Bleak
The fate of "small" open source
211–220 of 238 posts
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#212I 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…
This. The code is like 10 lines long. I might as well copy that from Stackoverflow and adapt that for my own use. Why bother packaging that?
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#213> I don’t know which direction we’re going in with AI Maybe programming languages will be designed for AIs in the future. Maybe they'll have features that make grafting unknown generated code easier.
Will we ever even get a widespread new programming language? AIs work great for coding because they have massive codebases in C/C++/Python/JS/etc. to train on. If I create a language called "foo" tomorrow, no such codebase will exist for it and the lack of AI support for the language will be a huge barrier for adoption so it's going to be much less likely to catch on like Python did back in the day.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah we are getting lots of "I don't know how to do this and AI gave me this code that doesn't work, can you fix it" or "AI said it can do this" and the feature doesn't exist... some people will even argue and say "but AI said it doesn't take long, why won't you add it"
It weaponises incompetence, carelessness and arrogance at every turn. AI, to me, is a character test: I'm regularly fascinated by finding out who fails it. For example, in my personal life I have been treated to AI-generated comms from someone that I would never have expected it from. They don't know I know, and they don't know that I think less of them, and I always will.
>They don't know I know, and they don't know that I think less of them, and I always will.
lol, behavior like this is way more destructive to personal relationships than AI ever will be.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 diff…
This is entirely because "we" insist on search being free. This means Google needs to find other ways to pay for it, which creates a different set of incentives.
If we somehow paid directly for search, then Google's incentives would be to make search good so that we'd be happy customers and come back again, rather than find devious ways to show us more ads.
Most people put up with the current search experience because they'd rather have "free" than "good" and we see this attitude in all sorts of other markets as well, where we pay for cheap products that fail over and over rather than paying once (but more) for something good, or we trade our personal information and privacy for a discount.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#216Earlier 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
I don't think searching for answers to simple questions was a problem until Google nerfed their own search engine.
Google was unable or unwilling to fight people gaming their SEO to float garbage and blogspam to the top results, waay before these more specific policy change events that have been reported w.r.t intentionally making search worse.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#217> 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…
I keep seeing this attitude and I don't really understand it at all; there's no upside to publishing open source work because it might be utilized by more people, is that correct? Or is it the attribution? There are many many libraries I have used and continue to use and I don't know the author's internet handle or Christian name. Does that matter? Why? I have written a lot of code that my name is no longer attached…
> I want the things I do today to have an upside for people in the future.
I think most would agree with this, but the way things work today don't support it. As of now, AI gains are privatized while the losses are socialized. Until that one-sided imbalance is addressed, LLM's "use" of open source is unbounded and nonreciprocal.
Attribution is a big part of the human experience. Your response frames it as ego driven, but it's also what motivates people to maintain code that is not usually compensated, it's also what builds reputation, trust, communities, and even careers.
Until that’s figured out, we can still share, but maybe in ways that are closer to one another, or under distribution models that reflect the reality we’re in rather than the one we used to have.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#218This seems to be specific to the JavaScript ecosystem, and to some extent orthogonal to AI coding. Micro-libraries with trivial-ish functionality are generally more difficult to justify to add as a dependency. I’m sure AI coding agents will eventually learn as well that there’s a balance to strike between implementing stuff yourself and the use of libraries. I’m also sure that people who are interested in actual coding will continue to open-source what they find useful, and other people like them will read their code.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#219> the era of small, low-value libraries like blob-util is over. Thankfully (not against blob-util specifically because I've never intentionally used it), I wouldn't completely blame llms either since languages like Go never had this dependency hell. npm is a security nightmare not just because of npm the package manager, because the culture of the language rewards behavior such as "left-pad". Instead of writing endle…
Another thing about Go, and more generally, the statically-typed languages, is that these utility functions are generally safer to get a once-over and a commit into the code base than in dynamically-typed languages. Something that joins an array of strings with a joiner in some non-trivial way is a lot easier to review when you don't have to worry about it getting an array of DOM nodes and a NaN for the join character, and all the other things that could come in. Well-tested little utilities for Javascript are valuable, and I don't 100% trust LLMs to not give me code based on common misconceptions rather than the actually correct code in that case. Or at least, correct for some definition of correct, which in the dynamic languages can itself be some work to figure out.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Upvoting because it's a salient point and downvoters are mad. HN has a complex lately.
It's not even a point, it barely counts as sarcasm. I'm not sure why a chunk of hello world in ARM assembler is supposed to be relevant to anything, let alone if there's a trap hidden in there.
It's PowerPC assembler.
I assume GP's point was that assembly language literacy was a pointless skill nowadays. I found it quite useful, precisely because it's no longer an ubiquitous skill, so you can shine with your expertise in some situations.