Why open source maintainers burn out: an autopsy of entitlement culture. Dropping legacy support triggered an email storm that perfectly demonstrates the parasitic mindset keeping us trapped in the past.
The rise of single-maintainer projects like SQLite and curl isn't an anomaly - it's the future. Why committees kill innovation and how solo developers or super focused teams with clear vision will reshape open source.
Learn how to break free from the laboratory system, spot genuine technical leaders, and redirect your empathy to protect the real victims. Plus: How the "be kind" movement was weaponized to silence technical expertise.
From FOREX scammers to tech influencers: How the same laboratory system weaponizes your empathy, farms your confusion, and sells you certainty. The psychology behind why we defend our gurus and attack the experts who could actually help us.
Ruby Central forcibly removed the people who built RubyGems for over a decade, replacing them with a 'Director of Open Source' whose last Ruby code was a conference tutorial in 2010. This is the anatomy of a hostile takeover disguised as 'strengthening stewardship.'
I spend time in scammer communities studying grift patterns. When I saw RubyCademy's "simple refactoring" advice, something clicked. This isn't about one bad tweet - it's about recognizing the laboratory system that turns confused developers into revenue streams.
In 2024, I authored LRDL (LLM Requirements Definition Language) - the exact same concept as TOON. After spending thousands in API calls testing it, I found out only frontier models understand it, at extra thinking cost. Small models need structure. Deepseek started speaking Mandarin mid-discussion. Gemini replied in Russian. Claude refactored my Ruby code to Java. I wiped the guide from GitHub because I know any big project will output bad results. Now TOON is getting the same hype cycle, and we're heading toward software that's not only SLOP - it's dangerous.