We really feel for the poor oppressed AI people who have no financial, political or corporate backing unlike Codeberg, which gets $0.5 trillion in investor money!
You are not allowed to say certain personalities who cover some of this stuff on Hacker News, albeit from a little bit of a theatrical position, but it still does get to the heart of some of this stuff. This sheer nonsense. What this person is talking about is not a community. They want a club.
More evidence of tribalism, combined with exceptionally precise confessions running as whataboutisms
Pelagicaustral is on the money.
It would just be nice if people understood the difference between wanting a club with a gate versus a community. I am impressed, though. I never thought I’d see a vomit diarrhea load of bumper stickers, but a digital form at the end of the article.
sloperators are so easily offended when their token use doesn't give them access to a welcoming community of people who actually want to do their work.
Luddites are too fucking lazy to follow up their words with actions and keep using software developed using LLMs instead of completing the herculean task of reinstalling their system.
I notice this with ruby right now, where claude took over development.
But it is not confined to just ruby. AI slop eliminates human contributors.
Why would I want to even try to interact with AI slop meta-designing
software? If I go to another developer and ask "hey many, how did you add
this great feature #123"? I'd get the reply "claude slop". Wowsers. Now
tell me this is healthy to a community ...
I wonder how people work with omarchyslop (the linux distribution spam-slopped by DHH). Do they have any real community outside of paid fanboi accounts? If so, how do they interact? I feel that there is no real exchange of e. g. code since claude slop just autogenerates that. It must be strange for them.
The agentic development loop is just another tool at a developer's disposal. Whether it produces slop is still a matter of the driver's design, taste, risk tolerance, skill, etc. Even in your hypothetical, it implies liking a feature enough to reach out and ask about it.
One perspective that you might want to conside, and which is discussed by Oxide folks in this podcast episode [1], is that agents are a kind of non-deterministic compiler which is still, to some extent, capable of producing useful output. Consider this: even before agents, ruby source code might have been seen slop to someone writing a strongly typed language.
Lastly, there is a community for users of that distro if you care to look for it (I am not among them).
I don’t disagree, but this ignores some of what we have learned about critical masses and network effects. If everyone can just take their own copy with no interaction, many won’t join the community and it may never reach a critical mass despite and because of its openness.
Of course, but any of those people making a copy of the code can be the ones to decide to build a community around it.
Fabrice Bellard doesn't need to personally administer to the ongoing development and community functions of QEMU or ffmpeg, it is sufficient that he released the code as open source, and others carry the torch from there.
And if people disagree about the form those communities take, they can split them as they see fit. As happened with libav and ffmpeg for a number of years. This too is fine, and is only possible because of the license.
Seems like you aren't actually disagreeing at all?
First you're just disagreeing about the relative importance of "community" vs the license used. This does not seem like an important distinction, blog rhetorical structuring aside, since the value of each is really "it depends" (in the extreme, neither community or license matter if no one ever sees or hears of the code, for instance).
Second:
> If I publish my code under an open source license... If I keep my code proprietary...
That isn't even the distinction that the author is making. They're only talking about communities around open source code. They spell out the dichotomy quite explicitly:
> This is why I don't care as much anymore about a project being under a copyleft free software license or a non-copyleft free software license.
> This has taken a backseat, as I now believe that there is something more important than license: community. The community around a software project is what dictates the values of the project. A strong copyleft license does still signal that the project cares about software freedom, but, by itself it is not enough.
I don't care about community at all, the license is the only thing that has any "signal" when comes to someone caring about software freedom. If you release all your code as GPL (or MIT, or Apache, etc), you care about software freedom. Nothing is more important than the license.
The list of bullet points the author then provides are completely irrelevant to "caring about software freedom".
Im really interested in seeing where the anti-ai crowd ends up in a few years.
Im sympathetic to the perspective in some ways but I think it's wildly impractical to actually try to keep AI out of software development.
I suppose an anti-ai optimist might hope for a future where AI written software proves too problematic over time and things return to their ideal vision of no AI in most software.
I really, really dont think that's in the range of possibilities. So what would be left?
- pockets of anti ai software
- these people slowly disappear or the window moves ("ai in software BUT ...")
Give it a few years and nobody will want to run software that hasn't been debugged and hardened by AIs. It's going to be much more thorough than human auditors - it already is, to some extent, and faster anyway, but I'm talking about the future. So it's going to be the latter, complete normalization of AI. You can still write the program by hand, but you'll need AI to make it trustworthy and secure enough, if only because the attackers will also be mostly AI.
I think this is a certainty. Future generations will be born into a world where education, technology, and jobs have corrected for AI's existence. They will never know a world without it or have the experience of the current growing pains.
We've seen this plenty of times with new tech in the past, and as disruptive as AI is, I can't imagine the cat going back in the bag.
Its a bit like how we have gps connected maps in our pockets. Anyone born after 2000 has only a loose concept of being lost (within range of a *G tower and >1% battery) and treats paper maps as a hobby. Our children will grow up assuming their phone can do maths and programming better than human ever could.
>In five years, we'll all have phones that connect physical locations again, instead of (or as well as) people. And we'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know what it is to be lost, to not know where you are and how to get to some desired destination from wherever that is.
>Think about that. "Being lost" has been part of the human experience ever since our hominid ancestors were knuckle-walking around the plains of Africa. And we're going to lose it — at least, we're going to make it as unusual an experience as finding yourself out in public without your underpants.
1. All modern LLMs are (in my eyes) inherently morally problematic. They were trained on stolen information, and where they didn't break the law they corrupted social contracts. Their manner of operation is also problematic: disadvantaged communities are being exploited at a rapidly increasing disproportionate rate in the name of "more compute".
2. I am fundamentally disinterested in the productivity mindset that LLMs lean into. I don't care to "produce more"; the value of my work does not lie in the amount of money that can be gotten in exchange for it. This is an easier position to hold as someone who does not hold a typical corporate job, but even if I did I would still resist because an increase in my output would not correlate to an increase in my salary.
At the root of it all is people. I care about people (their existence, their happiness, my connections to them, their connections to each other), and any use of LLMs is (in my mind) anti-people, so I want no part of it.
>1. All modern LLMs are (in my eyes) inherently morally problematic.
Yes, I think this is a key point and I'm not surprised to hear it. It's a fundamental problem with AI. It's not something that will disappear as it becomes more useful or makes less mistakes.
