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Changing how we develop Ladybird

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Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#341

Post by manuelz »

This is a very sad day.

Yes, Ladybird is facing a wall of slop... no... A tsunami of slop overwhelms core maintainers. Probably safe to generalize to other popular open source projects.

The project is important and the code is beautiful! I spent many happy hours trying to understand the code, browser-specs and tried to adapt to their coding style. After 18 months I ended up with a few merged PRs. Some were pure joy to write. I got to work directly with most of their core maintainers in the review cycle. They're great!! From the outside, it seems like their responsiveness to submissions slowed down in the last few months... slop.

Of course, it would be great if there was another way, but here we are.

Love <3 to Andreas and the core maintainer group! Keep up the good fight! Maybe we'll meet again.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#342

Post by flaviolivolsi »

patates wrote: post #131

When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected. Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the co…

Sonos? Did you mean Suno?

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#343

Post by vanviegen »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #276
torben-friis wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But all now seems like a transition phase. Transition to f-ing what though? It feels like being in the middle of a tornado. But I think it helps to turn off screens, sit in a desk, and calmly remember first principles and consider them slowly. Quoting obama, "reality has a way of catching up with you". I see a lot of talk, but iOS is not delivering a decade of features and fixes on each yearly release. Literally no…

I sense your comment as saying: "AI is hype, and reality will catch-up.". But the simple fact is there's massive evidence that in skilled hands 10x or 100x engineers are possible. We're seeing evidence of it across major open source project as well. And definitely behind closed doors across companies. Reality will catch-up with that too, once the other smoke clears.

> But the simple fact is there's massive evidence that in skilled hands 10x or 100x engineers are possible. We're seeing evidence of it across major open source project as well. And definitely behind closed doors across companies.

Each of these three sentences are in need of some evidence. I'm not actually seing any signs of software velocity notably increasing anywhere. Except perhaps in the AI-reseller sphere, but that seems mostly due to throwing huge amounts of VC money at it and a lack of quality control.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#344

Post by sodapopcan »

jatora wrote: post #332
patates wrote: post #131

When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected. Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the co…

> Also: I liked a song and it was sonos. I unliked it after discovering. I feel so stupid, so often. This is asinine. Keep depriving yourself of things you enjoy I guess?

It's not asinine at all. Context matters in art. Otherwise, more songs exist that I would probably really like than I will ever hear, so I'm going to focus on the human-made ones. Besides, part of the joy of music extends beyond listening. For many people, myself included, if we feel really connected to a song we like to learn about the people who created it.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#345

Post by appreciatorBus »

Yokohiii wrote: post #175
cpcallen wrote: post #42

On the one hand, if you grew up in the baazzar, moving to the cathedral might feel like the "death of open source" even if it is really just a return to an earlier way of working. On the other hand, while not accepting external code contributions will certainly improve their security posture it will also make it more difficult to identify who to invite to join the priesthood.

Open source development has become more and more superficial aligning with modern social network characteristics. It's more important to have an contribution, a active commit history, a few stars as a proof of pixel fame than the intrinsic value of the contributions or projects. Before the rise of github, open source projects were heavily walled gardens. Little clubs that gave you a stare when you entered the room. G…

Yes. Open source existed and thrived before GitHub, before git, and before anyone had ever used the words “pull request“.

It was different, to be sure, but it was not worse. We are living through a transition, but people do that all the time and we adjust our behaviour and we find new equilibriums. We will do that with open source too, and if it ends up looking more like open source in the 80s or 90s, it’s gonna be fine.

Maybe some people who got really good at gaming their Github reputation are going to lose out, but that was never the point. Anyone who likes this kind of work and wants to get involved will find a way.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#346

Post by tejohnso »

wussboy wrote: post #338
jatora wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also: I liked a song and it was sonos. I unliked it after discovering. I feel so stupid, so often. This is asinine. Keep depriving yourself of things you enjoy I guess?

Perhaps knowing a human with talent worked on it, putting some small part of themselves and their lived experience into the music has value to them? If so, then their actions make complete sense.

Human created music might have value to them, but it doesn't mean that the AI song was valueless. They admit they enjoyed it. So it doesn't make sense in terms of it not having value.

I wouldn't say it's asinine though. People reject creative output out of personal protest against the creator. Someone might love a movie only to refuse to ever watch it again because they found out the director was accused of something horrible.

Some people just don't want to support anything to do with AI. Although in this case the OP admits to also using AI directly so there's some inconsistency there, which is consistent with the state of confusion and uncertainty OP is expressing.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#347

Post by acureau »

TekMol wrote: post #230
conradludgate wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was alluded to in the post - contributors turn into maintainers. Someone who contributes has a small but plausible chance of sticking around. For an open source project that isn't a business, that's really the only way to recruit people

But why recruit people, now that we have AI? Couldn't an agent monitor feature requests and bug reports, reason about them, and then implement and fix the ones it deems important?

For the same reason software engineers still employed. AI is not yet capable of autonomous software development. From my perspective we're nowhere close.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#348

Post by Sharlin »

artyom wrote: post #128
torben-friis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is certainly a certain... entitlement? (It's not the perfect word, but I fail to find a proper term) from some of the vibe crowd. Like an attachment to the output and refusal to accept that most of the work was not theirs. It is seen in the way they approach contributions but also in regular language. I created X, insistence that their 'curation' was very influencial to the output, difficulty to mention LLM con…

I agree it's not "entitlement" specifically but there's something there. I guess by now everyone has experienced that type of person that "tries to help" by copy/pasting a bunch of AI slop and expecting you to work through the cognitive load of validating it. The original post sums it pretty well, such big output inherently meant big effort, which was a proxy for good faith. Now that's gone.

It was a proof of work system. When work becomes cheap, it stops being proof.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#349

Post by simonw »

bakugo wrote: post #287
simonw wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's entirely consistent with what they said here: > Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences.

That's the philosophical argument. In practice, though, the effect of large unreviewed AI commits on the project and its users is likely to be the same regardless of whether those commits were prompted by a core developer or an outside contributor.

I don't buy that at all. A core developer producing a thousand line commit that they'll be responsible for over the remaining lifetime of the project is entirely different from a fire-and-forget PR from an outside contributor.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#350

Post by appreciatorBus »

gbalduzzi wrote: post #198
smartmic wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are great Open Source projects doing fine with the cathedral style, just look at Sqlite and its siblings (Fossil, …). So I do not see a problem with Ladybirds decision, in contrary, IMHO it strengthens the human aspect of software development and puts the brakes on AI free riders

I still don't see solutions on how a normal person can become a mantainer though. If all relevant open source projects close up their contributions, you can't enter the project anymore from an external point of view. Almost all open-source public figures started by being interested in a project and submitting PR to it, until eventually either joining the project as core mantainer or creating a separate open source pr…

> how a normal person can become a maintainer though.

Is the goal to produce high-quality software, or is the goal to produce an apprenticeship scheme for developers who are interested in the project but not so interested that they are willing to write an email to introduce themself or otherwise engage in normal human social interactions?

Normal people will still be able to get involved if they want to, just like normal people can get jobs. You learn about the organization you’re interested in joining, you try to meet some people and introduce yourself, you gain trust and prove your worth. It can be true that a pull request once embodied some of these tasks, but it is not true that being unable to submit a request means that these tasks are no longer possible to perform. It just means you’ll have to do them differently, just like the rest of humanity does when they want to get involved in an organization.

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