aarondf

I added the qs because it defaulted to a story from 3 months ago.

soloterm.com is closed source

woah hey! you're speaking the shibboleths!

I'll take that bet

I think you're conflating a talent pipeline with ease of running PHP. Those are not the same thing at all

We should fund open source!

Not like that!

My word... samwho is doing some of the best technical explainers on the internet right now.

I've run into that issue while developing https://soloterm.com.

If you respond twice to their theme query probes, the whole thing bricks. Or if you're slightly out of order. It's very delicate.

damn framerate looks good

But the good news is that we can increase our chances of encountering good luck.

Every phrase in the article was carefully selected to make it clear that we're trying to increase the odds. Nothing is sure. But if you play the game right, the odds of winning go up

My role? My role as a what?

I understand. I am, however, impotent against OpenAI. If I publish code to GitHub, I understand it will be used for training. I'd rather get the win for my family than try to fight a megacorp. I'm sorry.

Unfortunately we have to play the game according to the rules on the field. You can decide to opt out entirely (which is fine) or you can play the game and try to win. Personally, I will play and try to win.

That means I will make things, talk about them, and accrue social and/or actual capital for me and my family. I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try. I CAN build cool things, talk about them, and get cool jobs or friends or a following or whatever. I understand not everyone is comfortable with this tradeoff.

And guess how you make friends in high(er) places...

by...

publishing your work and making friends in your industry

No easy answers, I'm afraid. But I would still say you can get lots of social capital from creating things and talking about it. And these days, that can get you past the LLM-inundated HR front door if you want a job. If you hang out on twitter long enough you'll see people go from "hey I made this cool thing" to "hey cloudflare/vercel/etc hired me to come work on cool-thing-adjacent thing!"

It's a pretty repeatable pipeline. And having proof that you can DO something makes you stand out. Maybe moreso than ever!

Very well said

You had me in the first half! <3

Hey! I wrote the article a few years ago. Fun to see it on HN again.

It was here back when I wrote it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071137

Lots of comments talking about how this is just some sort of ploy to feed the machine. I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you it changed my life and the lives of many others. Hope it can help you too!

Then define luck as "connecting with fellow nerds." Still works

Totally. An engineer, who (at the the time) works in marketing! Makes sense to me :D

I'm a software developer who was, at the time, working in a marketing role. Happy to answer questions.

I wrote the article. I'm not a marketing droid, I don't work for GitHub, just a guy recounting his personal experiences and hoping to help others.

Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV

I think you're conflating the cost to consumers to use AI and the cost to run AI. Sure, it's a house of cards, but the cost to consumers still rounds to zero.

hell yeah, Rainmaker rules

Very nice of you to characterize me as such, I truly appreciate it.

Thank you Sam.

For others, I wrote a longer response above!

Haha people have sent it to me! I'm currently trying to make it on my own in the wide world though.

I never disagreed with the decision to lay people off to become profitable. That's part of the implicit agreement when you take employment in the US. You can quit whenever you want and they can fire you whenever they want! I knew that going in!

I agreed with it, but of course it stung. That's only natural!

Sam and I are all good though! To his immense credit he reached out to me directly a little while back to mend any hurt feelings, of which I had a few. We're friends. He even came on my podcast and we talked for over an hour like old buds.

I have a lot of feelings and sometimes they get hurt. Sam has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. Today PlanetScale is a going concern and I'm happy and doing great! All is well.

The podcast is good btw, y'all should listen!

PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert https://youtu.be/IB3mzON8Iyw

This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qwshdtijFY and his whole channel are a great binge for this topic.

No nonsense, an actual practitioner, and not very "YouTubey"

PHP has Composer, and it's extremely good!