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The fate of "small" open source

nolanlawson.com

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Re: The fate of "small" open source

#181

Post by computerthings »

debtta wrote: post #145
josephg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Exper…

Unless you're part of the demoscene or your webpage is being loaded by Voyager II, why is 70kb of source code a problem? Not wanting to use well constructed, well tested, well distributed libraries to make code simpler and more robust is not motivated by any practical engineering concern. It's just nostalgia and fetishism.

[dead]

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#182

Post by eloisant »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #157
whatevertrevor wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

Yes, in the case of Google:

- They make more money from ads if the organic results are not as good (especially if it's not clear they're add)

- They get more impressions if you don't find the answer at the first search and have to try a different query

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#183

Post by eloisant »

AstroBen wrote: post #66
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

There was a time before SEO slop that web search was really valuable We're fighting slop with condensed slop

Before Google the web was already full of SEO slop. Except "SEO" just meant "put a list of popular keywords in a block hidden with CSS". That was the time of Altavista and other search engines.

So the time you're talking about is a window when Google existed, but before they gave up on fighting spam.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#184

Post by stevage »

>Many software developers will argue that asking a candidate to reverse a binary tree is pointless

Is "reversing a binary tree" actually a thing, or is this a cute kind of "rocket surgery" phrase intentionally mixing reversing a linked list and searching a binary tree?

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#185

Post by windward »

exasperaited wrote: post #21
mccoyb wrote: post #14

I don’t think open source is going anywhere. It’s posed to get significantly stronger — as the devs which care about it learn how to leverage AI tools to make things that corporate greasemonkeys never had the inspiration to. Low quality code spammers are just marketing themselves for jobs where they can be themselves: soulless and devoid of creative impulse. That’s the thing: open source is the only place where the t…

> It’s posed to get significantly stronger It's really not. Every project of any significance is now fending off AI submissions from people who have not the slightest fucking clue about what is involved in working on long-running, difficult projects or how offensive it is to just slather some slop on a bug report and demand it is given scrutiny. Even at the 10,000 feet view it has wasted people's time because they ha…

>Every project of any significance is now fending off AI submissions

Not anything with a cathedral model.

'open source' is too ambiguous to be useful.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#186

Post by stingraycharles »

stevage wrote: post #184

>Many software developers will argue that asking a candidate to reverse a binary tree is pointless Is "reversing a binary tree" actually a thing, or is this a cute kind of "rocket surgery" phrase intentionally mixing reversing a linked list and searching a binary tree?

It’s probably a mistake on the author’s end, but the problem comes across anyway.

I can only imagine reversing a binary tree would imply changing the “” which would be a useless exercise

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#187

Post by nitnelave »

stevage wrote: post #184

>Many software developers will argue that asking a candidate to reverse a binary tree is pointless Is "reversing a binary tree" actually a thing, or is this a cute kind of "rocket surgery" phrase intentionally mixing reversing a linked list and searching a binary tree?

I think it's a reference to the Google interview problem that the author of Homebrew (IIRC) failed. They were quite upset about it since they have proved their worth through their famous open-source contributions, but got rejected in a LeetCode-like interview.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#188

Post by _heimdall »

zwnow wrote: post #4
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.

But some webdev said they are 10x faster now so it cant be bad for humanity /s

They must be slackers, I heard from multiple sources that AI makes you a 100x developer.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#189

Post by zahlman »

friendzis wrote: post #148
josephg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Exper…

> 400 bytes of source code becomes 70kb in an instant, This only shows how limited and/or impractical dependency management story is. The whole idea behind semver is that at the public interface level patch version does not matter at all and minor versions can be upped without breaking changes, therefore a release build should be safe to only include major versions referenced (or on the safe side, the highest version…

> The whole idea behind semver is that at the public interface level patch version does not matter at all and minor versions can be upped without breaking changes, therefore a release build should be safe to only include major versions referenced (or on the safe side, the highest version referenced).

... Sorry, what does that have to do with tree shaking?

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#190

Post by zahlman »

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…

> It gives people visibility while setting clearer boundaries on how the work can be used.

... Because those would be respected?

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