How do you feel about a dependency that was written by AI? It seems like things will get progressively harder and harder to maintain a real boundary, outside of just writing everything yourself. And perhaps hosting.
Yeah, I think it's infeasible to remain in software development while maintaining a 100% "I refuse to touch anything that has a nonzero level of LLM input" for that reason.
For the time being, I'm content to simply not use it myself. I don't think it's reasonable for me to foist my morals onto those around me, in the same way that my very close vegan friend still talks to me when I order a whole milk latte. I don't think there's a way to exist in modern society without incurring some degree of (likely indirect) immorality, so it's all about setting boundaries for myself where I can and accepting where I end up.
I said "resist", not "absolutely refuse". There are limits where one's livelihood is concerned. I am fortunate to be in a place where I can still decide for myself.
But, of course, this is also part of the immorality of the AI industry.
> At the root of it all is people. I care about people (their existence, their happiness, my connections to them, their connections to each other)
100% agree. That's what it is all about. That, and our time.
> and any use of LLMs is (in my mind) anti-people
Hard disagree. A lot of good can be done for the people with this tech. Blanket rejection of an entire category of technology has not worked out well for the disadvantaged communities in the past. We have plenty of history.
Maybe "any" was too strong, but I would still say most uses of LLMs are anti-people.
I think about how disappointing it is when a new project makes it to the front page of HN and I click through and it's just... vibe-coded slop. Looks pretty at first, but it's clear that there isn't really much human underneath. Lots of obvious interface problems or just a distinct lack of a personal touch. It's empty, and it makes me sad.
Or even not in software, I think of all the people who have been so quick to offload their thought processes to a statistical model. What do you mean you don't know what you want to eat at this restaurant so you asked Claude and got recommended something that isn't even on the menu?
And that's just individual stuff. I am genuinely fearful of the integration of AI into, say, the legal and judicial processes, or governance, or whatever else. People give the models wayyyy too much credibility considering they (the models) cannot give an accurate confidence interval for their results, and I think it's going to make things much worse for disadvantaged communities to a degree that the communities will not be able to overcome by using the technologies themselves.
Thank you for sharing — yes, this is exactly the feeling I have. The end product is not what got me excited about all the projects I used to see here; the inspiring part was the human element itself, and AI effectively removes all but the most superficial traces of that.
> 1. All modern LLMs are (in my eyes) inherently morally problematic. They were trained on stolen information, and where they didn't break the law they corrupted social contracts.
It's bizarre to me that over what feels like less than a year, enforcement of intellectual property and copyright laws has become the most important moral principle. Suddenly, it's your moral duty to enforce Disney's trademark of Mickey Mouse.
I reject this moral framing completely. Information wants to be free!
On the one hand, I agree with you about, e.g., Disney. I think the way they have deliberately manipulated the formation of modern copyright law for their purposes is also problematic.
But I do care about, for example, a recently published author, or someone who posts their paintings on social media. Regardless of where the law stands in each particular case, I think it's repugnant that statistical models were trained on these inputs with the intent of offering the ability to produce similar outputs without any payment or even attribution to the original artist.
> Information wants to be free!
If someone chooses to make their information free, then so it may be, but the issue at hand is very obviously not about the use of, e.g., copyleft materials. The AI companies knowingly chose to take material that they knew they should not have and used it to make their copycat machines, building those machines in such a way that those responsible can cower behind the letter of the law to defile its spirit.
Instead of some reasonable time limit such as 14 years, we get big corporations that hoard copyright effectively for eternity, and big corporations that violate copyright instantly.
It's the little guy whose work is copied (used to train models that create copies on demand) immediately, but who is prosecuted when he pirates someone else's work.
> But I do care about, for example, a recently published author, or someone who posts their paintings on social media. Regardless of where the law stands in each particular case, I think it's repugnant that statistical models were trained on these inputs with the intent of offering the ability to produce similar outputs without any payment or even attribution to the original artist.
I have somewhat more sympathy for individuals, but I disagree with the entire system itself.
Suppose an aspiring artist learns from someone's work, and I commission them to produce similar output to the original without attribution. Was the act of them learning from the work "repugnant"?
> If someone chooses to make their information free, then so it may be, but the issue at hand is very obviously not about the use of, e.g., copyleft materials. The AI companies knowingly chose to take material that they knew they should not have and used it to make their copycat machines, building those machines in such a way that those responsible can cower behind the letter of the law to defile its spirit.
I don't agree that they shouldn't have done it. I disagree with the letter and the spirit of the law.
Setting aside the law itself entirely (it is, after all, not an arbiter of morality), I think "if I can copy your work, I am entitled to do so" is a problematic worldview that harms individuals and communities, and I want no part of it.
Agreed, this is my unpopular opinion. The “moral framing” asks us to accept the absurd idea of “intellectual property”, and that someone who drew a picture without crediting or compensating everyone they leaned on to get the last 1%, somehow owns 100% of the proceeds thereafter.
AI represents the sum total of human knowledge and everyone who thinks they’re owned compensation for their last mile contributions, which build on centuries of human existence and knowledge-making, are just leaning into the pro capital idea that whoever owns a thing controls a thing. In reality when you put something out into the world, whatever it is, it takes a life of its own and you don’t really get to own or control that.
These artists and programmers and writers think they’re owned compensation because they “own” what they create but they do not. They in fact owe a debt to everyone who came before them they must pay forward. AI took that debt and made it tangible.
> the value of my work does not lie in the amount of money that can be gotten in exchange for it.
What do you think money is?
It's a rough proxy approximation for value.
So yes, the amount of money you can get for your work is rough approximation of its value.
You can also have a precious pet rock that you personally hold very dear and well "valueable" - but valuable to nobody but you only. So realistically it has zero value to everyone else.
If you don't care about creating value, you don't care about people.
As, ultimately, it costs money to care for people, and if you don't have it - all you have are prayers and best wishes.
> What do you think money is? It's a rough proxy approximation for value.
Money is an abstraction, not an approximation. There is not of necessity any real basis for any price that has ever been attached to any product or service, ever. Money is an artificial mechanism by which we exchange debt owed by the issuing state that itself also has no real basis.
> If you don't care about creating value, you don't care about people.
