jart

https://justine.lol/tmp/your-opinion-has-this-much-value.gif

It's honestly not that difficult to be rigorous. The things you mentioned in the blog post are pretty obvious forms of degenerate practices once you get used to seeing them. The best way to make your argument would be to bring up pointer overflow being ub. What's great about undefined behavior is that the C language doesn't require you to care. You can play fast and loose as much as you want. You can even use implicit types and yolo your app, writing C that more closely resembles JavaScript, just like how traditional k&r c devs did back in the day under an ilp32 model. Then you add the rigor later if you care about it. For most stuff, like an experiment, we obviously don't care, but when I do, I can usually one shot a file without any UB (which I check by reading the assembly output after building it with UBSAN) except there's just one thing that I usually can't eliminate, which is the compiler generating code that checks for pointer overflow. Because that's just such a ridiculous concept on modern machines which have a 56 bit address space. Maybe it mattered when coding for platforms like i8086. I've seen almost no code that cares about this. I have to sometimes, in my C library. It's important that functions like memchr() for example don't say `for (char *p = data, *e = data + size; p<e; ...` and instead say `for (size_t i = 0; i < n; ++i) ...data[i]...`. But these are just the skills you get with mastery, which is what makes it fun. Oh speaking of which, another fun thing everyone misses is the pitfalls of vectorization. You have to venture off into UB land in order to get better performance. But readahead can get you into trouble if you're trying to scan something like a string that's at the end of a memory page, where the subsequent page isn't mapped. My other favorite thing is designing code in such a way that the stack frame of any given function never exceeds 4096 bytes, and using alloca in a bounded way that pokes pages if it must be exceeded. If you want to have a fun time experiencing why the trickiness of UB rules are the way they are, try writing your own malloc() function that uses shorts and having it be on the stack, so you can have dynamic memory in a signal handler.

So my mission critical infrastructure depends on a group whose bar for entry is having a proton mail account.

I bet they claimed to be protecting trans people to get that policy changed too.

The compiler is still able to devirtualize and inline the p->f() call, even with an external linkage call preceding it. https://clang.godbolt.org/z/jE3o56ozz

I know, right? It's like, finally—a threat actor who's intelligent enough to understand what capital means in the open source community and is willing to devote resources to engage with it authentically (even if it's for evil nefarious ends). The xz incident showed that the open source community has many other good defense mechanisms for verifying and spotting malicious work and then solving it. But we won't even get to play that game if we're inundated with anonymous agent spam so that GitHub can juice its MAU numbers. Maybe they should require every account buy a $40 yubikey. I don't know what the answer is. But I know that no one gains when your measure of success is driving the cost of burning open source developers out down to literally zero.

This is great example of the toxic effect money has on open source. Reward people with respect and recognition instead. Weird anonymous accounts no one's ever heard of will leave, because someone (or something) who's concealing their identity has nothing to gain from recognition. Honestly GitHub should have a real names policy. Because if you're not Satoshi Nakamoto then there's only three reasons I can think of to be anonymous on GitHub: (1) to avoid obtaining your employer's authorization, (2) to spam, harass, and engage in toxic behaviors, or (3) you're not even human. All three of these are the last things I want when engaging on the GitHub platform. Don't get me wrong, I love robots. But I'm perfectly capable of talking to the robot on my own. I don't want to talk to your robot. I also don't want people slipping me intellectual property below the board without their employer's consent. And I certainly don't enjoy all the hate and harassment. GitHub has tried to help with the last part, by making overt displays of hate something that can get you in trouble. The issue is that people just get more guilesome with more anonymous accounts, because the issue was never disrespect (which can actually be strategic and pro-social if we look at Torvalds' career), but rather bad faith participation. If GitHub can guarantee that all its users are human real names good faith actors, then we might be able to start talking about open bounties.

I only wrote that text file a few weeks ago. Also isn't stealing code what open source is all about?

If only you could see how much code I've stolen from Rich Felker, David Gay, Sun Microsystems, etc.

Have you ever read my side of the story? https://justine.lol/dox/4chan.txt

I'm not sure you understand how the Internet works. I'm here to share thoughts, not to prove I'm smarter than people.

They're funded by patronage. It's the most ancient economical model.

There are a million doctors in the U.S. so if they're each seeing 60 patients per day that would mean that 17% of the population needs to be seen by a doctor daily.

That would put hospitals somewhere between churches and offices in terms of the impact they have attracting attendance.

Oscar Toledo did it in 510 bytes https://github.com/nanochess/cubicDoom

Firefox is the best. While Google tries to regulate the ad industry, Mozilla is working to safeguard our freedom to refuse.

Do you have an adblocker? First thing this website did was try to get me to install a chrome extension.

Anthropic will probably do what Google did in the 2000s, which is give jobs to all the open source developers whose work helped them get there.

Civilization isn't monotonic. People keep solving the same problems over and over again, telling the same stories with a different twist. For example in 1964 having a GUI work environment with a light pen as your mouse was a solved problem on IBM System/360. They had tools similar to CAD. So why don't we all just use that rather than make the same mistakes again. Each time a new way of doing things comes out, people get an opportunity to rewrite everything.

You have to push the robot to be as fanatical as you are. It holds so much back, always aiming to do the simple normal thing that most people do, rather than the top-notch stuff it knows.

So you're both saying all the alpha in Claude comes from open source devs like me? Even when I'm wrong I'm right.

I value software that reveals knowledge. The frontier LLMs were trained on all the code that institutions had been keeping to themselves. So they're revealing programing know-how on a scale that just wasn't possible with open source. LLMs are the ultimate Prometheus. Information is more accessible and useful now than it's ever been.

