[deleted]
The fate of "small" open source
61–70 of 238 posts
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#62Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website. Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality. All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.
[flagged]
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?
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
The summary is often incorrect in at least some subtle details, which is invisible to a lot of people who do not understand LLM limitations.
Now, we can argue that a typical SEO-optimized garbage article is not better, but I feel like the trust score for them was lower on average from a typical person.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. Slight pushback on this. The web has been spammed with subpar tutorials for ages now. The kind of medium "articles" that are nothing more than "getting started" steps + slop that got popular circa 2017-2019 is imo worse than the listy-boldy-emojy-filled articles that the LLMs come up with. So nothing gained, nothing lost imo. You still have to learn how to…
The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?
What happens when the monkeys stop getting bananas to work on the typewriters? More stories?
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#65[deleted]
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?
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
There was a time before SEO slop that web search was really valuable
We're fighting slop with condensed slop
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?
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.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#68I 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 repository than actually writing the library.
I like the approach C sometimes takes, with the "tiny header file" type of libraries. Though I guess that also stems from the lack of a central build system.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and you just dump it in your project with limited vetting Well yes there’s your problem. But people have been doing this with random snippets found on the internet for a while now. The truth is that irresponsibles developers will produce irresponsible code, with or without LLMs
> The truth is that irresponsibles developers will produce irresponsible code, with or without LLMs True. But the difference is the scale and ease of doing with code generators. With a few clicks you can add hundreds of lines of code which supposedly does the right thing. While in the past, you would get code snippets for a particular aspect of the problem that you are trying to solve. You still had to figure out how…
Surely in any responsible development environment those hundreds of lines of code still have to be reviewed.
Or don't people do code review any more? I suppose one could outsource the code review to an AI, preferably not the one that wrote it though. But if you do that surely you will end up building systems that no one understands at all.
Re: The fate of "small" open source
#70> Sure, you could use blob-util, but then you’d be taking on an extra dependency, with unknown performance, maintenance, and supply-chain risks. Use of an AI to write your code is also a form of dependency. When the LLM spits out code and you just dump it in your project with limited vetting, that's not really that different from vendoring a dependency. It has a different set of risks, but it still has risks.
Right, but you do avoid worries like "will I have to update this dependency every week and deal with breaking changes?" or "will the author be compromised in a supply-chain attack, or do a deliberate protestware attack?" etc. As for performance, a lot of npm packages don't have proper tree-shaking, so you might be taking on extra bloat (or installation cost). Your point is well-taken, though.
You can avoid all those worries by vendoring the code anyway. you only 'need' to update it if you are pulling it in as a separate dependency.