On this we agree, but, of course, my point was that when I say "value" I don't mean monetary value. A person's value is intangible, and the value of their works (whatever those may be) is derived entirely from the relationship formed between the artist and their context and the connection from this relationship to whoever wishes to partake of the art.
> As, ultimately, it costs money to care for people, and if you don't have it - all you have are prayers and best wishes, and you functionally can't help anyone.
What a woefully capitalistic perspective. I wish the best of luck to you and your shareholders.
This is a simplistic view over money and currencies in general. Money is a form of credit. It's an abstraction in the sense that it unifies preferences and signals under a single dimension. It's an approximation in the sense that, when you buy something for 20 bucks, it's not that the something is actually worth 20 bucks, but that you value 20 bucks (and, by extension, the other things you could buy with them) than the something.
In this regard, while it's kinda wrong to say "it costs money to care for people", caring for people is not free either - you have to spend something: time, labor, psyche, favors, etc. All of these can be acquired or replaced by trading with others (which is preferable to do through money): buying tools/machines, hiring workers/services, acquiring means to connect with others, and so on. Turns out money is just a more verifiable and simplified form of favors.
> It's an approximation in the sense that, when you buy something for 20 bucks, it's not that the something is actually worth 20 bucks, but that you value 20 bucks (and, by extension, the other things you could buy with them) than the something.
I regret to inform you that this is actually a description of abstraction, not approximation. :) The twenty "dollars" abstract over the notion of "a quantity that is owed" such that you can exchange the otherwise meaningless scraps of paper (or just bytes these days!) for other goods/services. If you were not going to use that money for something else, it actually has no value, curiously enough.
Decades ago, money had a concrete value in that you could request the issuing government to take your dollars and give you gold at an established exchange rate. When we abandoned the gold standard (and all forms of fiscal concretization), money became inherently abstract.
> Turns out money is just a more verifiable and simplified form of favors.
I should like to refer you to the book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" for an alternative look at monetary systems, credit and debt, favors, and more. I found it a fascinating read (I mean that genuinely), and very educational with regard to this claim in particular.
> Decades ago, money had a concrete value in that you could request the issuing government to take your dollars and give you gold at an established exchange rate. When we abandoned the gold standard (and all forms of fiscal concretization), money became inherently abstract.
This is nothing more than redditor type "akshually" autistic yapping nitpicking on terms being used rather focusing on the semantics they were used to convey in an argument.
The argument stands whether or not you're using gold backed dollars, fiat (that gets constantly devaluated by incessent printing), or gold coins directly.
It's currency - nominated in some units, and those units will be a proxy and close approximation to value it represents.
> On this we agree, but, of course, my point was that when I say "value" I don't mean monetary value.
Value and monetary value represent almost essentially the same thing.
There isn't some other "pixie" dust version of value, for which - people for some reason - refuse to give money for.
If people aren't willing to pay money for something, oh the odds are it's worthless - in every sense of the word.
> A person's value is intangible.
No, it isn't, person without assets (and money) is worthless and their value is selling their labour like a slave
directionally proportional how valuable their labour is, or they sleep under a bridge and starve. And this is exactly what happens in reality.
That's unless they have friends and family that assign some value (monetary!) to them, and are willing (and able!) to buffer the expense of getting them of the street, etc. This expense can be directly translated to money of the fiat kind.
> What a woefully capitalistic perspective. I wish the best of luck to you and your shareholders.
The perspective is either true or it's not. I couldn't care less what label you assign to it.
If a person is starving and sleeping out on the street, or has health issues. It will cost money to feed them, house them and cure them.
A broke person is literally incapable of providing this in any sustainable way.
Some pedantic "akshually-ing" about "exchange debt owed by the issuing state" isn't helping anyone.
Do you believe that we're in an AI bubble? If so what do you think will happen if & when it pops? What happens if Anthropic and OpenAI go under? Will Microsoft and Google continue investing? Or will local/open-weight LLMs be viable alternatives? In the latter case will there be new ones trained, and if so who's gonna build the AI data centers that turned to be unprofitable in absence of a frontier model to distill cheaply? Or do you think we can run current models and point them at the Internet and be done with it?
And don't forget that for the entire existence and our entire experience of LLM-based AI is based on the LLMs being constantly updated and refreshed. And it is widely accepted (and even confirmed by the labs themselves) that updating the models is undeniably unsustainable.
So, I'd love to imagine what the future looks like once we're stuck with a model (no matter how capable) that can never be updated ever again. What future versions of "do it for my grandma" can never be patched out?
I am sympathetic to their cause, as I understand why one may be against what AI represents (in multiple dimensions).
But I believe that the anti-ai crowd will end up with contributions by people who pretend they don't use AI. Which may be fine if what you want is that "contributors own their work to some extent" (i.e. they need to understand something in order to pretend they didn't use an AI), but for those who don't want AI because of the inequalities it creates or the carbon footprint, then... well it doesn't work.
> Does the project have an inclusive code of conduct?
If you want a project to be community driven, adding an agreement that empowers its leaders to punish and exclude any community member for any reason, including reasons that have nothing to do with the project itself, is the opposite of that.
Codes of conduct result in dictator-driven projects, not community-driven projects.
A community _will_ form around any piece of software with enough users and developers, regardless of if it has a code of conduct or not. And communities will almost inevitably develop community standards and cliques. The code of conduct simply formalizes that. Someone who gets kicked out of a community with a code of conduct is equally likely to get kicked out of a community without a code of conduct
And besides that, someone can always make their own community around FOSS software. Fork and move on. But the new community will compete with the old, and it's possible that the fact that people stay with the old community means that they actually prefer that community
You need to build a thing first. Community doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. License doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. I'm seeing people forget this principle a lot recently.
The best thing you can do to promote free software is to make good free software. I was recently invited to sign a European digital sovereignty petition (which I am not eligible to sign). Know what helps much more with that? Making European digital sovereign systems. Instead of petitioning the government to switch MS Office to LibreOffice someone would have to actually put in the effort to find out why the government doesn't use LibreOffice, and fix that. (It's probably not because it doesn't run on their computers!)
You have to use copyleft licenses or else the software quickly becomes unfree, if it's actually worth anything. This doesn't happen to most non-copyleft free software because it's not worth very much, not because it doesn't happen.
