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Vouch

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381–390 of 507 posts

Re: Vouch

#381
post #223
post #139

It should just be $1 to submit PR. If PR is good, maintainer refunds you ;) I noticed the same thing in communication. Communication is now so frictionless, that almost all the communication I receive is low quality. If it cost more to communicate, the quality would increase. But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time.

This thought pattern leads to crypto. In that world there's a process called "staking" where you lock some tokens with a default lock expiry action and a method to unlock based on the signature from both participants. It would work like this: Repo has a public key. Submitted uses a smart contract to sign the commit with along with the submission of a crypto. If the repo merges it then the smart contract returns the t…

The "money goes to the repo part" is the problem here, as it incentivizes maintainers to refuse legitimate pull requests.

Crypto has a perfect way to burn money, just send it to a nonexistent address from where it can never be recovered. I guess the trad fi equivalent are charitable donations.

The real problem here is the amount of work necessary to make this viable. I bet Visa and Mastercard would look at you funny if your business had such a high rate of voluntary transaction reversals, not to mention all the potential contributors that have no access to Visa/MC (we do want to encourage the youth to become involved with Open Source). This basically means crypto, and crypto has its own set of problems, particularly around all the annoying KYC/AML that a normie has to get through to use it.

Re: Vouch

#383
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the perverse incentive is that there will be RepoCoin, and the people involved will be incentivized to make the price of that as high as possible. Isn't this problem unrelated to cryptocurrency? There will be the US dollar, and the people involved will be incentivized to keep its value high, e.g. by pressuring or invading other countries to prevent them from switching to other currencies. Or they'll be incentiv…

Sure, but your average developer doesn't have a lot of agency in if the US invades another country in order to increase the value of the coin they got for having a PR merged. But with crypto they do. See for example all the BAGS coins that get created for random opensource projects and the behavior that occurs because of that.

Just use a stablecoin, don't float a "utility token" those things are stupid. Have a smart contract receive a USDC deposit. If the maintainer "times out" reviewing your PR, the contract returns all the deposit. If the maintainer does not accept your PR, the contract burns 0.5x of the deposit and returns the rest. Maintainers can decide to turn off the time-out for very popular projects where you probably would have devs trying to spam PRs for fame/recognition, but hopefully the deposit price can accurately reflect the amount of spam the project gets.

Utility tokens are fundamentally equities and you need to firewall equity from an organization the same way companies in most market economies are regulated.

Re: Vouch

#384
post #285
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be by design. Almost anyone writing software professionally at a level beyond junior is getting paid enough that $1 isn't a significant expense, whether in India or elsewhere. Some projects will be willing to throw collaboration and inclusivity out the window if it means cutting their PR spam by 90% and only reducing their pool of available professional contributors by 5%.

Indian here. You are correct. Expecting any employed Indian software developer to not be able to spare 1$ is stupid. Like how exactly poor do you think we are?!

You misunderstood the point. The point isn't that you are poor. The point is that the burden of the money lies on average heavier on you than someone from USA. This creates an uneven playing field.

I like to compare it with donations. If you get a USD donated, that is the same USD regardless of who gave it. Right? Right?!? Either way you don't know how heavy the burden is on the person who donated. You probably don't care. But it matters to the person who donated.

Re: Vouch

#385
post #139

It should just be $1 to submit PR. If PR is good, maintainer refunds you ;) I noticed the same thing in communication. Communication is now so frictionless, that almost all the communication I receive is low quality. If it cost more to communicate, the quality would increase. But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time.

Or just don't refund it. Most people want to make contributions to open source, and everyone can afford $1. Exceptions can be made for very active contributors.

>everyone can afford $1

Well that's awfully assumptuous. So now a young college kid needs to spend time and money to be able to help out a project? I also don't like that this model inentivizes a few big PR's over small, lean, readable ones.

We're completely mixing up the incentives here anyway. We need better moderation and a cost to the account, not to each ccontribution. SomethingAwful had a great system for this 20 years ago; make it cost $10-30 to be an external contributor and report people who make slop/consistently bad PR's. They get reviewed and lose their contributor status, or even their entire account.

Sure, you can whip up another account, but you can't whip the reputation back up. That's how you make sure seasoned accounts are trustworthy and keep accounts honest.

Re: Vouch

#386

Hi, thank you for putting in the work to share and manage this. Having read the commands I noted that there are only two options available: vouched and not, with denounced being a harder not vouches. I was wondering if it would help to separate this into three levels: vouched (positive), not vouched (neutral) and denounced (negative)? Then a project could allow PRs from 'not vouvhed' contributers, but have the option…

It seems it's a 3 state system already, with exit code 2 being the "not vouched / neutral" state.

https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch?tab=readme-ov-file#local-...

Local Commands

Check a user's vouch status:

vouch check

Exit codes: 0 = vouched, 1 = denounced, 2 = unknown.

Re: Vouch

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this seems like a privileged solution. Let's say you're a one-of-a-kind kid that already is making useful contributions, but $1 is a lot of money for you, then suddenly your work becomes useless? It feels weird to pay for providing work anyway. Even if its LLM gunk, you're paying to work (let alone pay for your LLM).

Not that word, in the context of contributing to an open source project that you're likely already benefiting from. ie, if you want to contribute code, you must also contribute financially.

>contributing to an open source project that you're likely already benefiting from.

Yes, but many people benefit for free. You see the backwards incentives of making the most interested (i.e. the ones who may provide the most work to your project) pay?

And none of that even guarantee support. Meanwhile you donate more and you get to tell people what the build. It's all out of what.

Re: Vouch

#388
post #285
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be by design. Almost anyone writing software professionally at a level beyond junior is getting paid enough that $1 isn't a significant expense, whether in India or elsewhere. Some projects will be willing to throw collaboration and inclusivity out the window if it means cutting their PR spam by 90% and only reducing their pool of available professional contributors by 5%.

Indian here. You are correct. Expecting any employed Indian software developer to not be able to spare 1$ is stupid. Like how exactly poor do you think we are?!

>Like how exactly poor do you think we are?!

I get laid off and suddenly I'm poor and am weighing optins. And I'm American.

Re: Vouch

#389
post #305
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indian here. You are correct. Expecting any employed Indian software developer to not be able to spare 1$ is stupid. Like how exactly poor do you think we are?!

I think the point was that if an aspirational minimum wage worker on a borrowed computer wants to put up a PR then it would cost them less than ten minutes of wages to afford $1USD in the US, while the same worker in India would need to put up about half a day's wages. This is very noble in theory, but in practice you're not going to get many high-quality PRs from someone who's never been paid to write software and h…

so we continue to make the rich richer and the broke students struggle more to get valuable experience. Very easy to point in 10-20 years under the coming "engineer crisis" why 'suddenly' can't support the systems we built.

Re: Vouch

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the issue here. Even if I trust you, I still need to review your work before merging it. Good people still make mistakes.

What is the definition of trust if you still have to verify? How does "trust" differ from "untrust" in that scenario?

trust resudes the verification I suppose. Getting a PR from a trusted contributor would probably have me do a quick scan for obvious mistakes. And they'd know to keep the PR's small and on the right branch to help facilitate a scan.

a new person with a big idea on the slightly wrong (but reasonable) channel would have more work in verification.

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