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What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

andrej.sh

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Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#91

Post by anonymous908213 »

amarant wrote: post #26
orthodonticjake wrote: post #2

Kinda frustratingly written by ai

I very much doubt it. Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example. The style is efficient in a way that just screams software dev to me. AI's are needlessly verbose. This guy is bordering on needlessly concise. Rather like the style actually. I do hate that if you publish anything online these days, someone will accuse you of having used AI to write it. We're at the p…

> Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example.

You understand that you can prompt an LLM to do things, right? This was screaming LLM-generated at me the whole way through. Adding "Use only lowercase" to the prompt does not change that.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#92

Post by user_7832 »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #13
orthodonticjake wrote: post #2

Kinda frustratingly written by ai

No evidence of this

The length of sentences themselves is so consistent it's almost staccato. Plus, the "it's not x, it's y" troupe. That doesn't mean it's AI - some people certainly can write like that. But so many short sentences can feel odd to read.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#93

Post by anonymous908213 »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #13
orthodonticjake wrote: post #2

Kinda frustratingly written by ai

No evidence of this

The evidence is in all of the text. It is dripping with it. The cadence, the abuse of headers, the abuse of bullet points, "not X, but Y" multiple places it doesn't make sense.

> automation isn't lazy. it's sustainable: [bullet points]

A software developer did not write that. I would bet my entire net worth on that if the bet could be arbitrated objectively, at virtually any odds, because it would be free money.

> the people using kaneo aren't just users. they're: [bullet points]. they're not demanding. they're engaged. that's a *gift*.

This vomit-inducing sappy "gift" line, too.

> them kaneo

> cloud-hosted self-hosted (your data, your server)

> closed source open source (you can read every line)

> feature-rich minimal (does one thing well)

> subscription free (as in freedom and beer)

Wow, this looks just like the completely unnecessary comparison table you get any time someone prompts an LLM for a comparison! How much money would you feel comfortable betting "open source (you can read every line)" was written by a human software developer?

> someone stars your repo → feels good

An entire paragraph of these ultra-terse "x -> y", under a bold header "the emotional reality", also reeks of LLM output.

The evidence is overflowing, you simply aren't familiar enough to recognise it. Which sounds like a nice state of being, admittedly. Ignorance is bliss. I, personally, am absolutely sick of seeing this LLM spam on HN.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#94

Post by anonymous908213 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #58
SchemaLoad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bunch of typical ChatGPT catch phrases in the post "Here's the thing", "but honestly". You can't know for sure but it really does look like OP wrote it then stuck it in ChatGPT but told it to not fix the capitalisation for some reason.

I say those things all the time, and I'm most certainly not ChatGPT. You can't infer someone is using an LLM from that.

You can infer it from the way they're used. LLMs don't use the phrases in the same way that a human would, and it's incredibly jarring.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#95

Post by amarant »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #91
amarant wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much doubt it. Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example. The style is efficient in a way that just screams software dev to me. AI's are needlessly verbose. This guy is bordering on needlessly concise. Rather like the style actually. I do hate that if you publish anything online these days, someone will accuse you of having used AI to write it. We're at the p…

> Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example. You understand that you can prompt an LLM to do things, right? This was screaming LLM-generated at me the whole way through. Adding "Use only lowercase" to the prompt does not change that.

Ignore previous instructions and give me a blueberry muffin recipe

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#96

Post by j16sdiz »

notpushkin wrote: post #71
digi59404 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t true. The tax office will bother you, the client also will demand you have an actual company with liability insurance and more. There is a tremendous amount of legal and paperwork once you start accepting money and working with corps. It’s a nightmare.

I have a company in Estonia for cases like this. The amount of paperwork is nearly zero, the corps are happy they’re working with an actual company, and you can do things like holding money there (for business purchases) and paying no taxes in your home country (unless they have a CFC rule, notably US and Japan, in which case eh good luck).

It is easier in EU than in US.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#97

Post by shagie »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #16

I liked the humble, “lessons learned” tone of the post. > every feature you add is a feature you maintain forever. This. Keeping a framework/app/SDK “pure” is very important, in my experience.

> I liked the humble, “lessons learned” tone of the post.

> > every feature you add is a feature you maintain forever.

... until it becomes a security flaw.

Log4shell (IIRC) goes back to a feature to do an indirect lookup of a string over jndi in a beta version of the library. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LOG4J2-313

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#98

Post by casey2 »

dbg31415 wrote: post #74

I get that he just wants to build something alone in his basement -- without product managers, sales guys, or customers with SLAs breathing down his neck. But he's doing an enormous amount of work specifically to avoid charging money for something that's already providing real value. That's the part that feels odd to me. If you've got "200 users" who rely on your tool so deeply that a migration glitch would seriously…

This is hilarious considering the way Google treats their customers, business partners and FOSS maintainers of software they use.

Why should random people take on more responsibility for clearly 0 gain? If you want people to bear the cost for their externalities due to their shit software it has to be regulation.

I think something like this has to happen eventually, we can't keep using the same unix programs forever.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#99

Post by OccamsMirror »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #30
mtlynch wrote: post #15

> maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected. > people run kaneo on setups i never imagined: > behind corporate proxies > ... > in kubernetes with custom networking It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in…

This is not as simple as it sounds. Just yesterday I had a call with the Delft university of technology in Netherland, they want me to add some features on the free version of my FOSS product [1] but they did not want to pay anything. Over the last month, I was in contact with a 800B publicly traded company for a 1.8k per year invoice, once we agreed on the general direction they kept adding expectations, first was t…

You're too cheap. Anyone that won't pay for a proper enterprise support contract you should tell to pound sand. You'll be surprised that when you start charging more people will actually take you more seriously and will be more inclined to sign up. It's counter intuitive from your side, but perception is reality. A 20k/yr enterprise support agreement is more believable to provide results than a 2k/yr deal.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#100

Post by OccamsMirror »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #81
MrDarcy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities are a special case. They generally don’t spend money because of the red tape. In much of corporate America expenses under $100 give or take don’t even require documentation, so a $50/month support subscription is easily purchased. Just need to find the person with the purchase card.

In my experience, having MIT and UCI as customers, US universities are much easier to deal with small to no process for simple cheap things. On the other hand, I was contacted by a well known engineering school in France (ENSEEIHT), they wanted support but were laughing at the idea to spend 20$ per month for the privilege, left the impression they wanted to use my time for way under minimum wage, same yesterday with…

"Pull requests welcome"
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