HN user
What a clever trick to throw more money (governmental subsidies) into a sinking ship (xAI and "AI" in general). Perplexingly this maneuver will probably boost stock prices thus creating more monopoly money to burn resources with.
I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting underpaid data workers.
However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally.
Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
Ok so Google ignores W3C on WEI.
But could someone else create a W3C proposal that could counteract WEI? It wouldn't have to implementation-specific but rather one or more principles drawing a line in the sand that shouldn't be crossed like what WEI is built to achieve?
AI progress won't be dead in the water if it respects copyright laws. Yes, being free to just freely grab any data is infinitely easier. But having to rely on properly licensed datasets or asking users for consent should be the norm for ML development IMHO.
Also, If we had trained some A.I. on the Windows codebase and started freely using suggestions given by it I bet Microsoft would scream copyright infringement in a heartbeat.
So happy to learn of this and I wish them best of luck in their efforts. And I'm surprised to find so many people klinging to Copilot.
We shouldn't shed any tears for a megacorporation which shows such blatant disregard for the licensed works of people's labour.
Yes, AI is here to stay but we should be able to build AI that respects copyright. Yes, it's easier to just steal data and call it fair use. Whether or not that's stealing will be interesting to try in court.
I love that they included an ortholinear keyboard and open schematics. Definitely keeping my eyes on this.
I’m not happy about people losing money.
However, I’m happy if this means money will be invested in innovation towards saving the planet, rather than finding new ways to burn resources with proof-of-work-based crypto.
Wow. Thanks for the headsup! I’ll have to look into this.
Yeah that makes sense. And “nobody got fired for picking technology X from large company Y”, there’s also that type of thinking.
Very much agree. Though there’s a line between implementing cryptographic algorithms yourself vs. implementing cookie based authentication.
Cryptography is something I’d leave to standard libraries. However, when it comes to authentication it might not be that hard to implement some cookie or token logic as long as the actual cryptography is handled by some well tested library.
I don't think my article shuts the door on domain specific languages even though it doesn't offer it as an answer. It could be an answer. By relying a bit less on frameworks and writing more code ourselves we have the chance to make our code fit the domain we're working with better. For now I wanted to wrestle a bit with the idea of always pulling in frameworks to do things.
If your thing has been built so often already that much of the logic can be factored out into a framework, great - may as well use that
I agree, though that often comes with some costs and tradeoffs like I tried to outline in the article.
That's true we might not have been able to mobilize so much productivity so quickly for business without throwing frameworks at the problem. However, I think also a lot of effort might have been wasted by reinventing wheels and rewriting application many times over because some framework or language fell out of fashion and hiring for it became difficult.
Yes! It's like we've taught people to fish with the new latest in fishing equipment, but we failed to teach them some tried and true fishing principles. Haha, maybe this analogy breaks down. But yeah, I find that we focus almost too hard on keeping up with framework release notes instead of trying to see if we can distill some common patterns relevant across frameworks.
Your mention of composing dataflows reminded of this project https://nodered.org/ which I haven't tried myself but sounds a bit like what Yahoo Pipes was back in the day.
I'm also curious about how simple we can make self-hosting on bare metal hardware. These days I've been looking a bit into Gnu Guix where you can define a whole server system using lisp syntax. My current explorative sideproject is to try and setup a Gitea service with Guix on a Raspberry PI.
I think one such counter-incentive could be, "whatever tech you choose you'll have to live with the consequences by owning maintenance and future development." However, in our fast-paced industry people can switch roles and jobs so quick that they'll never have to face the consequences of their tech-choices.
Hi everyone! The author here. Happy to discuss the thoughts expressed in the article.
Some weeks ago I wrote a couple of bookmarklets, one of which was this:
javascript:(function(){ location.href = `https://nitter.net${location.pathname}` })();
You can take this JavaScript snippet and save it as a clickable bookmark (hence the name bookmarklet) in you browser. I've named this "re-open in Nitter". I deleted my Twitter account a while back but sometimes I get handed a Twitter link. This snippet let's me quickly re-open the link in Nitter which is a nag-free way to browse Twitter without having an account. :)
I’m actively working to change this as a CTO in a small digital agency. Can’t say that I’ve completely solved it but I’ve started challenging my peers when they use the words hope, belief and especially magic to describe what they’re up against. We’re professionals not hobbyists. Our codebases should get easier not harder to work with over time.
We have a sister organization which is larger and with their own CTO. I’ve tried to boil the ocean and inspire change across both companies, it was hard, for now I'm just focusing on trying to inoculate the new hires against accepting any sub-optimal bureaucracy. Though I see that need to find some way to train them to be so open and confident that they can start to challenge processes when they need to.
I have a lot of hope in the new hires though. Culture is hard to change but definitely doable. It’s all about who you hire, fire, praise and incentivize.
