21–30 of 152 posts
An OCD dream but you need to embrace it and configure it or you would get "AI slop".
I’ve stopped all my open source contributions and projects. I’ve now moved my resources to organizing and supporting communities like python Atlanta. My commitment was always the community and not the code. I also want to see what will companies do once open source closes shop and fewer people know how to program. It’s why I’m making sure there is a local support network for those of us who still want to stay in soft…
Trying to explain how the global economy and welfare of most of humanity is hugely dependent on free software production labor, without the advent of actually seeing a world where this actually happens, is just like when we try to explain something like consciousness. There is no explanation that makes sense. So predictions about new avenues of doom (like "MIT licensing was a huge mistake! we should have all been GPL!") similarly dont carry a lot of weight, because of course these predictions make perfect sense in the abstract, yet real world results don't line up at all.
Basically open source software is an emergent phenomenon, like consciousness or evolution, or perhaps even how very large language models suddenly seemed like real people. It's something that would never be predictable in its own absence, which means it will remain largely unpredictable how it will respond to ongoing changes such as "the open source authors and contributors now use programs themselves to produce more code".
I stopped reading at "load-bearing" and em dash.
Ironically, the prevalence of AI "tells" like that (combined with the ubiquity of AI works passed off as human-written) will inevitably feed back into more use by non-AI writers who think they're normal. (Also, I'm never gonna give up my em dashes.)
I’ve stopped all my open source contributions and projects. I’ve now moved my resources to organizing and supporting communities like python Atlanta. My commitment was always the community and not the code. I also want to see what will companies do once open source closes shop and fewer people know how to program. It’s why I’m making sure there is a local support network for those of us who still want to stay in soft…
There has been ever increasing consolidation in the hardware world along with an ever growing acceptance of restrictions by the public 'for our safety'.
Software that is not open source, is proprietary software. Open weight models, are not open source. Binary blobs in a repo with an Apache license, is not open source.
Am I a retro-grouch? Probably. I guess it doesn't matter anymore what I think about it.
Either the LLM public capability is not sufficient to positively contribute, or it is.
If it is not sufficient to positively contribute, open source projects become drowned in low quality contributions.
If it is sufficient to positively contribute, we end up with multiple implementations of open source projects.
Actually maybe it only goes one way.
Open-source alternatives are being launched at an ungodly pace and they are really polished. All these comments about AI Slop are underestimating how good these builders have gotten and AI lets you iterate really fast. If the builder actually uses the software he's building, the feedback loop is really efficient. I keep a directory of open-source alternatives and just in the past month, I've replaced applications I'v…
> All these comments about AI Slop are underestimating how good these builders have gotten and AI lets you iterate really fast. Both of these are true: we’re witnessing an unprecedented amount of slop, while also the tools get better and better. So when talking about Open Source maintainer exhaustion, it’s because of the slop, not because of the great tooling. AI is an amplifier, and in this case it amplifies the gre…
Kind of like going to the app store and picking the app with the most downloads because the other option is looking at 400 different apps that may or may not do the same thing.
Open-source alternatives are being launched at an ungodly pace and they are really polished. All these comments about AI Slop are underestimating how good these builders have gotten and AI lets you iterate really fast. If the builder actually uses the software he's building, the feedback loop is really efficient. I keep a directory of open-source alternatives and just in the past month, I've replaced applications I'v…
But the flipside is of course users that are clueless won't now be stopped by "can't make a PR", they will throw prompt at AI and send it when the AI decides it's good enough