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The fate of "small" open source

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Re: The fate of "small" open source

#151

Post by skandinaff »

justarandomname wrote: post #103
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.

On that - naive proposition; shouldn't we establish say "humanTube" - service which would strictly prohibit AI content? With all this AI slop engulfing our web 2.0 - maybe this is the time and place to establish the new web for "nerds" i.e. people who care for the real thing? Just as our current web once was a place for scientists and engineers mostly, maybe we now need something as this? I feel the flaws in my own point, but maybe it's not all hopeless?

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#152

Post by jaapz »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #142

Given that some 80% of developers are now using AI in their regular work, blob-util is almost certainly the kind of thing that most developers would just happily have an LLM generate for them. Sure, you could use blob-util, but then you’d be taking on an extra dependency, with unknown performance, maintenance, and supply-chain risks. Letting LLM write utility code is a sword that cuts both ways. You often create a th…

Exactly. When you assume blob-util to be a utility library that has been in use for quite a while by many people in many different contexts, hasn't seen much changes and just "works", IMHO the risk of weird bugs is a lot larger with LLM-generated code. Code generated by LLM's often have the problem that the code seems logical, but then contain weird bugs that aren't immediately obvious.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#153

Post by johnnyanmac »

weitendorf wrote: post #64
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?

What happens when the monkeys stop getting bananas to work on the typewriters? More stories?

Sadly these aren't monkeys. These are more like termites eating at any and all wood they can find. They'll eat at the foundation and move to the next trend to eat at.

Spam by its nature is low effort, low yields anyway. They don't particularly care about making scraps since their pipeline is nearly automated.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#154

Post by immibis »

bloomca wrote: post #63
NewsaHackO wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The summary is often incorrect in at least some subtle details, which is invisible to a lot of people who do not understand LLM limitations. Now, we can argue that a typical SEO-optimized garbage article is not better, but I feel like the trust score for them was lower on average from a typical person.

Marketing departments are already speaking of GEO - generative engine optimization. When a user asks an AI for the best X, you want it to say your X is the best, and you'll do whatever it takes to achieve that.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#156

Post by 1718627440 »

eviks wrote: post #116
Levitating wrote: post #68

I am sure I am not the only one who thinks these micro-dependencies are worthless anyway. You'd be better off just listing the functions in a markdown file for people to copy over than ship an entire package for it. This isn't "small" open source, "small" would be something you put together in a week or weekend. These are like "micro" projects, where more work goes into actually publishing and maintaining the reposit…

What's your copy& paste solution to security updates?

The security maintenance of the ten lines of code I have read and copied into my code is the same as the ten lines of code next to it, that I have written myself.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#157

Post by johnnyanmac »

whatevertrevor wrote: post #132
cml123 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think searching for answers to simple questions was a problem until Google nerfed their own search engine.

I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general. Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching…

>do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse?

sure. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

>These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.

Of course, it's hard to "objectively" prove that they literally made search worse, but it's clear they were fine with stagnating in order to maximize ad revenue.

I see it as the same way Tinder works if you want the mentality. There's a point where being "optimal" hurts your bottom line, so you don't desire achieving a perfect algorithm. Meanwhile, it can be so bad for Google that directly searching for a blog title at times can leave me unsuccessful.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#158

Post by imtringued »

llbbdd wrote: post #117
weitendorf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Upvoting because it's a salient point and downvoters are mad. HN has a complex lately.

The context is literally this:

>Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website.

What weitendorf posted is definitively not a library, nor is there a small tutorial for the code.

>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.

Considering the low effort to post and high effort to understand what weitendorf wrote, he might be considered a spammer given the context. The code quality is also low since his application can easily be replicated by a bunch of echo calls in a bash script, making me lean towards thinking he is a low quality spammer, given the context.

>All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.

I'm not sure you can argue that weitendorf sufficiently addressed this. He put too much emphasis on an obvious strawman (real programmer) which is completely out of context. Nobody is questioning here whether someone is a programmer or not. There is no gatekeeping whatsoever. You're free to use LLMs.

I'll also complain about your use of "salient" here, which generally has two meanings. The first is that something is "eye catching" (making me think more of spam), the second meaning is "relevancy/importance" to a specific thing and that's where weitendorf falls completely flat.

Now you might counter and argue that he packaged all of his salient points inside the statement "want to lay off bread-and-butter red-blooded american programmers", then your position is incredibly weak, because you're deflecting from one strawman to another strawman or alternatively, your counterargument will rely heavily on reinterpretation, which again just means the point wasn't salient.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#159

Post by immibis »

eviks wrote: post #116
Levitating wrote: post #68

I am sure I am not the only one who thinks these micro-dependencies are worthless anyway. You'd be better off just listing the functions in a markdown file for people to copy over than ship an entire package for it. This isn't "small" open source, "small" would be something you put together in a week or weekend. These are like "micro" projects, where more work goes into actually publishing and maintaining the reposit…

What's your copy& paste solution to security updates?

Does left-pad have security updates? You may as well ask what's the security update solution for Stack Overflow answers.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#160

Post by immibis »

theturtlemoves wrote: post #135
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…

You're not obligated to give away your mind for free. You're free to share, of course. But sharing implies reciprocity, a back and forth. The internet used to be like that, but if the environment changes, you adapt your behavior accordingly. In the long run I think it's time to starve the system from input until it's attitude reverts to reciprocal. It's not what I'd want, but it seems necessary. People learn from con…

Or use AGPL licenses. As a bonus, nobody in JavaScript checks licenses so you might be able to sue Amazon for money.
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