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Vouch

github.com

431–440 of 507 posts

Re: Vouch

#431

I think LLMs are accelerating us toward a Dune-like universe, where humans come before AI.

Got to go through the Butlerian Jihad first… not looking forward to that bit. (EDIT: Thanks sparky_z for the correction of my spelling!)

That was one of the most unplausible aspects of that series, at least the subset of which was remotely plausible - i.e. there was alot of "magic".

Given two factions at war, one of which is using AI/machines and the other is not and wants to destroy them, my bet is on the side using AI/machines.

Re: Vouch

#432

OSS was already brutal for new contributors before AI. You'd spend hours on a good-faith PR and get ignored for months, or get torn apart in review because you didn't know the unwritten conventions. The signal-to-noise ratio sucked but at least maintainers would eventually look at your stuff. Now with AI-generated spam everywhere, maintainers have even more reason to be suspicious of unknown names. Vouch solves their…

let's make it even better: why not set up a donation mechanism to get in the list?

Because I want people to get paid for writing code, not to pay to write code.

Re: Vouch

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First you have to make it low-friction. If I want Joe Average to send me $1 in cryptocurrency, how is he getting $1 in cryptocurrency to send me?

>First you have to make it low-friction. If I want Joe Average to send me $1 in cryptocurrency, how is he getting $1 in cryptocurrency to send me? Absolutely. You're 1000% correct. Cryptocurrency is way too high friction for stuff like that. When I wish to spend crypto, I need to: [If you don't have an exchange account already, you'll need the 0.x steps too!] 0.0 Create an account on an exchange which is legally allo…

All the setup is no worse than setting up a bank account

And technically it can be avoided through back channels if you know someone who already has it - can just pay them cash or whatever and they can send crypto to you

Crypto is very easy to transfer once you have a wallet

Its the exchange to/from real world currency where the friction is.

Re: Vouch

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's made me realize that the love of money corrupts". Yep. How about $1 per PR. The submitter gets to choose from a list of charities. No refund if the PR is accepted. The goal is to get rid of junk PR's. This would work. There could be a central payment system, which any open source project can integrate with. It could accept payment in say India, of the Indian PPP of $1, so you aren't shutting out poorer develope…

I would not pay any amount of money, even a trivial one, for the privilege of being able to do free work for a project - and I don't think I'm an outlier here.

Another way to think of it is: paying $1 to have your pr and concerns elevated above the supermajority sea (that which will be ai driven contributions). For that cost, it's a steal of the deal.

Then, from the perspective of "it's a donation to a project you care about" it becomes even more rational. But the project itself getting the money has all the problems others have outlined already, so that idea's a bit bust.

Re: Vouch

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it also increases the barrier to new adopters why not use ai to help with the ai problem, why prefer this extra coordination effort and implementation?

The barrier in the Ghostty project is to simply open a discussion. It's not really hard.

What about fixing a typo in a comment?

Do I have to start a discussion before I can submit a fix for a two char swap?

Also, my statement was general, why are you making it about one?

Re: Vouch

#436
post #42

Isn't it extremely difficult problem? It's very easy to game, vouch 1 entity that will invite lots of bad actors

It’s easy to game systems unless you attach real stakes, like your reputation. You can vouch for anyone, but if you consistently back bad actors your reputation should suffer along with everything you endorsed.

The web badly under-uses reputation and cryptographic content signing. A simple web of trust, where people vouch for others and for content using their private keys, would create a durable public record of what you stand behind. We’ve had the tools for decades but so far people decline to use them properly. They don't see the urgency. AI slop creates the urgency and yet everybody is now wringing their hands on what to do. In my view the answer to that has been kind of obvious for a while: we need a reputation based web of trust.

In an era of AI slop and profit-driven bots, the anonymous web is just broken. Speech without reputational risk is essentially noise. If you have no reputation, the only way to build one is by getting others to stake theirs on you. That's actually nothing new. That's historically how you build reputation with family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc. If you misbehave, they turn their backs on you. Why should that work differently on the web?

GitHub actually shows how this might work but it's an incomplete solution. It has many of the necessary building blocks though. Public profiles, track records, signed commits, and real artifacts create credibility that is hard to fake except by generating high quality content over a long time. New accounts deserve caution, and old accounts with lots of low-quality (unvouched for) activity deserve skepticism. This is very tough to game.

Stackoverflow is a case study in what not to do here. It got so flooded by reputation hungry people without one that it got super annoying to use. But that might just be a bad implementation of what otherwise wasn't a bad idea.

Other places that could benefit from this are websites. New domains should have rock bottom reputation. And the link graphs of older websites should tell you all you need to know. Social networks can add the social bias: people you trust vouching for stuff. Mastodon would be perfect for this as an open federated network. Unfortunately they seem to be pushing back on the notion that content should be signed for reasons I never understood.

Re: Vouch

#437
I will never contribute to a project that runs on this sort of ridiculous popularity contest system.

Re: Vouch

#438

I will never contribute to a project that runs on this sort of ridiculous popularity contest system.

Hint: every software project at every company runs on this sort of ridiculous popularity contest system, the rules of the game are just not publicized.

Re: Vouch

#439
post #307

Unfortunately, the mob mentality, and gate keeping from the Reddit mod era, proves that these types of systems simply don’t work.

We can see this effect from Mitchell's own release of his terminal emulator (Ghostty). It was invite-only. The in-crowd on YouTube/Twitter lorded it over others as a status symbol. None of it was based on actual engineering prowess. It was more like, "hey, you speak at conferences and people follow you on social media... you must be amazing".

Re: Vouch

#440
post #39

So you're screwed if you don't have any connections. In that way it's just like meat space.

exactly this, verification should always been on the code if someone fresh wants to contribute, now they will have to network before they can write code honestly i don't see my self networking just so that i can push my code I think there are valid ways to increase the outcome, like open source projects codifying the focus areas during each month, or verifying the PRs, or making PRs show proof of working etc,... many…

Why are folks seemingly so averse to sending an email / hopping on a channel to actually talk to maintainers before just firing off code? I've been on both sides of this; I have been young and green and just fired off contributions without stopping to think, do they event want this?. Codebases are rarely built primarily out of zillions of shotgunned patches, they are more like a garden that needs tending over time, and the ones that are the best tenders are usually the ones that spend the most amount of time in the garden.
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