topics. I studied (25 years ago) many topics that he likes to tell us his thoughts about, such as systemic racism, consumer behavior, nationalism, how to read bar charts, etc. It would be pretty easy for many people to tear open his posts, but he doesn't enable comments.
Haven't heard him talking about urban development, except for a general preference for European-style urban design (safety, efficiency, for people), and the overall terrible American car-centered design. Please correct me if he did say something incorrect about the urban design.
I don't think so. But urban planning covers a lot more than design and development and transportation. There's lots of history that inevitably includes exclusionary housing and redlining (e.g., historical systemic racism) and crime, as well as immigration, policing, job accessibility, and more. He's had a few posts that touch upon some of these. In sum, I think he's intellectually lazy.
> Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_.
Incidentally, this is also the fundamental flaw with Crichton's original description of the effect which questioned the accuracy of reporting about international affairs. When it comes to politics, simply having access to important leaders and meetings and reporting on them accurately and fairly is the only "journalistic expertise" you need.
Of course, the even broader problem with the concept is that, in reality, there are some articles written by journalists that contain a reasonable understanding of the subject matter, and some articles that do not. So seeing an article written about your field of expertise that contains misunderstandings doesn't by itself tell you anything about the distribution of good and bad articles covering any particular field.
Thank you for mentioning the effect by name. I read first about it 20 years ago, memorized it under a totally different name, and was never able to find it again.
With his infamous "As I remember London" article [1] he directly correlated skin colour to nationality leading to the claim that native Brits had dropped from 60% to a third.
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
>So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
His exact words from the blog:
"In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third."
White Brits are the only native/indigenous Brits to London. It's not misleading, it's just a fact. He did not interpret this fact incorrectly.
That's disingenuous because it's a neologism based on the population that were in America at the time of its colonisation. Native literally has the etymology of place of birth in the word.
You're mixing nationality, a piece of paper, with being "native", an ethnic group. Does not work in countries across Europe, Japan, Korea, etc. The settling of the USA and its cultural dominance has broken peoples brains. Europe is inhabited by its indigenous people!
The English are an ethnic group (ask 23andMe) and they are the founding stock of Great Britain. Source - the far right extremist wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
London was 97.7% white in 1960.
Now it is around 50%, and falling.
Again, source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
Is that good or bad? Leave that one up for debate, I mostly care about facts.
The literal definition and etymology of 'native' relates to birth, check a dictionary and the definition will read the same. The truth is that 60% of London's population is made up of native Brits and that hasn't changed at all over the last 25 years.
I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.
It’s a little closer to DHH’s point about the percentage of British people (the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are not simply “ethnic English”).
But it’s still very wrong. At that point it was a ninteeen-hundred-year old working international port city, it has had a large population of Jews of European descent for centuries (the first large community being so notable that they were discriminated against in Magna Carta, after all), various displaced populations after WWI and WWII, a very large Irish population, thousands of Italians, many Dutch.
In the 1800s French Huguenot refugees and their immediate descendants made up perhaps ten per cent of the population of London (figures vary, considerably, could be 3% or nearer 15% depending on the boundary definition you choose and that at the time of their arrival the UK had no formal immigration policy so no exact numbers — but over 200,000 settled in mainland Britain). A truly astonishing number arrived and the city simply made room. But they didn’t leave; they assimilated. Same thing happened with Dutch exile craftsmen.
This happens a lot in London’s history: <a href="https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/HistoryofContributions.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Historyof...
So he is wrong (and IMO ought to have known some of this) and you are not at all on the right track either.
People just have no grasp of the nearly unique reality of London as a historical melting pot. By 1960 its diversity was eclipsed by American cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, but this idea that London was somehow traditionally “ethnically British” to the point of being a quaint monoculture is fully crackers. Just not true. The difference since 1960 is just more visible because we started adding more literal colour from the Commonwealth.
A place worth visiting for Brits who don't believe this and tourists who are interested:
That is also bullshit (although a popular myth, deliberately cultivated by 19th-century English supremacists to justify subjugating their Celtic neighbors). Every region in Britain has a majority of Insular Celtic DNA on average (though the fraction varies). Even in the most heavily Anglo-Saxon regions like East Anglia, Germanic DNA is in the minority.
And of course the Celtic Britons replaced the Neolithic farmers, who replaced the Mesolithic foragers, and so on. "Indigenous" becomes meaningless with so many population replacements.
You think Celtic Brits don't count as white? Have you seen us? We're some of the pastiest looking people you will ever meet. I could get sunburnt opening the fridge.
