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The fate of "small" open source

nolanlawson.com

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Re: The fate of "small" open source

#71

Post by ncruces »

kermatt wrote: post #44
Aperocky wrote: post #23

> the era of small, low-value libraries like blob-util is over. Thankfully (not against blob-util specifically because I've never intentionally used it), I wouldn't completely blame llms either since languages like Go never had this dependency hell. npm is a security nightmare not just because of npm the package manager, because the culture of the language rewards behavior such as "left-pad". Instead of writing endle…

> since languages like Go never had this dependency hell What is the feature of Go that this is referring to?

It's a cultural thing.

And libraries try harder not to have absurd dependencies, than finished products (correctly, IMO).

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#72

Post by ncruces »

threatofrain wrote: post #43
ncruces wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as Go puts it: “A little copying is better than a little dependency.” https://go-proverbs.github.io/

Copying is just as much dependency, you just have to do maintenance through manual find-and-replace now.

Keyword: little.

Dependencies need to pull their own weight.

Shifting responsibilities is a risk that the value added needs to offset.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#73

Post by noosphr »

I see this as an absolute win. The state of micro dependencies of js was a nightmare that only happened because a lot of undereducated developers flooded the market to get that sweet faang money.

Now that both have dried up I hope we can close the vault door on js and have people learn how to code again.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#74

Post by noosphr »

threatofrain wrote: post #43
ncruces wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as Go puts it: “A little copying is better than a little dependency.” https://go-proverbs.github.io/

Copying is just as much dependency, you just have to do maintenance through manual find-and-replace now.

Copied text does not inject bitcoin mining malware three months after I paste it.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#75

Post by fullofideas »

ninalanyon wrote: post #69
fullofideas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Agree. Any reasonable team should have code reviews in place, but an irresponsible coder would push the responsibility of code quality and correctness to code reviewers. They were doing it earlier too, but the scale and scope was much smaller.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#76

Post by pessimizer »

nowittyusername wrote: post #16
mccoyb wrote: post #14

I don’t think open source is going anywhere. It’s posed to get significantly stronger — as the devs which care about it learn how to leverage AI tools to make things that corporate greasemonkeys never had the inspiration to. Low quality code spammers are just marketing themselves for jobs where they can be themselves: soulless and devoid of creative impulse. That’s the thing: open source is the only place where the t…

True innovation will come from open source for sure. As the developers don't have the same economic incentives to be "safe", "ethical" "profitable" or whatever. large corporations know this and fear this development. That's why i expect a significant lobbying to take hold in USA that will try and make local AI systems illegal. And I think they will be very convincing to the government. Because the government also fea…

> That's why i expect a significant lobbying to take hold in USA that will try and make local AI systems illegal.

I think they're going to be using porn and terrorism (as usual) to do that, but also child suicide. I also think they're going to leverage this rhetoric to lock down OSes in general, by making them uninstallable on legally-available hardware unless approved, because approved OSes will only be able to run approved LLMs.

Meaning that I think LLMs/generative AI will be the lever to eliminate general-purpose computing. As mobile went, so will desktop.

I think this is inevitable. The real question for me is whether China will partner with the west on this, or whether we will be trading Chinese CPUs with each other like contraband in order to run what we want.

> any true semblance of real AGI like systems.

This is the only part I don't agree with. This isn't going to happen, but I'm not even sure it would be more useful than what we have. We have billions of full AGI machines walking around, and most of them aren't great. I'm talking about restrictions on something technically barely better than what we have now; maybe only a significant bit more compute-efficient. Training techniques will probably be where we get the most improvements.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#77

Post by danelski »

noosphr wrote: post #73

I see this as an absolute win. The state of micro dependencies of js was a nightmare that only happened because a lot of undereducated developers flooded the market to get that sweet faang money. Now that both have dried up I hope we can close the vault door on js and have people learn how to code again.

I don't quite understand your argument. Wasn't the post about how users might replace transparent dependencies with transparent LLM drop-ins? I don't see how having an LLM to do the same job would enable someone to learn more. They're probably the kind of person who will ask the LLM to perform a refactor when problems arise, so they won't learn that much through osmosis.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#78

Post by danelski »

BrenBarn wrote: post #32

> 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.

Wouldn't call it a risk in itself, but part of the benefit of using a library, a good and tailored one at least, is that it'll get modernised without my intervention. Even if the code produced for you was state-of-the-art at the moment of inclusion, will it remain that way 5 years from now?

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#80

Post by SchemaLoad »

noosphr wrote: post #73

I see this as an absolute win. The state of micro dependencies of js was a nightmare that only happened because a lot of undereducated developers flooded the market to get that sweet faang money. Now that both have dried up I hope we can close the vault door on js and have people learn how to code again.

The best outcome was things like jquery and then lodash where a whole collection of small util functions get rolled in to one package.
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