A community of users doesn't have much value. Any forum or Discord guild or mailing list is secondary to the actual software and it actually being used. Plenty of successful software has no "community" - sudo, for example. Plenty of software with a "community" is not successful. Some software is successful and has a community, like Blender.
A community of developers is only valuable if they're doing valuable things. The Fediverse chat group that shared the link to the European digital sovereignty petition - no useful Fediverse software seems to be coming out of the people in that group. It's all about ivory-tower protocols that won't possibly work in the real world, and stuff like that. No actually working software.
We also have to stop over-estimating the worth of free software just because it's free. Good free software is good software which is also free software. No software is bad, bad software is also bad. Some random code you wrote and published somewhere on the internet usually isn't very useful, and that's probably why it doesn't have a community. Don't try to create a community first - that won't make the software any better. You have to make good software, that can spread by word of mouth, first and then you can have a community after that. Think about the number of random little programs on the internet, now think how many are installed on your computer - not a very big percentage, but the ones that you do have installed, many people have installed. Those are the useful ones.
In most projects the original creators remain the main developers no matter how many other contributors join. Late contributors having a significant effect on a project is the exception, not the rule, and when it happens it's actually an undesirable power inversion since the original creator retains unearned influence - see the PolyMC incident. There is no way to become the chief developer of a project other than having created it. If you think you can rewrite the whole thing and make it better, don't "join the community" - make a fork (which makes you part of the community, but that is not the main goal!).
If you're actually doing the majority of the work, offering a dual license is not unethical. We are forced to live in capitalism whether we like it or not, and we should be trying to squeeze money out of capitalist entities - lord knows they're good at squeezing money out of us. To not play that game is to lose by default. This isn't incompatible with being nice to people who are not money-squeezers, if you dual-license. A community fork can legally continue as AGPL-only. (You don't necessarily need a full CLA either, you just need people to agree their code will be in your commercial version. Programmers treat licenses and CLAs like satisfying the borrow checker, but that's not how they actually work.)
Some really good points here.
I suppose this shows that some software projects are community-first (like Game Jams), and some are Utility-first (name any). They are often both, but one takes precedence.
And rather than saying "all software should be done this way", it is more a question of what the primary goals of a project are.
Game jams aren't software projects - they are jams. Indeed you need a bunch of people to have a jam of any type. A project can spawn from a jam, but it isn't the jam.
I’ve found trying to contribute to FOSS to have all the stress of work with none of the pay.
I’ll jam with my friends, make a game in a weekend, but I have no interest in dealing with the egos of big FOSS projects.
However, I am seeing vibe coding create a new type of community. In the music space you have tons of people vibe coding new OSes for music hardware.
Akai has even promised to officially support custom firmware on the MPC Sample Keys! Custom firmware has existed for decades, but maybe a tiny handful of people could make it. Now just about everyone can!
You should not contribute if you don't find it worth it. There are many reasons to contribute. Maybe it's easier for you if your patch gets upstream instead of maintaining a fork, maybe you want to be part of a community, maybe something else.
I don't know if it's good for your CV. I have done a ton of open source before AI was a thing, and the truth is that nobody cares. I still have the basic coding test in interviews, even if the team interviewing me is actually relying on my open source work in their project.
And AI making it easier to contribute to a project, I think it's even less valuable today. Do it if you want to, that's all!
Yes and anyway, open source is immoral now because your free work will be absorbed by corporations using AI and weaponized to oppress fellow independent software developers; driving down the value of their labor.
Where do you see the industry getting monopolized? GitHub is getting overloaded because there are too many new projects. That's the opposite of a monopoly and most of them are from independent developers. No corporate control in sight.
I don't have a problem with me or anyone else giving away our labor for free. It's not like strike breaking in a unionized industry. This is only taking money from companies like Adobe that get their expensive tools replaced, and giving some of it to AI providers.
Some of the world's most successful open source projects and "communities", such as the Linux kernel, have succeeded contrary to the author's proposed values. What they really are looking for is a like minded clique, not a community.
i suppose i differ in the opinion that the most important thing about software are the users, and to the extent that AI can be used to create better software faster for them we should use it. i don't share the same moral qualms about AI, but even if i did i think there would be a strong argument that the benefits outweigh it.
developer communities can also be valuable but i think increasingly people are finding they can be quite toxic. the chillest communities i've found have actually been ones primarily made up of non-devs vibecoding. no egos, no endless arguments, holy war battles, or bikeshedding. they just build stuff and share. it's kind of nice acutally.
The longer I think about the impact of AI on software development, the more I see parallels between "pets" and "cattle" types of software projects. Or more aptly, fine china and disposable styrofoam plates. LLM-based development allows large-scale production of essentially disposable software. Which is fine for many business cases - software is a cost for them. Even with software as products, it makes sense to optimize production costs.
But open-source software is far more about the process than the product. And therefore longevity of resulting software can be expected to be far greater. Foundations of our software stack - libraries, source control operating systems, compilers, databases and numerous other pieces require people capable and willing to do a long-term care of the software - hence, the community that need to last decades. Linux and PostgreSQL is 35 years old, git is 21, OpenSSL 28.
I believe human-only software development will remain for the foreseeable future, despite the growth of LLM-based ones, just like mass-produced grocery bread didn't displace the artisanal bakeries.
Some talented engineers I know just want to run an open source project with contributors and participation in technical discussions, yet also intentionally without the ""community"" part.
In enough cases, I'm sure many of us can think of some, some of the relatively recent "community" stuff has been counter-productive to an open source project, abused as an opportunity to enforce on clueless bystanders whatever fad orthodoxy of the day, or in the worst cases campaign viciously against specific demographics under the banner of doing the opposite.
Talented engineers who just want to do an open source project don't want any of that.
Separate from all that, I'm 100% with no Discord and no GitHub, both of those are total cancer.
I feel like there are infinitely many philosophies. From "I don't care" to "here is a list of 200 things your project must honour in order to be respectable" through "I just find this cool".
As a user, I like it when I own the devices I buy and can install and modify the software I want. It's not always the way it is, and that's life. I won't go to other projects and tell them that they must change something because I want them to.
I guess it's way too late to lodge this complaint, but using the word "community" to refer to things that aren't rooted in geographical areas has always struck me as odd.
I recently got a "WatchPad": a smart watch "back", which you can stick on the back of a non-smart watch and it does HR, SpO2, step, sleep monitoring.
