Five comments where embedding-shape said the quiet part clearly

> The excuse that we don't need to know how things work because AI will take care of it is going to bite a lot of people on their asses

Abstractions always led to this sort of behavior. So many of my web development peers screamed at me for being curious about what happens behind/further down then the stack we were learning, and this was decades ago. Seems it differs a lot per person, and what I've found out only later, depending on the situation; nowadays I'm comfortable with both approaches of "this is below the abstraction I actually care about" and "No, I have to dive deeper to actually understand properly the abstraction level I'm at right now"

I think this is something like a "delayed cargo culting", or "cargo culting based on outdated facts". I think it's basically the same as the hypothesis from the "Monkey Ladder Experiment", where monkeys got punished when trying to get a banana, and eventually all the monkeys were replaced with monkeys that didn't realize why the banana was off-limits, yet persisted in trying to "help" other monkeys trying to prevent them from getting the banana.

I'm not sure if I read that that specific experiment was debunked or not, but it certainly sounds familiar to how some developer trends get propagated even though the ground truth as changed.

I mean, I don't think anyone can say for sure if "GitHub became GitHub because git was the winner" or "Git became mainstream because GitHub won the developer mindshare", pretty much everyone I knew used GitHub for everything besides the actual VCS protocol, although a lot of us early users were users of GitHub especially because of git.

Most people just wanted to collaborate on the platform other people were on, and where the popular projects were, that it used git was just an implementation detail at that point for most I think.

Some people are guilty of writing stuff as they go along it as well. You could maybe even say they're more like "thinking out loud", forming the idea and the conclusion as they go along rather than knowing it from the beginning. Then later, when they have some realization, like "thinking out loud isn't entirely accurate, but...", they keep the entire comment as-is rather than continuously iterate on it like a diffusion model would do. So the post becomes like a chronological archive of what the author thought and/or did, rather than just the conclusion.

I think it's useful to separate "tech" from "the VC ecosystem" and "most of tech leadership", the former being a huge range of people, while the latter two being a small group comparatively.

Not to mention HN is yet another sub-section of the "tech" ecosystem with a small cross-section of VC and startups, although that was indeed the focus on the beginning, I think the scope of HN has grown quite a lot since its beginnings.