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The fate of "small" open source

nolanlawson.com

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Re: The fate of "small" open source

#101

Post by inferiorhuman »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #59
AstroBen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?

One instance of definite benefit of AI is AI summary web search. Searching for answers to simple questions and not having to cut though SEO slop is such an improvement

Hard disagree. AI summaries are useless for the same reason AI summaries from Google and DDG are useless: it's almost always missing the context. The AI page summaries typically take the form of "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" instead of "here's what the page actually says". Just give me the fucking contents. If I wanted AI slop I'd ask my fucking doorknob.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#102

Post by justarandomname »

ef2k wrote: post #92

> I’m still trying to figure out what kinds of open source are worth writing in this new era Is there any upside to opensourcing anything anymore? Anything published today becomes training data for the next model, with no attribution to the original work. If the goal is to experiment, share ideas, or let others learn from the work, maybe the better default now is "source available", instead of FOSS in the classic sen…

This is kinda how I've felt for months. I don't have any interest in continuing existing open source projects and don't want to create any new ones.

What's the point?

All of my personal projects for the past few months have been entirely private, I don't even host them on Github anymore, I have a private Forgejo instance I use instead.

I also don't trust any new open source project I stumble upon anymore unless I know it was started at least a year ago.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#103

Post by justarandomname »

RyanHamilton wrote: post #2

Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website. Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality. All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.

I was searching a specific niche on Youtube today, and scrolled endlessly trying to find something that wasn't AI generated. Youtube is being completely spammed.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#104

Post by pabs3 »

xgulfie wrote: post #94
ef2k wrote: post #92

> I’m still trying to figure out what kinds of open source are worth writing in this new era Is there any upside to opensourcing anything anymore? Anything published today becomes training data for the next model, with no attribution to the original work. If the goal is to experiment, share ideas, or let others learn from the work, maybe the better default now is "source available", instead of FOSS in the classic sen…

Sorry but source-available is probably going to get slurped up for training data as well Microsoft already did this for all code in every public repo.

When are they going to start doing it for private repos too...

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#105

Post by inferiorhuman »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #7

Small open source is still valuable, but the bar is higher. If your project is something that's trivial and nobody just thought to do it before you and bothered to do it after, that's probably not going to survive, but if your project is a small focused tool that handles something difficult really well, it's 100% got a future.

Earlier this year I wrote an interpreter for a niche, proprietary binary format. Someone asked if I could open source it so that they could (more easily) run it on NixOS. I declined as I'm just that strongly opposed to my work being used to train AI models and further entrench the enshittification of the internet.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#106

Post by 1gn15 »

ef2k wrote: post #92

> I’m still trying to figure out what kinds of open source are worth writing in this new era Is there any upside to opensourcing anything anymore? Anything published today becomes training data for the next model, with no attribution to the original work. If the goal is to experiment, share ideas, or let others learn from the work, maybe the better default now is "source available", instead of FOSS in the classic sen…

Staying true to free software principles. It's unethical to publish nonfree code or binaries.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#107

Post by nineteen999 »

KPGv2 wrote: post #87
SchemaLoad wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these util libraries require basically no changes ever. The problem is the package maintainers getting hacked and malicious versions getting pushed out.

If you use an LLM to generate a function, it will never be updated. So why not do the same thing with a dependency? Install it once and never update it (and therefore hacked and malicious versions can never arrive in your dependency tree). You're a JS developer, right? That's the group who thinks a programmer's job includes constantly updating dependencies to the latest version constantly.

> Install it once and never update it (and therefore hacked and malicious versions can never arrive in your dependency tree).

Huh? What if your once-off installation or vendoring IS a hacked an malicious version and you never realise and never update it. That's worse.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#108

Post by josephg »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #80
noosphr wrote: post #73

I see this as an absolute win. The state of micro dependencies of js was a nightmare that only happened because a lot of undereducated developers flooded the market to get that sweet faang money. Now that both have dried up I hope we can close the vault door on js and have people learn how to code again.

The best outcome was things like jquery and then lodash where a whole collection of small util functions get rolled in to one package.

Oh god, without tree shaking, lodash is such a blight.

I've seen so many tiny packages pull in lodash for some little utility method so many times. 400 bytes of source code becomes 70kb in an instant, all because someone doesn't know how to filter items in an array. And I've also seen plenty of projects which somehow include multiple copies of lodash in their dependency tree.

Its such a common junior move. Ugh.

Experienced engineers know how to pull in just what they need from lodash. But ... most experienced engineers I know & work with don't bother with it. Javascript includes almost everything you need these days anyway. And when it doesn't, the kind of helper functions lodash provides are usually about 4 lines of code to write yourself. Much better to do that manually rather than pull in some 70kb dependency.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#109

Post by j1elo »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #96
jorvi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're the author of a library, you have to cover every possible way in which your code might be used. You don't actually. You write the library for how you use it, and you accept pull requests that extend it if you feel it has merit. If you don't, people are free to fork it and pull in your improvements periodically. Or their fork gets more popular, and you get to swap in a library that is now better-maintained…

It's a rare developer (or human for that matter) who can just shrug and say "fork off" when asked for help with their library.

It would be healthy that it becomes more common, in fact the privately-owned public garden model of the Valetudo project [1] is the sanest way for FOSS maintainers to look at their projects.

[1]: https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo#valetudo-is-a-garden

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#110

Post by tanin »

Right now I tend to not use an external library unless the code would be large e.g. http server and/or the library is extremely popular.

Otherwise, writing it myself is much better. It's more customizable and often much smaller in size. This is because the library has to generalize, and it comes with bloats.

Using AI to help write is great because I should understand that anyway whether AI writes it or not or whether it's in an external library.

One example recently is that I built a virtual list myself. The code is much smaller and simpler compared to other popular libraries. But of course it's not as generalizable.

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