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Astral to Join OpenAI

astral.sh

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#741

Post by saghm »

rtpg wrote: post #672
dahlia wrote: post #414

What strikes me most about this acquisition isn't the AI angle. It's the question of why so many open source tools get built by startup teams in the first place. I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund. Getting there wasn't easy: the application process is long, the amounts are modest compared to a VC round, and you have to build community trust before any of that becomes possible. But the…

uvs success is downstream of paying like 10 very good rust tooling developers to work on uv full time. Full time effort put into tools gets you a looooot of time to make things work well. Even ignoring the OSS stuff, many vendors seem to consider their own libs to be at best “some engineers spend a bit of time on them” projects!

Yeah, it's pretty hard to argue that at least for the python tooling use case, the typical open source methodologies had failed to solve things as well in a couple decades as uv did in a few years as a startup. The lesson we should take from that is probably more up for debate.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#743

Post by pojzon »

arw0n wrote: post #569
FuckButtons wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.

Ruff is nice, but not important, uv is one of the few things making the python ecosystem bearable. Python is a language for monkeys, and if you don't give monkeys good tools, they will forever entangle themselves and you . It is all garbage wrapped in garbage. At least let me deploy it without having to manually detangle all that garbage by version. I'm done pretending this is a "right tools for the right job" kind o…

Yes please, lets start with scraping to bin whole internet using javascript and its family.

See the point ?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#744

Post by applfanboysbgon »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #724
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Because they can", after spending a bunch of money to acquire an existing solution. I suppose when it's other people's money, there's no problem with burning it by the fistful. Apparently, "because they can" does not extend to building solutions with their own product.

They should just halt development immediately and build their own operating system from scratch! You realise that there’s certainly at least one Astral dev that uses Copilot or Claude Code or whatever, right? You’re so anti-AI that you’re making nonsensical arguments. The existence of AI doesn’t mean that human effort and skill and care is worth nothing. OpenAI has never argued that. Nothing is incongruent here excep…

Not anti-AI, but I am anti-gaslighting, and you are gaslighting just as well as Sam Altman here. Altman won't shut the fuck up about AGI, swapping between "AGI is here" one day and then "AGI is coming in two weeks" the next without a hint of shame as he lies to the public, lies to the media, and lies to investors. "Completely fictionalised worldview", fuck me you're good at this, I must have been imagining the fact that literally every single fucking day there's a thread at the top of HN declaring that anyone who still reads code no longer has a place, I must have been imagining things when the Amazon CEO said he was laying off developers because agents will replace them, I must have been imagining the fact that a ~trillion dollars are being invested into a chatbot on the supposition that if you just give it two more weeks, two more weeks, it will replace the entire white collar labour force.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#745

Post by saghm »

mcdonje wrote: post #464
kjksf wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is lack of money not lack of legal structure. Consider ffmpeg. You can donate via https://www.ffmpeg.org/spi.html How much money do they make from donations? I don't know but "In practice we frequently payed for travel and hardware." Translation: nothing at all. If such a fundamental project that is a revenue driver for so many companies, including midas-level rich companies like Google, can't even pay dece…

Google contributed tons of developer hours for things like bug fixes, without which the project might not be where it is today. There are examples of foundations or other similar entities paying developers, like Linux, SQLite, even Zig. Maybe the difference is some projects rely on core contributors more because external contributions are more restricted in some way. But sure, the entire open source model doesn't wor…

There's a wide gap between the arguments "the open source model doesn't work" and "the open source model failed to produce anything as good as uv after a couple decades of python tooling churn". The latter is why people are understandably unsure of where things go from here.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#746

Post by saghm »

dadrian wrote: post #475
hijodelsol wrote: post #12

This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years has adopted many of these technologies. Having their future depend on a cap-ex heavy company that is currently (based on reporting) spending approx. 2.5 dollars to make a dollar of revenue and must have hypergrowth in the next years or perish is less than ideal. This should discourage anybody doing…

As opposed to Pip, which is obviously free and sustainable forever.

And takes a lot closer to "forever" to download all of your dependencies

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#747

Post by birdfood »

NiloCK wrote: post #67

A concern: More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now. As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Clau…

These companies are telling us software development is over. They are positioning themselves as the means of production. You want to build anything you do it through them. And since ‘software is solved’ this is not a software but a user acquisition.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#748

Post by slopinthebag »

echelon wrote: post #470
pixelsort wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the many darker timelines that one can extrapolate, capturing essential tech stacks is just a pre-cursor to capturing hiring. Once we start seeing Open AI and Anthropic getting into the certifications and testing they'll quickly become the gold standard. They won't even need to actually test anyone. People will simply consent to having their chat interactions analyzed. The models collect more information about us…

As if there will be hiring in the fullness of time. There will come a day when you can will an entire business into existence at the press of a button. Maybe it has one or two people overseeing the business logic to make sure it doesn't go off the rails, but the point is that this is a 100x reduction in labor and a 100,000x speed up in terms of delivery. They'll price this as a $1M button press. Suddenly, labor capit…

This is pure fantasy. Even if LLM's eventually became this capable (they will not), your whole scenario doesn't make sense any sense.

What is far more likely is that governments use AI to oppress their citizens with robots and drones. That is the thing to be scared of.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#749

Post by larodi »

tasuki wrote: post #685
arw0n wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruff is nice, but not important, uv is one of the few things making the python ecosystem bearable. Python is a language for monkeys, and if you don't give monkeys good tools, they will forever entangle themselves and you . It is all garbage wrapped in garbage. At least let me deploy it without having to manually detangle all that garbage by version. I'm done pretending this is a "right tools for the right job" kind o…

Ahaha, I feel this comment. I used to do backend development in superior languages, and sometimes do hobby frontend in superior languages, but my work is Python now. And it kind of has to be Python: we do machine learning, and I work with GDAL and PDAL and all these other weird libraries and everything has Python bindings! I search for "coherent point drift" and of course there's a Python library. The superior langua…

relax, soon u be rewriting the essence of all these libs into something new. python has its days numbered also perhaps for many engineering decisions that are now cheap via llms.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#750

Post by Terretta »

aprdm wrote: post #673
arw0n wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruff is nice, but not important, uv is one of the few things making the python ecosystem bearable. Python is a language for monkeys, and if you don't give monkeys good tools, they will forever entangle themselves and you . It is all garbage wrapped in garbage. At least let me deploy it without having to manually detangle all that garbage by version. I'm done pretending this is a "right tools for the right job" kind o…

Python existed for years before uv with a huge ecosystem, and will continue to do so after/if it dies

uv, yes*, but really PEP 723:

https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/

* disclosure: We are a commercial client of astral.sh

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