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LightFog

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Interested in Free Software, Native Desktop Apps and the pain that building and using them entails.

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I don’t understand the proposed reality they (we) should live in.

They are trying to advocate for software that doesn’t hurt its users in a sea of enshittifaction.

They should stop because corporations produce powerful software?

Maybe I’m reading too much into it but the roadmap mentioning switching from GPT4 Turbo to 4-o and hoping for better math performance feels like they are betting on a significant near term reliability improvement in LLMs without any other real plans. That magic jump is starting to look more and more doubtful by the day.

This ‘everyone is using it so I need to also’ logic is funny to me, given the idea of the F in FOSS is to use network effects to spread the idea of software freedom. Using and thus endorsing a proprietary platform with ever increasing integration into the software lifecycle seems to do the exact opposite of that.

It’s still baffling to me how many FOSS projects still use that platform, they’ve done very well keeping the ‘Microsoft’ prefix out of people’s sight.

Codeberg does seem to be gaining some momentum with FOSS projects now though, at long last.

GPL software needn’t have anything to do with GNU - having alternative projects is healthy for many reasons.

I just think that trying to make a permissive drop-in replacement for software that emphasises the very freedoms that have allowed the creation of the replacement in the first place is unfortunate and short-sighted. It’s a good thing that the authors have every right to do it all the same though.

It’s a shame to see all this effort going toward replacing core GPL licensed utilities with permissive ones. It seems like a particularly common thing in the Rust community.

It feels disrespectful of the intentions of the work that went into the tools that are being cloned.

I don’t see how the particular license has anything to do with it. The gist is the content is being used under a claim of ‘fair use’. It doesn’t matter what the license terms are in that case. It seems like the argument is toward small creatives somehow banding together and ‘close sourcing’ their work.

When working in a research lab we used to have people boast that their analysis was so big it ‘brought down the cluster’ - which outed them pretty quickly to the people who knew what they were doing.

Generally for HN the request for politeness is positive I think, but in the technology area and especially journalism I think there is an unhealthy aversion to calling people out for anti-social behaviour, leading to a chilling effect on discussing it.

Indeed - well, thank you for the piece. Just like the Google Search one it’s clear that plenty of work has gone into digging through corporate docs and giving them some much needed daylight!

HN rules/ethos don’t agree but the lack of ‘politeness’ in these posts is refreshing. ‘Manners’ have long been a way to reinforce power imbalances and avoid scrutiny. Us plebs shouldn’t shy away from calling out corporate scumbaggery for what it is - what is more damaging, impolite prose or what this company is doing to our society?

I'm Bearish OpenAI 2 years ago

Years ago so many ‘machine learning’ startups failed because their predictions were 90% accurate but 99.99% was needed for businesses to pay for them. These old scars seem to be missing in LLM mania - why will businesses pay for them now when the previous non hallucinating ML models weren’t reliable enough.

I'm Bearish OpenAI 2 years ago

You are assuming all stakeholders want the mid level people gone. We already have the technology to automate most of this stuff - bullshit jobs exist for a different reason.

When you fly into some countries you have to fill out a form confirming that you haven’t committed genocide. A lot of people laugh at it without thinking about why the affirmation is there.

This is about setting a public position and expectation around contributions. If you want to violate it then so be it - maybe you’ll get away with it, but you are now violating the policy.