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Astral to Join OpenAI

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#491

Post by y1n0 »

japhyr wrote: post #328
IshKebab wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you'd think so but somehow JFrog (makers of Artifactory) made half a billion dollars last year. I don't really understand that. Conda also makes an implausible amount of money.

From my understanding there are a lot of companies that need their own package repositories, for a variety of reasons. I listened to a couple podcasts where Charlie Marsh outlined their plans for pyx, and why they felt their entry into that market would be profitable. My guess is that OpenAI just dangled way more money in their faces than what they were likely to get from pyx. Having a private package index gives you…

We have some kind of simple pip repo that is private where I work. What would astral bring to the table?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#492

Post by dec0dedab0de »

everforward wrote: post #185
rgilliotte wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree The value for Anthropic / OAI is that they have a strong interest in becoming the "default" agent. The one that you don't need to install, because it's already provided by your package manager.

I don't think this holds because we're talking about developers who know how to use a package manager, on a piece of software you have to install anyways. The friction of "uv add $other_llm_software" is too low for it to have a real impact. I think they're more into the extra context they can build for the LLM with ruff/ty.

until "uv add $openai_competitor" mysteriously breaks in odd, difficult to troubleshoot ways.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#493

Post by roryirvine »

chuckadams wrote: post #467
roryirvine wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dan Bernstein took that attitude back in the 90s - I think his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain", which ran counter to the mainstream position of "if it doesn't have a license, then you have to treat it as proprietary". And, sure, djb wasn't actually likely to sue you if you went ahead and distributed modified versions of his software...…

I doubt the lack of license was the reason DJB's projects didn't take over the world. Most of them required heavy forking to break away from hardwired assumptions about the filesystem and play nice with the OS distribution, and DJB is himself notoriously difficult to work with. Still, qmail managed to establish maildir as the standard format and kill off mbox, and for that alone I'm eternally grateful.

Well, there were always plenty of patches available - it's just that lots of them conflicted with each other, and that was a product of the licensing.

Agreed with the rest, though. I relied heavily on qmail for about a decade, and learned a lot from the experience, even if it was a little terrifying on occasion!

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#494

Post by arw0n »

mountainriver wrote: post #472
NiloCK wrote: post #67

A concern: More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now. As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Clau…

[flagged]

Let's see how it plays out. My current assumption is that degrees and CVs will become more important in the workplace. Things like good architecture, maintainability, coherence, they are all hard to measure. A true 10x developer without a college degree will lose to the PhD without any hard skills. And these types only speak python, so they will instruct the AI to type python. Or maybe they'll vibecode rust and elixir, I don't know. But the cynic in me strongly thinks this will make all our bullshitty jobs way more bullshitty, and impostors will profit the most.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#495

Post by raincole »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #194
NiloCK wrote: post #67

A concern: More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now. As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Clau…

It’s a small tool shop building a tiny part of the Python ecosystem, let’s not overstate their importance. They burned through their VC money and needed an exit and CLI tool chains are hyped now for LLMs, but this mostly sounds like an acquihire to me. Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.

> tiny part of the Python ecosystem

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#496

Post by thayne »

chis wrote: post #446
hijodelsol wrote: post #12

This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years has adopted many of these technologies. Having their future depend on a cap-ex heavy company that is currently (based on reporting) spending approx. 2.5 dollars to make a dollar of revenue and must have hypergrowth in the next years or perish is less than ideal. This should discourage anybody doing…

My hope would be that this eventually pushes pip to adopt a similar feature-set and performance improvements. It's always a better story when the built-in tool is adequate instead of having to pick something. And yes UV is rust but it's pretty clear that Python could provide something within 2-5x the speed.

pip isn't exactly a "built-in" tool. Beyond the python distribution having a stub module that downloads pip for you.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#498

Post by throwaway5752 »

dcre wrote: post #469
throwaway5752 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't have incentive to cultivate developer goodwill. They are monetizing replacing developers everywhere. That is the trillion-dollar valuation. They have the opposite incentive.

They are not. A very large proportion of their revenue comes from developers. A large proportion of their marketing and product work is aimed at developers. You have to work really hard to not see this. Just look at what Altman and Brockman tweet about. https://xcancel.com/gdb https://xcancel.com/sama/

All the various APM companies are implementing "Assign to agent" flows. The various foundation model providers will be satisfied getting a subscription for 10% of total comp of a developer, instead of pocketing 60% of the total comp completely replacing them?

The only thing that could prevent this is lack of ability to execute, like how Uber wanted to replace drivers with FSD vehicles.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#499

Post by pixelsort »

echelon wrote: post #470
pixelsort wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the many darker timelines that one can extrapolate, capturing essential tech stacks is just a pre-cursor to capturing hiring. Once we start seeing Open AI and Anthropic getting into the certifications and testing they'll quickly become the gold standard. They won't even need to actually test anyone. People will simply consent to having their chat interactions analyzed. The models collect more information about us…

As if there will be hiring in the fullness of time. There will come a day when you can will an entire business into existence at the press of a button. Maybe it has one or two people overseeing the business logic to make sure it doesn't go off the rails, but the point is that this is a 100x reduction in labor and a 100,000x speed up in terms of delivery. They'll price this as a $1M button press. Suddenly, labor capit…

There could be opportunities we haven't anticipated.

What if labor organizes around human work and consumers are willing to pay the premium?

At that point, it's an arms race against the SotA models in order to deepen the resolution and harden the security mechanisms for capturing the human-affirming signals produced during work. Also, lowering the friction around verification.

In that timeline, workers would have to wear devices to monitor their GSR and record themselves on video to track their PPG. Inconvenient, and ultimately probably doomed, but it could extend or renew the horizon for certain kinds of knowledge work.

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