Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).
Zero-contribution open source doesn't at all make it closed source. It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes. SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.
The Cognitive Dark Forest
211–220 of 301 posts
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).
Zero-contribution open source doesn't at all make it closed source. It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes. SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#213For the better part of the last 20+ years big corpos had the $ to throw and replicate virtually anything they wanted. They got the cash and man power, yet they didn't do it. Why? Because they don't care, they have business to run, they need to somewhat keep focus which can't happen when scattering attention all over the place. The difference now is that for relatively >simple One seems to omit the fact that LLMs are…
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zero-contribution open source doesn't at all make it closed source. It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes. SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.
Minor correction: SQLite is not closed to contributions. It just has an unusually high bar to accepting contributions. The project does not commonly accept pull requests from random passers-by on the internet. But SQLite does accept outside contributed code from time to time. Key gates include that paperwork is in place to verify that the contributed code is in the public domain and that the code meets certain high q…
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#215The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect. The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even de…
I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make ne…
Bold assumption. On what will you run Emacs if average PC costs $12000? Yes. Even Raspberry Pi. It's not called war on general computing for nothing.
If you say the cloud, that will be cut up and reused by the next AI crawler.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#216The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect. The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even de…
I would suffocate it. Know the greedy snake idiom? A snake is so hungry and greedy that it suffocates on its prey? Best you can do is to spread all of the goods it provides, as it is too greedy to not devour them itself. It will consume them and suffocate slowly.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#217This article makes no real sense to me. >You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger. This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly…
>Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly. Was this just awkward phrasing or did something change and they learn after training?
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make ne…
> I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years Bold assumption. On what will you run Emacs if average PC costs $12000? Yes. Even Raspberry Pi. It's not called war on general computing for nothing. If you say the cloud, that will be cut up and reused by the next AI crawler.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#219I guess not many people know but app templates for Uber, AirBnb etc. have been around for years now. You don’t even have to prompt. It’s sitting on the shelf, complete. “Execution is hard” was never about the code part. Up until 2 years ago I was an engineer/entrepreneur. I could build anything. Other stuff, selling, supporting (execution) was hard. LLMs made building some of the things I could build faster/easier, o…
Big companies won't execute our ideas because they need maintain everything that they execute. Plus, the cost of modifying something that was executed itself is also very high at a big company.
Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of anti-fragility, I'd point you to the law of requisite variety instead. You'll notice that all AI improvements are insanely good for a week or two after launch. Then you'll see people stating that 'models got worse'. What happened in fact is that people adapted to the tool, but the tool didn't adapt anymore. We're using AI as variety resistant and adaptable tools, but we miss the fact that most deployments…
New models literally do get worse after launch, due to optimization. If you charted performance over time, it'd look like a sawtooth, with a regular performance drop during each optimization period. That's the dirty secret with all of this stuff: "state of the art" models are unprofitable due to high cost of inference before optimization. After optimization they still perform okay, but way below SOTA. It's like a kni…