Oh hon, I am your Irish people transported across a sea. In this part of my family, “happily” by personal decision, as opposed to the other half that wound up in Australia. The sun and I have made our peace.
But I’ll happily burn my skin red to protest racist shits. And some of them open with this old trope. Apparently my response is almost as old a trope. But that’s not what Boudicca told us when we fought the Romans.
robgough · · focus · HN ↗
It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
dorianmariecom · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
But if someone misrepresents deliberately on a topic of polarising importance, why would you spend any time listening to them on any other topic?
I would (still) listen to him if I did not know he wrote stupid wrong things on other topics in bad faith.
goosejuice · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
goosejuice · · focus · HN ↗
Ignoring dhh because he's offensive is totally reasonable and if that's what you meant well that's different.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
It's fully based on the substance of the point as well. DHH's view is not just wrong, it's wilfully misleading, on a topic of enormous significance, to further a bad faith point. He could have retracted or amended it when presented with the facts; he has not. So this is a problem of substance as well as person.
From there yes, I get to a point about the person. IMO it is a useful practical definition of madness to pretend that someone acting in bad faith can be trusted to do it only on a single divisive topic.
Given two people, one a manipulative antivaxxer and one not: are you saying you don't factor your view on their anti-vaxx thoughts into their recommendations on other fact-based topics?
For me, these people simply get deleted from my brain, as far as possible.
These are simple judgements about the likelihood someone's opinion on a topic I do not know about is going to be good. When I know that their other opinions are clearly wrong and held in bad faith, I am going to take that into account.
(Where religion comes into things is where it becomes mostly a question of personality.)
goosejuice · · focus · HN ↗
mattbrewsbytes · · focus · HN ↗
DHH or anyone else spouting opinions on social media is hardly qualified to be setting policies for countries. Social media is also hardly the place to have any sort of debate on those topics.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
It tends to only be when someone is egregiously wrong or (as in the case IMO) acting in deliberate bad faith on a topic of massive public concern, like this. Because these people are a waste of psychological resources.
I totally write off proselytising antivaxxers who I think should have reason to know better, I tend to write off climate change deniers who should know better, and yes, I tend to write off educated people who mislead with statistics to create intellectual cover for xenophobic, bigoted thugs and their antisocial campaigns.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good one. Other people who get written off tend to have a nasty streak on a topic of some divisiveness. For example I am not religious but not anti-religious; I am anti being deliberately or loudly cruel, posturing or nasty about it either way. People who are like that can be like that, but they will not get to tell me about their professional interests as if their awful behaviour is just a quirk.
YMMV, but I am now middle aged and I don’t have the time for this anymore. Freedom of speech isn’t without consequences for loss of respect. If you think my position awful or lily-livered you are fully within your rights to let it colour your judgement of my opinions on technology.
themgt · · focus · HN ↗
The one for me is spotting the Baader-Meinhof effect, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
revetkn · · focus · HN ↗
ryantgtg · · focus · HN ↗
I have a background in sociology and urban planning. It's very clear that DHH is not an expert on politics. His blog posts demonstrate a very elementary understanding of the topics he covers. He doesn't even understand statistics.
revetkn · · focus · HN ↗
sejje · · focus · HN ↗
specialist · · focus · HN ↗
Crichton's Law: unwittingly serving as the best example of one's own snarky law.
machomaster · · focus · HN ↗
What an interesting way to make it sound like that means anything. "Background" - how appropriately vague...
And how exactly does this make you an expert on European, and especially Danish, immigration, culture and vox populi?
KingMob · · focus · HN ↗
I do agree "background" is vague, but I generally assume the minimal threshold to say that is something like a previous career, undergraduate degree, or graduate degree in the background. I personally wouldn't say I had a background in something I was only an amateur enthusiast of.
---
That being said, what on earth gives you the idea a substantial background in sociology WOULDN'T be relevant here?
machomaster · · focus · HN ↗
Appeal to authority is a bias for a reason. In this case it wasn't even that well executed.