I didn't particularly want the ugly app, but it is implemented in GadgetBridge[1], which is on codeberg.
That's an Android app, but I wanted a MacOS version.
I LLM-reverse engineered the API based on the GadgetBridge work and now have a MacOS version, specific for my device. As part of that I worked out how to do temperature monitoring (which GadgetBridge doesn't support). Normally I'd contribute that back, but codeberg has been very explicit on their policy of no-LLM work, so I guess I won't do that.
As a fun exercise, read the comments in this thread as a justification for removing SWE jobs and getting rid of human development completely in favour of LLMs. As a bonus, imagine you're an executive and you are saving a truckload of money and headaches that come with dealing with people.
We’re in the tabs v spaces of this era. It will be forgotten. No one debates BSD v Linux. No one remembers SCO. Or whether silverlight will be ported. Or whether an app is available on Linux/Mac. Or whether drivers exist for their hardware. Or whether web standards are adhered to. Or whether you have to use a proprietary compiler.
Everyone thinks AI vs non-AI is a debate but just like all of those, it’ll be meaningless to the engineers of tomorrow.
> Copyright has always been a system that upholds the hegemony of the powerful, it enriches corporations at the expense of the working class.
This is not true. I've never heard of a 'working class' person getting sued for copyright infringement. People who run a business to make money from copyright infringement are not working class and those who are would never be pursued.
The problem is not that copyright protects the powerful, it's that copyright is not enforced if you're not powerful. As is the case with AI. The problem is lack of enforcement so the idea that copyrights oppresses the working class is completely backwards.
I'm an open source developer myself. One of my projects has about 6k stars on GitHub. Open source is dead. It was never 'open' anyway because it was always the big corporate-sponsored projects which got all of the attention.
Frankly, open source is immoral at this stage. Just a con to convince gullible fools to give away their time for free for AI to use. Given the new reality, author is essentially a scammer trying to steal people's time (though perhaps unwittingly).
I'm not saying this as an insult. I do consider my past self to be a gullible fool before AI, though you have to recognize that was a lesser kind of fool. Now the exact mechanism of theft of labor is right there in front of your eyes! What a fool you have to be to write open source code now!
Those things are important when you want to use making software as a fun social activity. (And are of the appropriate tribe, for the ones with political valence.)
They matter rather less if the goal is to have useful software.
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There's also the possibility that you make something commercially valuable, and forbid corporations from deriving value from it; in which case you'll suddenly have to share space with something that's (somewhat?) interoperable and outside your control. As was seen in the news a few times when project owners got annoyed at cloud providers and tried to restrict them.
> there is something more important than license: community
Is there such thing as "community" at all? As I know, the majority of open-source projects are developed by a single person, where others only contribute bug reports (in best case). It's not a community, if there is such imbalance in contribution and power.
Only a handful of projects (a small percentage) has actual community with many members doing meaningful contribution. But they are most notable ones, so that one may think, that all open-source projects function like this.
All the major projects have a large number of developers. Linux, BSD, Firefox, KDE, Gnome, Qt, GStreamer, ffmpeg, Mesa, Wine, Blender, VLC, node.js, React, Ruby, Python, Rust, GCC, LLVM, Clang, Debian...
Now, the number of projects is not that important since we are talking about people. In my entirely unscientific estimate, the majority of FOSS developers is mainly active in a project of more than ten people.
> Is there such thing as "community" at all? As I know, the majority of open-source projects are developed by a single person, where others only contribute bug reports (in best case). It's not a community, if there is such imbalance in contribution and power.
Every single time this comes up it turns out that 'community' is just a trojan horse for 'group of people that sign off on whatever I want and enforce my personal opinions on others'
Honestly, no. Communities are great, the best projects have them, but a BIG part of the reason why webdev and gamedev completely went south (and why most other areas went the same way) is because they focused on vague gesturing towards the 'community' over the software. This is why webdev for so long had thrown out security and performance in favor of 'developer comfort' (or 'productivity', or some other weasel word) and why gamedev artificially retooled entirely around virality within its community - the gamedev subreddit, twitter, instagram. Everything is about what you can show and do in a weekend jam and it's why almost everything that comes out is derivative and frankly bad.
It's not really about 'community' as much as it is about relationships between individuals. Those sound similar but you can gesture vaguely towards the 'health' of the former to justify anything in the way that you can't with the latter.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 67.0 ms ] threadUnless you use AI.
Same people, same mute message; every time, with no delay. "Accept me, then I'll see if I want to accept you".
Fuck off.
More evidence of tribalism, combined with exceptionally precise confessions running as whataboutisms
Pelagicaustral is on the money.
It would just be nice if people understood the difference between wanting a club with a gate versus a community. I am impressed, though. I never thought I’d see a vomit diarrhea load of bumper stickers, but a digital form at the end of the article.
It's a revival of old web whimsy. Sorry for your loss of it.
get a grip
I wonder how people work with omarchyslop (the linux distribution spam-slopped by DHH). Do they have any real community outside of paid fanboi accounts? If so, how do they interact? I feel that there is no real exchange of e. g. code since claude slop just autogenerates that. It must be strange for them.
One perspective that you might want to conside, and which is discussed by Oxide folks in this podcast episode [1], is that agents are a kind of non-deterministic compiler which is still, to some extent, capable of producing useful output. Consider this: even before agents, ruby source code might have been seen slop to someone writing a strongly typed language.
Lastly, there is a community for users of that distro if you care to look for it (I am not among them).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSOdBO9I6q8
If I keep my code proprietary, you are beholden to the shape of the community I dictate.
The license is first, it precedes, any notion about community.
Fabrice Bellard doesn't need to personally administer to the ongoing development and community functions of QEMU or ffmpeg, it is sufficient that he released the code as open source, and others carry the torch from there.
And if people disagree about the form those communities take, they can split them as they see fit. As happened with libav and ffmpeg for a number of years. This too is fine, and is only possible because of the license.
First you're just disagreeing about the relative importance of "community" vs the license used. This does not seem like an important distinction, blog rhetorical structuring aside, since the value of each is really "it depends" (in the extreme, neither community or license matter if no one ever sees or hears of the code, for instance).
Second:
> If I publish my code under an open source license... If I keep my code proprietary...
