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Publishing your work increases your luck

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Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#101

Post by aarondf »

socialcommenter wrote: post #100
aarondf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV

Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit? I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.

No easy answers, I'm afraid. But I would still say you can get lots of social capital from creating things and talking about it. And these days, that can get you past the LLM-inundated HR front door if you want a job. If you hang out on twitter long enough you'll see people go from "hey I made this cool thing" to "hey cloudflare/vercel/etc hired me to come work on cool-thing-adjacent thing!"

It's a pretty repeatable pipeline. And having proof that you can DO something makes you stand out. Maybe moreso than ever!

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#102

Post by gcanyon »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #17

> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interest…

I maintain Navigator, a development tool I started over twenty years ago; I am the only contributor to the open source repository [1]. I have rewritten drag and drop in that thing four times (because drag and drop in Livecode [2] is a bit of a hack). It's a pain every time. I'm not rewriting it again.

1. https://github.com/gcanyon/navigator

2. https://livecode.com

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#103

Post by why-o-why »

it's the same logic lotto uses: "you can't win if you don't play".

while i agree it is irrefutable logic, the chance of being seen is quite small because there are literally millions of other people doing the same thing. gauging probability is what human brains have trouble with.

but it does improve your odds a minuscule amount. but it is always always always better to have friends in high(er) places who can amplify your work. that counts for x1000 more. one mention from someone with 1M followers is worth more than publishing 1000 articles.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#104

Post by aarondf »

why-o-why wrote: post #103

it's the same logic lotto uses: "you can't win if you don't play". while i agree it is irrefutable logic, the chance of being seen is quite small because there are literally millions of other people doing the same thing. gauging probability is what human brains have trouble with. but it does improve your odds a minuscule amount. but it is always always always better to have friends in high(er) places who can amplify…

And guess how you make friends in high(er) places...

by...

publishing your work and making friends in your industry

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#105

Post by skhameneh »

aarondf wrote: post #91
hypfer wrote: post #24

I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else. Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money. This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me. Which does make sense I guess, given…

Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV

I have no doubt your intentions were good and I am a fan of open-source myself. Unfortunately, since this was written, it’s become more widely known and commonplace for large corporations to disproportionally benefit from open source.

And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched licenses, some have shifted closed-source, and others have simply abandoned their projects.

Just last week I began rethinking usage of MIT/Apache licenses for future work. For the longest time I was hesitant about GPLv3 and almost scared to use in my personal projects, but it turns out my hesitations were fueled by...large corporations.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#106

Post by socialcommenter »

aarondf wrote: post #101
socialcommenter wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit? I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.

No easy answers, I'm afraid. But I would still say you can get lots of social capital from creating things and talking about it. And these days, that can get you past the LLM-inundated HR front door if you want a job. If you hang out on twitter long enough you'll see people go from "hey I made this cool thing" to "hey cloudflare/vercel/etc hired me to come work on cool-thing-adjacent thing!" It's a pretty repeatable…

No easy answers, but a glimpse of hope anyway. Thank you for weighing in!

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#107

Post by aarondf »

skhameneh wrote: post #105
aarondf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV

I have no doubt your intentions were good and I am a fan of open-source myself. Unfortunately, since this was written, it’s become more widely known and commonplace for large corporations to disproportionally benefit from open source. And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched li…

Unfortunately we have to play the game according to the rules on the field. You can decide to opt out entirely (which is fine) or you can play the game and try to win. Personally, I will play and try to win.

That means I will make things, talk about them, and accrue social and/or actual capital for me and my family. I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try. I CAN build cool things, talk about them, and get cool jobs or friends or a following or whatever. I understand not everyone is comfortable with this tradeoff.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#108

Post by skhameneh »

aarondf wrote: post #107
skhameneh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt your intentions were good and I am a fan of open-source myself. Unfortunately, since this was written, it’s become more widely known and commonplace for large corporations to disproportionally benefit from open source. And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched li…

Unfortunately we have to play the game according to the rules on the field. You can decide to opt out entirely (which is fine) or you can play the game and try to win. Personally, I will play and try to win. That means I will make things, talk about them, and accrue social and/or actual capital for me and my family. I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try. I CAN build cool things, t…

> I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try.

I do not like this take and I do hope you reconsider repeating such. This very much reads as accepting a lack of any claim to reasonable privacy and ownership, borderline on accepting what I would consider theft.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#109

Post by aarondf »

skhameneh wrote: post #108
aarondf wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately we have to play the game according to the rules on the field. You can decide to opt out entirely (which is fine) or you can play the game and try to win. Personally, I will play and try to win. That means I will make things, talk about them, and accrue social and/or actual capital for me and my family. I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try. I CAN build cool things, t…

> I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try. I do not like this take and I do hope you reconsider repeating such. This very much reads as accepting a lack of any claim to reasonable privacy and ownership, borderline on accepting what I would consider theft.

I understand. I am, however, impotent against OpenAI. If I publish code to GitHub, I understand it will be used for training. I'd rather get the win for my family than try to fight a megacorp. I'm sorry.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#110

Post by aschmelyun »

socialcommenter wrote: post #100
aarondf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV

Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit? I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.

> any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit

I would say that now, more than ever, this means you should be collecting and sharing what you create.

Not on large social media platforms either, on websites that you own and (ideally) host yourself.

Start a blog, host your own instance of Gitea, build a platform for your videos. Spread what you create and activity participate in the community but maintain ownership and an audit trail over what you've created.

People ripping off others works has always been a thing, of course it's much easier and pervasive now. It's still (IMO) beneficial to say "Look! I did this thing first!", with the added benefit of accruing the kind of "social capital" Aaron talked about.

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