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Changing how we develop Ladybird

ladybird.org

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Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#291

Post by rhubarbtree »

I see this as the slow death of OpenSource.

It’s controversial to say, and I may be downvoted, but I’ll share this as a pov: OSS is essentially giving away our work for free. Did that ever really make sense? If it does, why don’t graphic designers give their work away for free? Why don’t authors do that? UX designers?

It’s a very peculiar thing to us nerds.

And the strangest thing is, we may have unwittingly built the data source required to make our skills redundant, as models are trained on the work we gave away for free.

I think this is an interesting narrative.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#292

Post by bakugo »

jeremyjh wrote: post #241
adrian17 wrote: post #211

Reading this leaves a weird taste in my mouth, since the author tends to regularly make nontrivial >1k LOC PRs (sometimes several per day) and merge them on the same day with no reviews at all. This is even ignoring the LLM aspect; I don't know what % of them are assisted, but even if it was 0%, this isn't the pace of development I'd be comfortable with.

Yes, I have lost faith in some open source project maintainers that are doing this. There is an open source platform we've used for years at work (we use the paid Enterprise version of it) that introduced some pretty grotesque security flaws and when I looked into it I realized AI had taken over the project - you can clearly see it in the commit log whether it is attributed or not, just based on volume and frequency.…

Why not name the project in question?

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#293

Post by m0llusk »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #192
debugnik wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell no, open source is just about the licence, and source available generally refers to proprietary licenses that at least let customers access the source. This is just the cathedral model to open source, as opposed to the bazaar you clearly prefer, but it's still open source.

By definition yes, but I believe most people consider open contribution essential for OSS.

Abandoning editorial control is poison for all composed works.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#294

Post by jeltz »

rjh29 wrote: post #135
satvikpendem wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they say, just send me the prompt instead, at least that's more useful.

For anything but the most trivial change, a prompt is not enough though. There's a long iterative process of generating the right code, reviewing it, testing it, experimenting with UX or design for maintainability, fixing bugs... even a predominantly AI-generated PR can capture a lot of value. But apparently trying to distinguish those from the 'one-shot' vibe coded PRs is too much work for the Ladybird team.

> But apparently trying to distinguish those from the 'one-shot' vibe coded PRs is too much work for the Ladybird team.

Yes, that is exactly what this announcement is about. That it was too much work for them to tell those two apart.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#295

Post by rhubarbtree »

vrganj wrote: post #31

LLMs are killing open source just like they're killing online discussion forums. It's heartbreaking, my two favorite things about the internet are dying off because human interaction can't outscale AI slop.

And most social media, and blogs.

Newspapers are adopting it too, so soon we may see slop dominate even high brow publications.

Feels like a huge shift in human intellectual capabilities. Honestly quite worrying, I don’t think it’s a Luddite position to say that removing writing is removing thinking.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#296

Post by jeltz »

Hendrikto wrote: post #104
domenicd wrote: post #80

Fascinating to see that Chromium/Gecko/WebKit are now more "open" browser engines than Ladybird, at least in one important respect. (Servo is arguably in the middle, accepting outside contributions as long as you don't use AI.) It's understandable that a team without much funding would have to close off contributions to spare on labor costs. But, it makes me feel that people don't give Google/Mozilla/Apple enough cre…

Those corporations are not doing that out of the good of their hearts. They are doing so to assert control, in order to protect their business value. If it stopped being economical for them, they would stop tomorrow. I do not think we should be eternally grateful for monopoly building.

Yeah, they are essentially praising price dumping.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#297

Post by Fraterkes »

Intralexical wrote: post #274
Fraterkes wrote: post #66

I've been looking a lot at Godot (another big open source project) PRs lately, and there's been kind of a surge of wholy ai-generated PRs (both code and description). This is agains project-policy, so people creating these PRs usually get mildly told off. What's surprising is that while many submitters take that fairly well, some people get really indignant, essentially calling the maintainers ungrateful. It's kinda…

> What's surprising is that while many submitters take that fairly well, some people get really indignant, essentially calling the maintainers ungrateful. Why is it surprising that some people who expect results without spending any effort also feel entitled to receiving gratitude without putting in any thought?

If I don’t word these critiques in the most diplomatic way possible, this immediately turns into a discussion about the prevalence of anti-ai sentiment on hn. Which would be boring.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#298

Post by efficax »

maplethorpe wrote: post #283

Their loss. Think about it. Anthropic just reported that their codebase is now improving itself. We're moments away from every open source repo being able to do the same. Think of it like torrenting — you'll be able to open your repo to the public, and have a stream of code flow in from millions of contributors. More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days. Lad…

> open your repo to the public, and have a stream of code flow in from millions of contributors. More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days.

why would you want this. this sounds terrible

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#299

Post by lioeters »

kristoff_it wrote: post #132

The problem statement is clear to everybody. > For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself. The solution, IMO, is a strictly worse version than what we chose in the Zig project (banning LLM contributions). > AI tools have changed the eco…

The Zig project is making a real difference in the culture of open source software. I'm so glad for the leadership and community. It's a refuge from the mania of large language models disrupting this and other industries, steamrolling over human connection, decency, ingenuity, class, taste. These intangible qualities that make it worthwhile, joyous and fun, will be destroyed unless people put in effort to protect them.

Comments in this thread that insist open source has nothing to do with community, that it's simply a licensing matter, is disappointing and shows a lack of understanding of what's it's all about. Similarly with the community of mathematicians. Some people reduce it to "Math is just a tool", which is just ignorant and sadly misses the beauty, wisdom, camaraderie, and the humanity of the endeavor which is what matters.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#300

Post by rhubarbtree »

casey2 wrote: post #209

I don't understand why people contribute AI slop to existing projects. You move 1000x faster. Just write your own browser in 2 days.

I want someone to resolve the contradiction you have highlighted. Why don’t we now have an AI built web browser that is much better faster than chrome?

To that mind, why hasn’t chrome itself become 1000x better?

There is a disconnect between the narrative and reality.

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