That isn't even the distinction that the author is making. They're only talking about communities around open source code. They spell out the dichotomy quite explicitly:
> This is why I don't care as much anymore about a project being under a copyleft free software license or a non-copyleft free software license.
> This has taken a backseat, as I now believe that there is something more important than license: community. The community around a software project is what dictates the values of the project. A strong copyleft license does still signal that the project cares about software freedom, but, by itself it is not enough.
I don't care about community at all, the license is the only thing that has any "signal" when comes to someone caring about software freedom. If you release all your code as GPL (or MIT, or Apache, etc), you care about software freedom. Nothing is more important than the license.
The list of bullet points the author then provides are completely irrelevant to "caring about software freedom".
Im sympathetic to the perspective in some ways but I think it's wildly impractical to actually try to keep AI out of software development.
I suppose an anti-ai optimist might hope for a future where AI written software proves too problematic over time and things return to their ideal vision of no AI in most software.
I really, really dont think that's in the range of possibilities. So what would be left?
- pockets of anti ai software
- these people slowly disappear or the window moves ("ai in software BUT ...")
- ai use is completely and thoroughly normalized
I think this is a certainty. Future generations will be born into a world where education, technology, and jobs have corrected for AI's existence. They will never know a world without it or have the experience of the current growing pains.
We've seen this plenty of times with new tech in the past, and as disruptive as AI is, I can't imagine the cat going back in the bag.
>In five years, we'll all have phones that connect physical locations again, instead of (or as well as) people. And we'll be raising a generation of kids who don't know what it is to be lost, to not know where you are and how to get to some desired destination from wherever that is. >Think about that. "Being lost" has been part of the human experience ever since our hominid ancestors were knuckle-walking around the plains of Africa. And we're going to lose it — at least, we're going to make it as unusual an experience as finding yourself out in public without your underpants.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping...
1. All modern LLMs are (in my eyes) inherently morally problematic. They were trained on stolen information, and where they didn't break the law they corrupted social contracts. Their manner of operation is also problematic: disadvantaged communities are being exploited at a rapidly increasing disproportionate rate in the name of "more compute".
2. I am fundamentally disinterested in the productivity mindset that LLMs lean into. I don't care to "produce more"; the value of my work does not lie in the amount of money that can be gotten in exchange for it. This is an easier position to hold as someone who does not hold a typical corporate job, but even if I did I would still resist because an increase in my output would not correlate to an increase in my salary.
At the root of it all is people. I care about people (their existence, their happiness, my connections to them, their connections to each other), and any use of LLMs is (in my mind) anti-people, so I want no part of it.
Yes, I think this is a key point and I'm not surprised to hear it. It's a fundamental problem with AI. It's not something that will disappear as it becomes more useful or makes less mistakes.
How do you feel about a dependency that was written by AI? It seems like things will get progressively harder and harder to maintain a real boundary, outside of just writing everything yourself. And perhaps hosting.
For the time being, I'm content to simply not use it myself. I don't think it's reasonable for me to foist my morals onto those around me, in the same way that my very close vegan friend still talks to me when I order a whole milk latte. I don't think there's a way to exist in modern society without incurring some degree of (likely indirect) immorality, so it's all about setting boundaries for myself where I can and accepting where I end up.
Then you simply would be let go.
But, of course, this is also part of the immorality of the AI industry.
100% agree. That's what it is all about. That, and our time.
> and any use of LLMs is (in my mind) anti-people
Hard disagree. A lot of good can be done for the people with this tech. Blanket rejection of an entire category of technology has not worked out well for the disadvantaged communities in the past. We have plenty of history.
I think about how disappointing it is when a new project makes it to the front page of HN and I click through and it's just... vibe-coded slop. Looks pretty at first, but it's clear that there isn't really much human underneath. Lots of obvious interface problems or just a distinct lack of a personal touch. It's empty, and it makes me sad.
Or even not in software, I think of all the people who have been so quick to offload their thought processes to a statistical model. What do you mean you don't know what you want to eat at this restaurant so you asked Claude and got recommended something that isn't even on the menu?
And that's just individual stuff. I am genuinely fearful of the integration of AI into, say, the legal and judicial processes, or governance, or whatever else. People give the models wayyyy too much credibility considering they (the models) cannot give an accurate confidence interval for their results, and I think it's going to make things much worse for disadvantaged communities to a degree that the communities will not be able to overcome by using the technologies themselves.
It's bizarre to me that over what feels like less than a year, enforcement of intellectual property and copyright laws has become the most important moral principle. Suddenly, it's your moral duty to enforce Disney's trademark of Mickey Mouse.
I reject this moral framing completely. Information wants to be free!
But I do care about, for example, a recently published author, or someone who posts their paintings on social media. Regardless of where the law stands in each particular case, I think it's repugnant that statistical models were trained on these inputs with the intent of offering the ability to produce similar outputs without any payment or even attribution to the original artist.
> Information wants to be free!
If someone chooses to make their information free, then so it may be, but the issue at hand is very obviously not about the use of, e.g., copyleft materials. The AI companies knowingly chose to take material that they knew they should not have and used it to make their copycat machines, building those machines in such a way that those responsible can cower behind the letter of the law to defile its spirit.
It's the little guy whose work is copied (used to train models that create copies on demand) immediately, but who is prosecuted when he pirates someone else's work.
I have somewhat more sympathy for individuals, but I disagree with the entire system itself.
Suppose an aspiring artist learns from someone's work, and I commission them to produce similar output to the original without attribution. Was the act of them learning from the work "repugnant"?
> If someone chooses to make their information free, then so it may be, but the issue at hand is very obviously not about the use of, e.g., copyleft materials. The AI companies knowingly chose to take material that they knew they should not have and used it to make their copycat machines, building those machines in such a way that those responsible can cower behind the letter of the law to defile its spirit.
I don't agree that they shouldn't have done it. I disagree with the letter and the spirit of the law.
AI represents the sum total of human knowledge and everyone who thinks they’re owned compensation for their last mile contributions, which build on centuries of human existence and knowledge-making, are just leaning into the pro capital idea that whoever owns a thing controls a thing. In reality when you put something out into the world, whatever it is, it takes a life of its own and you don’t really get to own or control that.
These artists and programmers and writers think they’re owned compensation because they “own” what they create but they do not. They in fact owe a debt to everyone who came before them they must pay forward. AI took that debt and made it tangible.