A "background in software development" (an HR or a marketing girl in the website design sweatshop) does not give enough relevance and authority to speak about the technical details of Linux kernel. Vice versa.
ryantgtg · · focus · HN ↗
Anyway, all I was saying is that reading his posts as a somewhat informed reader leaves me with the impression that he doesn't have a deep understanding of these topics. I studied (25 years ago) many topics that he likes to tell us his thoughts about, such as systemic racism, consumer behavior, nationalism, how to read bar charts, etc. It would be pretty easy for many people to tear open his posts, but he doesn't enable comments.
machomaster · · focus · HN ↗
ryantgtg · · focus · HN ↗
throwawayfifo · · focus · HN ↗
Examples of these claims?
ryantgtg · · focus · HN ↗
throwawayfifo · · focus · HN ↗
tshaddox · · focus · HN ↗
Incidentally, this is also the fundamental flaw with Crichton's original description of the effect which questioned the accuracy of reporting about international affairs. When it comes to politics, simply having access to important leaders and meetings and reporting on them accurately and fairly is the only "journalistic expertise" you need.
Of course, the even broader problem with the concept is that, in reality, there are some articles written by journalists that contain a reasonable understanding of the subject matter, and some articles that do not. So seeing an article written about your field of expertise that contains misunderstandings doesn't by itself tell you anything about the distribution of good and bad articles covering any particular field.
suhlig · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
diego_sandoval · · focus · HN ↗
Any specific examples? I am/was out of the loop on this and had to Google "DHH politics" to know what people are talking about.
rossriley · · focus · HN ↗
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
[1] <a href="https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64" rel="nofollow">https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
WillPostForFood · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
spiralpolitik · · focus · HN ↗
nixon_why69 · · focus · HN ↗
throwawayfifo · · focus · HN ↗
His exact words from the blog:
"In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third."
White Brits are the only native/indigenous Brits to London. It's not misleading, it's just a fact. He did not interpret this fact incorrectly.
rossriley · · focus · HN ↗
sejje · · focus · HN ↗
rossriley · · focus · HN ↗
sejje · · focus · HN ↗
sejje · · focus · HN ↗
shadowtree · · focus · HN ↗
You're mixing nationality, a piece of paper, with being "native", an ethnic group. Does not work in countries across Europe, Japan, Korea, etc. The settling of the USA and its cultural dominance has broken peoples brains. Europe is inhabited by its indigenous people!
The English are an ethnic group (ask 23andMe) and they are the founding stock of Great Britain. Source - the far right extremist wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
London was 97.7% white in 1960. Now it is around 50%, and falling. Again, source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
Is that good or bad? Leave that one up for debate, I mostly care about facts.
rossriley · · focus · HN ↗
shadowtree · · focus · HN ↗
dwaltrip · · focus · HN ↗
simianwords · · focus · HN ↗
you obviously know this because you know what "native americans" means.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.
It’s a little closer to DHH’s point about the percentage of British people (the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are not simply “ethnic English”).
But it’s still very wrong. At that point it was a ninteeen-hundred-year old working international port city, it has had a large population of Jews of European descent for centuries (the first large community being so notable that they were discriminated against in Magna Carta, after all), various displaced populations after WWI and WWII, a very large Irish population, thousands of Italians, many Dutch.
In the 1800s French Huguenot refugees and their immediate descendants made up perhaps ten per cent of the population of London (figures vary, considerably, could be 3% or nearer 15% depending on the boundary definition you choose and that at the time of their arrival the UK had no formal immigration policy so no exact numbers — but over 200,000 settled in mainland Britain). A truly astonishing number arrived and the city simply made room. But they didn’t leave; they assimilated. Same thing happened with Dutch exile craftsmen.
This happens a lot in London’s history: <a href="https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/HistoryofContributions.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Historyof...
So he is wrong (and IMO ought to have known some of this) and you are not at all on the right track either.
People just have no grasp of the nearly unique reality of London as a historical melting pot. By 1960 its diversity was eclipsed by American cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, but this idea that London was somehow traditionally “ethnically British” to the point of being a quaint monoculture is fully crackers. Just not true. The difference since 1960 is just more visible because we started adding more literal colour from the Commonwealth.
A place worth visiting for Brits who don't believe this and tourists who are interested:
<a href="https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/docklands/" rel="nofollow">https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/docklands/
Super-cool museum space dedicated to London as a port city.
tclancy · · focus · HN ↗
Bullshit. They are Johann Come Later Germans who killed off the Celtic Brits.
senderista · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-03-19-who-do-you-think-you-really-are-genetic-map-british-isles" rel="nofollow">https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-03-19-who-do-you-think-you-re...
And of course the Celtic Britons replaced the Neolithic farmers, who replaced the Mesolithic foragers, and so on. "Indigenous" becomes meaningless with so many population replacements.
Lio · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
tclancy · · focus · HN ↗
But I’ll happily burn my skin red to protest racist shits. And some of them open with this old trope. Apparently my response is almost as old a trope. But that’s not what Boudicca told us when we fought the Romans.