Thanks for the question. Well. I put my AGPLv3-licensed code on GitHub to help other developers. I didn’t do this to help GitHub / Microsoft build a closed-source tool to monopolize the (F)OSS market.
It’s interesting how incumbent companies such as Google and GitHub try to capitalize on their user data with machine learning in any way they can to maximize shareholder value.
GH and MS spend a lot of time talking about how important open source is to them. They didn’t exactly prove this by building Copilot to be so oblivious about licensing. Either they took a gamble and hope they’d get away with it or it didn’t occur to them that this would be a problem at all. Either way, I’ve lost faith in GH's ability to act in the best interest of its users and the larger open source community.
It’s a free market and I hope to see more competition in this space: Both from GitHub-alternatives that respect code-licenses and from self-hosting alternatives.
I used to admire GitHub for being a fully bootstrapped company and free to pursue a path in the world they believed in as a company.
Since the Microsoft acquisition it’s becoming painfully obvious how unhealthily centralized the dev world has become, and they seem to strive to become ever more entrenched in the name of maximizing shareholder value.
I only have a small amount of open source projects on GH but I intend to vote with my feet and abandon the platform by self-hosting Gitea. By itself it won’t be a big splash but I’m inspired by posts such as this and I hope to inspire someone else in turn. Of all people we devs should be able to find good ways to decentralize.
From a distance I think Deno has a lot of promising features going for it. Expressing modules as URLs seems like a small difference but I believe it has big ramifications. With clever use of DNS resolving and caching I wonder how fast new instances will be able to spin up. I'm guessing it'll be fast!
My only gripe with the Deno company is that taking investor funding is a double-edged sword. Yes, they'll get to hire very skilled developers. However naturally the investors want a tidy exit, and I wonder if that would be to be bought out by Amazon, Microsoft or Google.
Edit: Just realized that there's a key difference in that Deno does not have something like NPM to be bought and sold because dependencies are URLs and thus decentralized. Also, Deno itself is open-source.
Good concerns though the Hippocratic license relies on the declaration of human rights, which are well defined and broadly accepted.
To the second issue, I’d argue that intellectual property doesn’t need to take a will of its own. Creators can ensure that their work doesn’t contribute to human rights abuse. Companies assert IP rights all the time.
The Hippocratic license explains how issues can be taken to EU court. I haven’t seen it happen yet but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
My heart breaks for this engineer. We can’t just file this under “it happens at all large companies” and call it a day. Large companies like Apple should be held to a higher standard.
With the rise of evaluating company stocks based on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) shareholders should start demanding that companies publish anonymized statistics on number of HR cases reported and how they were handled. Workplace abuse can happen everywhere but larger companies like Apple need to double-down and start showing that they are handling it.
This _might_ sound utopian. But shareholder value is about the only thing companies like Apple care about.
Apple held a modicum of respect in my book for stepping up to protect privacy. Reading a piece like this tears that away. I’m reminded that Apple is yet another gigantic tech company. The ends doesn’t justify the means. Great products doesn’t justify abuse.
As a European citizen I’m hopeful for this regulation. The tech giants would rather police themselves, but they should be subject to oversight to ensure that they don’t abuse their market power.
If this goes well I hope to see more competition and more innovation. I don’t believe that this will send Europe into some digital dark age, if anything it will make it easier for small to medium businesses to compete and innovate.
I’m trying to evaluate ethical licensing so that we can have a flourishing Commons of code projects to build on.
The hard problem is multifaceted:
I would argue that open source as we know fails to balance the market. We now have monopolistic tech incumbents in the “GAFAM“ companies, that thrive on open source while paying little tax and outcompeting actual tax paying businesses. I see maintainers either burning out or selling out to venture capitalists.
I want to believe in free and open source, but I also see that it fully enables surveillance capitalism, casino capitalism and tax avoiding monoliths.
So, I realize that I need to move past classic licensing and consider ethical licensing that try to remedy society’s inequalities and injustices.
Call me a cyber hippie, but if I want to build cool stuff in my spare time to share I want to maximize its chances of doing something good in the world. To that end I’m evaluating some ethical licenses.
There are many ethical licenses out there which are evolving. Presently, I’m evaluating this one: The (Cooperative) Non-Violent Public License: https://thufie.lain.haus/NPL.html
After the weekend I’ll try to get in touch with a Lawyer to review the license implications. It’s arguably not open source in definition, but maybe more so in spirit.
Thanks for the reply! I guess I wouldn’t fault Jenkins for poor plugin quality unless those plugins are supposed to be officially supported.
Great!
I recently switched to Gitea from GitLab for my homelab. I think Jenkins + Gitea will combine well. I’m looking forward to trying this out. :)
Just wondering, what are typical failures with Jenkins that you see?
Calling Jenkins outdated is like calling git or GNU/Linux outdated. It’s actively developed and provides solid value in my opinion.
It was a nice read. The real lesson here is how to diagnose issues like this.