What do you think money is?
It's a rough proxy approximation for value. So yes, the amount of money you can get for your work is rough approximation of its value.
You can also have a precious pet rock that you personally hold very dear and well "valueable" - but valuable to nobody but you only. So realistically it has zero value to everyone else.
If you don't care about creating value, you don't care about people. As, ultimately, it costs money to care for people, and if you don't have it - all you have are prayers and best wishes.
Money is an abstraction, not an approximation. There is not of necessity any real basis for any price that has ever been attached to any product or service, ever. Money is an artificial mechanism by which we exchange debt owed by the issuing state that itself also has no real basis.
> If you don't care about creating value, you don't care about people.
On this we agree, but, of course, my point was that when I say "value" I don't mean monetary value. A person's value is intangible, and the value of their works (whatever those may be) is derived entirely from the relationship formed between the artist and their context and the connection from this relationship to whoever wishes to partake of the art.
> As, ultimately, it costs money to care for people, and if you don't have it - all you have are prayers and best wishes, and you functionally can't help anyone.
What a woefully capitalistic perspective. I wish the best of luck to you and your shareholders.
In this regard, while it's kinda wrong to say "it costs money to care for people", caring for people is not free either - you have to spend something: time, labor, psyche, favors, etc. All of these can be acquired or replaced by trading with others (which is preferable to do through money): buying tools/machines, hiring workers/services, acquiring means to connect with others, and so on. Turns out money is just a more verifiable and simplified form of favors.
I regret to inform you that this is actually a description of abstraction, not approximation. :) The twenty "dollars" abstract over the notion of "a quantity that is owed" such that you can exchange the otherwise meaningless scraps of paper (or just bytes these days!) for other goods/services. If you were not going to use that money for something else, it actually has no value, curiously enough.
Decades ago, money had a concrete value in that you could request the issuing government to take your dollars and give you gold at an established exchange rate. When we abandoned the gold standard (and all forms of fiscal concretization), money became inherently abstract.
> Turns out money is just a more verifiable and simplified form of favors.
I should like to refer you to the book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" for an alternative look at monetary systems, credit and debt, favors, and more. I found it a fascinating read (I mean that genuinely), and very educational with regard to this claim in particular.
This is nothing more than redditor type "akshually" autistic yapping nitpicking on terms being used rather focusing on the semantics they were used to convey in an argument.
The argument stands whether or not you're using gold backed dollars, fiat (that gets constantly devaluated by incessent printing), or gold coins directly.
It's currency - nominated in some units, and those units will be a proxy and close approximation to value it represents.
Value and monetary value represent almost essentially the same thing. There isn't some other "pixie" dust version of value, for which - people for some reason - refuse to give money for. If people aren't willing to pay money for something, oh the odds are it's worthless - in every sense of the word.
> A person's value is intangible.
No, it isn't, person without assets (and money) is worthless and their value is selling their labour like a slave directionally proportional how valuable their labour is, or they sleep under a bridge and starve. And this is exactly what happens in reality.
That's unless they have friends and family that assign some value (monetary!) to them, and are willing (and able!) to buffer the expense of getting them of the street, etc. This expense can be directly translated to money of the fiat kind.
> What a woefully capitalistic perspective. I wish the best of luck to you and your shareholders.
The perspective is either true or it's not. I couldn't care less what label you assign to it.
If a person is starving and sleeping out on the street, or has health issues. It will cost money to feed them, house them and cure them. A broke person is literally incapable of providing this in any sustainable way.
Some pedantic "akshually-ing" about "exchange debt owed by the issuing state" isn't helping anyone.
It will correlate to you still having a job.
"Resisting" is like refusing to use a shovel at your ditch-digging job.
Whether they will keep doing so is another matter entirely.
The train will keep going for another 6 months at least.
So, I'd love to imagine what the future looks like once we're stuck with a model (no matter how capable) that can never be updated ever again. What future versions of "do it for my grandma" can never be patched out?
But I believe that the anti-ai crowd will end up with contributions by people who pretend they don't use AI. Which may be fine if what you want is that "contributors own their work to some extent" (i.e. they need to understand something in order to pretend they didn't use an AI), but for those who don't want AI because of the inequalities it creates or the carbon footprint, then... well it doesn't work.
Why don’t we care being at the mercy (again) of 2-3 companies?
If you want a project to be community driven, adding an agreement that empowers its leaders to punish and exclude any community member for any reason, including reasons that have nothing to do with the project itself, is the opposite of that.
Codes of conduct result in dictator-driven projects, not community-driven projects.
And besides that, someone can always make their own community around FOSS software. Fork and move on. But the new community will compete with the old, and it's possible that the fact that people stay with the old community means that they actually prefer that community
You need to build a thing first. Community doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. License doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. I'm seeing people forget this principle a lot recently.
The best thing you can do to promote free software is to make good free software. I was recently invited to sign a European digital sovereignty petition (which I am not eligible to sign). Know what helps much more with that? Making European digital sovereign systems. Instead of petitioning the government to switch MS Office to LibreOffice someone would have to actually put in the effort to find out why the government doesn't use LibreOffice, and fix that. (It's probably not because it doesn't run on their computers!)
You have to use copyleft licenses or else the software quickly becomes unfree, if it's actually worth anything. This doesn't happen to most non-copyleft free software because it's not worth very much, not because it doesn't happen.
A community of users doesn't have much value. Any forum or Discord guild or mailing list is secondary to the actual software and it actually being used. Plenty of successful software has no "community" - sudo, for example. Plenty of software with a "community" is not successful. Some software is successful and has a community, like Blender.
A community of developers is only valuable if they're doing valuable things. The Fediverse chat group that shared the link to the European digital sovereignty petition - no useful Fediverse software seems to be coming out of the people in that group. It's all about ivory-tower protocols that won't possibly work in the real world, and stuff like that. No actually working software.
We also have to stop over-estimating the worth of free software just because it's free. Good free software is good software which is also free software. No software is bad, bad software is also bad. Some random code you wrote and published somewhere on the internet usually isn't very useful, and that's probably why it doesn't have a community. Don't try to create a community first - that won't make the software any better. You have to make good software, that can spread by word of mouth, first and then you can have a community after that. Think about the number of random little programs on the internet, now think how many are installed on your computer - not a very big percentage, but the ones that you do have installed, many people have installed. Those are the useful ones.
