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Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

openchaos.dev

61–70 of 89 posts

Re: Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

#62
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says who?

Says anyone who has tried to do anything requiring the smallest amount of computer science or computer engineering. These models are really great at boilerplate and simple web apps. As soon as you get beyond that, it gets hairy. For example, I have a clone of HN I've been working on that adds subscriptions and ad slot bidding. Just those two features required a lot of hand holding. Figma Design nailed the UX, but the…

> a clone of HN I've been working on that adds subscriptions and ad slot bidding

Wut, what's the purpose of that? Is this just a toy learning project? Would it be to make money off of people who don't know that an ad-free version of HN exists at news.ycombinator.com? Will you try to sell it to Ycombinator?

Re: Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

#63
post #53

> The website IS the repo. The repo IS the website. I wonder if we get something productive by end of 2026 from this repo. Who knows, maybe we solve AGI

It's not possible to generate anything productive this way.

Wikipedia basically works this way. And instead of it being directly public, it goes through a voting process. One might argue it's actually much more curated than Wikipedia :P

Re: Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

#65
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says who?

Says anyone who has tried to do anything requiring the smallest amount of computer science or computer engineering. These models are really great at boilerplate and simple web apps. As soon as you get beyond that, it gets hairy. For example, I have a clone of HN I've been working on that adds subscriptions and ad slot bidding. Just those two features required a lot of hand holding. Figma Design nailed the UX, but the…

I’ve been pleasantly surprised how useful it is for writing low level stuff like peripheral drivers on imbedded platforms. It’s actually-simple- stuff, but exactingly technical and detail oriented. It’s interesting that it can work so well, then go wildly off the rails and be impossible to wrestle back on unless you go way back in the context or even start a completely new context and feed in only what is currently relevant (this has become my main strategy)

Still, it’s amazingly good at wrestling the harmony of a bunch of technical details and applying them to a tried and true design paradigm to create an API for new devices or to handle tricky timing, things like that. Until it isn’t and you have to abort the session and build a new one because it has worked itself into some kind of context corner where it obsesses about something that is just wrong or irrelevant.

Still, it’s a solid 2x on production, and my code is arguably more maintainable because I don’t get tempted to be clever or skip clarifying patterns.

There is a level of wholistic complexity that kills it though. The trick is dividing the structure and tasks into self contained components that contain any relevant state within their confines to the maximum practical extent, even if there is a lot of interdependent state going on inside. It’s sort a mod a meta-functional paradigm working with inherently state-centric modules.

Re: Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

#66
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this could end up either turning into a Linux or like when Microsoft released Tay and Twitter users taught it to be a Nazi. Or anywhere in between, really.

It really can't for numerous reasons, one of them being that PRs have to be fairly low effort, and this will be even more so if the popular "merge daily" PR is voted in. People talk about this "evolving", but it's nothing like biological evolution or genetic algorithms. It's just a linear sequence of small changes, and without either planning and central authority or some stable fitness function (the ecological envir…

> some stable fitness function

The participants could always vote to add a test harness and CI/CD to vet pull requests against.

Re: Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

#67

Am I the only one who's noticing that this "open chaos" project's most voted PRs are to add structure to the project (e.g., calculate +1/-1, etc.)? I guess people just desire a certain amount of structure to their chaos :)

Can’t have one without the other

Re: Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

#69
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most code by lines, perhaps, but not most code that works and is useful

Says who?

Says anyone with a modest level of skill at programming. It doesn't take a genius programmer to realize these things are terrible at writing code.

Re: Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

#70
post #5

Excited to see how this plays out, I made something similar a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9351286

Oh man, I was going to try and find that to link to it. I can’t believe it was 10 years ago… I really enjoyed following that for a while. Thanks for making it.
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