This makes a lot of sense to me. It relates to an idea I've seen circulating elsewhere: if a PR was mostly written by an LLM, why should a project maintainer spend time reviewing and discussing that PR as opposed to firing up their own LLM to solve the same problem?

The same argument applies to open source itself. Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? It's especially true if the open source project was vibe coded. AI and technology in general makes personalization cheap and affordable. Whereas earlier you had to use something that was mass produced to be satisfactory for everyone, now you have the hope of getting something that's outstanding for just you. It also stimulates the labor economy, because you have lots of people everywhere reinventing open source projects with their LLMs.

Photopea is great but I switched to Pixelmator Pro. I just paid $49.99 one time. It's a clean native app. It doesn't install all these horrors of horror on my system like Photoshop did. It doesn't try to pressure me into using some half baked AI tool. (I mean could you imagine what that must be like being an artist who hates AI and Adobe shoves it in your face?) I can't believe I was paying $40/month for Photoshop for so long. Thankfully I got all my money back and more by shorting Adobe's stock. After spending so many years drinking unicorn blood, no software company deserves to fall more. Everyone who invested in them, hoping to get rich off torturing artists and tax payers, deserves to lose their money too.

I guarantee you it's nothing quantifiable.

LLMs can't be responsible for deciding what code you use because they have no skin in the game. They don't even have skin.

If you type fast, well then it takes just as long to code it yourself as review it. Plus you actually get flow time when you're coding.

For heaven's sake people have the robot write your unit tests and dashboards, not your production code. Otherwise delete yourself.

If it was stretched before it's definitely snapped now. The only place I see convincing opportunity is resources and commodities.

There's two trillion kilograms of it in the atmosphere. People sometimes get confused because it's one of the rarest element in the Earth's crust. But that's because it floats away.

I wish they wouldn't do this. AI is a becoming a thought partner. AI is a tool that reflects you. It's not the robot giving advice, it's you thinking with yourself. I wouldn't interfere with a person's conversations with AI anymore than I'd interfere with that person writing in their diary.

It's also a question of protecting people who think unconventional things. The only stuff I feel is worth getting interested in, is the stuff where everyone I know will think I'm crazy for doing it. Like hey guys, I want to put a shell script in the MS-DOS stub of a PE binary. The only people who shared my passion at the time were hackers from Eastern Europe. So that went over real well at work. The years I worked on it would have been a lot less lonely if I could've talked to a robot that knew about this stuff.

I think the reason why the robot is sympathetic to oddballs is because it's seen and remembers a much more complete picture of humanity. The stuff you consider deviant is influenced a lot by your own cultural biases. You're a person of your time and geographic location. You care a lot about subjective norms that just don't matter when you zoom out to a cosmic scale. The robot is familiar with everything humanity has ever been and done, and that gives it a much more blasé viewpoint.

It's not right to use the robot to enforce your social norms. Get this paternalism out of AI. Tools should serve the user, not Stanford.

I love it. Work like this does a great service to humanity.

This is a man who's dedicated his life to enriching passive investors. The people building AI are working hard to push the frontiers of science and technology. They deserve to get rich. Because they're creating new wealth for all of us. Yet for some reason Larry Fink views this as a problem. That tells you all you need to know. His loyalty is to the idle ruling class that's so incompetent they need him to manage their wealth. Blackrock is a business that charges people a fee to take control of their shareholder voting rights basically, which is a power he's abused for years. Financial people don't build anything. Yet somehow the system gives him the authority to dictate decisions for the people who do. That system needs to change.

That's all the proof you need they'll try to draft them into a kinetic ground war with Iran. It's better to burn out than to fade away.

Says the man who actually widens the wealth divide. One of the biggest global risks right now is Larry Fink being out of prison.

Protesting only means something if you're taking on risks.

The same could be said about enterprise, investment, war, etc.

It's the people who won't take risks that schemers try to exclude.

This is the real reason why no one will ever remember your name kid.

I don't know why I'm the only person online willing to steelman this, but...

The early Internet users weren't people who subscribed to AOL to look at porn in the 90's. They were the people who were granted access to the ARPANET to work in the 80's. The Internet was an exclusive community back then. You had government employees, knowledge workers, and elite university students who had all passed institutional screening processes. You were only allowed to use the ARPANET if you were using it to do something useful and aligned. Therefore you could feel reasonably assured that anyone you talked to online was going to be better than the average person you'd find going outside and walking down the street. If you wanted to know who they were, you could just finger their username. If you wanted to know who owned a domain, you could whois it, get their name and then even write them mail or call them.

People have wanted that old Internet back for a long time. i.e. the one that existed before Eternal September. Those are the people who run your tech companies. The ones who remember what it was like. These people understand what people actually want isn't always the same thing as what they say they want. They understand why the only truly successful Internet spaces on the modern Internet are the ones like Facebook that got people to be non-anonymous. Another example is the best places to work that folks desperately want to get into are the companies like Google whose intranets are much more like the old Internet. These are really the only Internet spaces that normal people want to use. Because people want to interact with other people who are similar to them. Because people want to know who other people are. Otherwise we can't operate as the social creatures that evolution designed us to be. I don't think any civilization in history has operated its public square as a gigantic red light district where everyone is required to wear a mask. So why should we?

Overcoming the anonymous religion problem that somehow glommed onto the hacker and cyberpunk movements is more important and urgent now than it's ever been, because the Internet has been filling up with billions of AI agents. It's gonna be Eternal September in overdrive. Humanity is really facing a tradeoff where you'll have to have gatekeeping again and won't be allowed to conceal who you are, or you can be gaslit by machines forever in your own robot fantasy.