In most projects the original creators remain the main developers no matter how many other contributors join. Late contributors having a significant effect on a project is the exception, not the rule, and when it happens it's actually an undesirable power inversion since the original creator retains unearned influence - see the PolyMC incident. There is no way to become the chief developer of a project other than having created it. If you think you can rewrite the whole thing and make it better, don't "join the community" - make a fork (which makes you part of the community, but that is not the main goal!).
If you're actually doing the majority of the work, offering a dual license is not unethical. We are forced to live in capitalism whether we like it or not, and we should be trying to squeeze money out of capitalist entities - lord knows they're good at squeezing money out of us. To not play that game is to lose by default. This isn't incompatible with being nice to people who are not money-squeezers, if you dual-license. A community fork can legally continue as AGPL-only. (You don't necessarily need a full CLA either, you just need people to agree their code will be in your commercial version. Programmers treat licenses and CLAs like satisfying the borrow checker, but that's not how they actually work.)
I’ll jam with my friends, make a game in a weekend, but I have no interest in dealing with the egos of big FOSS projects.
However, I am seeing vibe coding create a new type of community. In the music space you have tons of people vibe coding new OSes for music hardware.
Akai has even promised to officially support custom firmware on the MPC Sample Keys! Custom firmware has existed for decades, but maybe a tiny handful of people could make it. Now just about everyone can!
I don't know if it's good for your CV. I have done a ton of open source before AI was a thing, and the truth is that nobody cares. I still have the basic coding test in interviews, even if the team interviewing me is actually relying on my open source work in their project.
And AI making it easier to contribute to a project, I think it's even less valuable today. Do it if you want to, that's all!
I don't have a problem with me or anyone else giving away our labor for free. It's not like strike breaking in a unionized industry. This is only taking money from companies like Adobe that get their expensive tools replaced, and giving some of it to AI providers.
https://thefirmwarehub.com/
The Behringer Kick was just announced with custom firmware being its main feature
https://tech.yahoo.com/audio/articles/behringer-kick-sampler...
developer communities can also be valuable but i think increasingly people are finding they can be quite toxic. the chillest communities i've found have actually been ones primarily made up of non-devs vibecoding. no egos, no endless arguments, holy war battles, or bikeshedding. they just build stuff and share. it's kind of nice acutally.
I disagree. I think AI centralises power and reinforces inequalities, and that's before we talk about cybersecurity and carbon footprint.
It is not clear at all that the benefits outweigh that.
What is clear, though, is that it's a very useful tool to write software.
But open-source software is far more about the process than the product. And therefore longevity of resulting software can be expected to be far greater. Foundations of our software stack - libraries, source control operating systems, compilers, databases and numerous other pieces require people capable and willing to do a long-term care of the software - hence, the community that need to last decades. Linux and PostgreSQL is 35 years old, git is 21, OpenSSL 28.
I believe human-only software development will remain for the foreseeable future, despite the growth of LLM-based ones, just like mass-produced grocery bread didn't displace the artisanal bakeries.
In enough cases, I'm sure many of us can think of some, some of the relatively recent "community" stuff has been counter-productive to an open source project, abused as an opportunity to enforce on clueless bystanders whatever fad orthodoxy of the day, or in the worst cases campaign viciously against specific demographics under the banner of doing the opposite.
Talented engineers who just want to do an open source project don't want any of that.
Separate from all that, I'm 100% with no Discord and no GitHub, both of those are total cancer.
As a user, I like it when I own the devices I buy and can install and modify the software I want. It's not always the way it is, and that's life. I won't go to other projects and tell them that they must change something because I want them to.
I didn't particularly want the ugly app, but it is implemented in GadgetBridge[1], which is on codeberg.
That's an Android app, but I wanted a MacOS version.
I LLM-reverse engineered the API based on the GadgetBridge work and now have a MacOS version, specific for my device. As part of that I worked out how to do temperature monitoring (which GadgetBridge doesn't support). Normally I'd contribute that back, but codeberg has been very explicit on their policy of no-LLM work, so I guess I won't do that.
So much for community.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge
Everyone thinks AI vs non-AI is a debate but just like all of those, it’ll be meaningless to the engineers of tomorrow.
This is not true. I've never heard of a 'working class' person getting sued for copyright infringement. People who run a business to make money from copyright infringement are not working class and those who are would never be pursued.
The problem is not that copyright protects the powerful, it's that copyright is not enforced if you're not powerful. As is the case with AI. The problem is lack of enforcement so the idea that copyrights oppresses the working class is completely backwards.
I'm an open source developer myself. One of my projects has about 6k stars on GitHub. Open source is dead. It was never 'open' anyway because it was always the big corporate-sponsored projects which got all of the attention.
Frankly, open source is immoral at this stage. Just a con to convince gullible fools to give away their time for free for AI to use. Given the new reality, author is essentially a scammer trying to steal people's time (though perhaps unwittingly).
I'm not saying this as an insult. I do consider my past self to be a gullible fool before AI, though you have to recognize that was a lesser kind of fool. Now the exact mechanism of theft of labor is right there in front of your eyes! What a fool you have to be to write open source code now!
They matter rather less if the goal is to have useful software.
.
There's also the possibility that you make something commercially valuable, and forbid corporations from deriving value from it; in which case you'll suddenly have to share space with something that's (somewhat?) interoperable and outside your control. As was seen in the news a few times when project owners got annoyed at cloud providers and tried to restrict them.
Is there such thing as "community" at all? As I know, the majority of open-source projects are developed by a single person, where others only contribute bug reports (in best case). It's not a community, if there is such imbalance in contribution and power.
Only a handful of projects (a small percentage) has actual community with many members doing meaningful contribution. But they are most notable ones, so that one may think, that all open-source projects function like this.
Now, the number of projects is not that important since we are talking about people. In my entirely unscientific estimate, the majority of FOSS developers is mainly active in a project of more than ten people.
Every single time this comes up it turns out that 'community' is just a trojan horse for 'group of people that sign off on whatever I want and enforce my personal opinions on others'
It's not really about 'community' as much as it is about relationships between individuals. Those sound similar but you can gesture vaguely towards the 'health' of the former to justify anything in the way that you can't with the latter.