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reading through this I eventually realized a situation similar to my experience of it is what my dog sees if I attempt to explain Python programming to him.

wow that is a really misleading headline. I thought this was the Israeli government spying on US soil.

the leader of China praised Open Source in a speech. Crazy times

great post but also the real thing they are talking about here is YAGNI

this whole AI era has put the topic of "do we believe actual reality, or what we hoped/assumed/continue to insist would be reality" front and center. Every discussion is like this these days.

the issue with articles that try to analyze the state of open source and its sustainability and all that is that nothing about open source makes any sense if you just talk about it. Imagine you're transported to 1977 and you work at IBM and you try to tell them, oh hey I have an idea, how about the OS everyone uses for literally all commerce, communication, military, etc., you name it, will be written by one guy in his spare time and later maintained by tens of thousands of mostly unpaid volunteers. "Don't other companies try to copy it and sell it as their own?" "Well sure, but mostly it's better to use the free one everyone knows". Try selling your manager at IBM in 1977 that idea for new software. It would be impossible. It would be impossible today.

Trying to explain how the global economy and welfare of most of humanity is hugely dependent on free software production labor, without the advent of actually seeing a world where this actually happens, is just like when we try to explain something like consciousness. There is no explanation that makes sense. So predictions about new avenues of doom (like "MIT licensing was a huge mistake! we should have all been GPL!") similarly dont carry a lot of weight, because of course these predictions make perfect sense in the abstract, yet real world results don't line up at all.

Basically open source software is an emergent phenomenon, like consciousness or evolution, or perhaps even how very large language models suddenly seemed like real people. It's something that would never be predictable in its own absence, which means it will remain largely unpredictable how it will respond to ongoing changes such as "the open source authors and contributors now use programs themselves to produce more code".

before COVID everyone on my team travelled once or twice a year to conferences as well as to the home office for get-togethers, on the company dime. Those conferences have been turned into online only and my company hasn't flown me or hardly anyone on my team or any of our related teams anywhere in years. All of that would be considered vastly extravagant and expensive today. So some kind of belt tightening went on that was never un-tightened.

OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster.

People are really really tired.

Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the <panic about XYZ>", our employers are making us work much harder, with a subtle but palpable panic in their emails, with WAY less promises of any kind of job security, companies that never had layoffs for decades are now doing them regularly, our githubs are flooded with people pointing robots at our issues to generate tepid pull requests, and at our pull requests to generate tepid reviews, and look shit is just crazy now.

So I think the whole "how would you approach this interesting problem..." thing is, for now, at least for me it feels a little bit on hold. Like oh that problem. How to scale? how to horizontally shard PostgreSQL? sure, real problems. But geez whatever we're building, it will be replaced in three months anyway. That's a hard problem you have there! I remember when I used to have problems like that, and my solutions sucked anyway and it was replaced with a node.js app two years later. Whatever advice I have, Claude is going to have 98% of it plus another 10% that I didn't even have.

This is all bad. So I think your post is possibly extremely useful. Maybe we should, for people we know and trust as humans in the real world, actually take the time and approach an issue as though we didn't have the Matrix to approximate it for us. I'm going to think about this and consider it.

At some point, you need to watch out for cynical/nasty series. In fact, all of the books we purchase are ranked against peers they have read in the past, or those we know to actively avoid buying due to cynicism, sarcasm, or open disdain towards adults (Wimpy Kid).

yeah how do you "know" this? our kid is obsessed with wimpy kid and a few other similar series and "cynicism" nails it perfectly, is there a list? of what's known to be "cynical" and what's not?

in my Atari days, I went through half a dozen of those stupid joysticks, which broke easily as they were poorly designed and put way too much repetitive strain on the plastic insides that broke regularly.

contrast to my SNES controllers that still work today and feel more or less like they did literally 34 years ago. that blows my mind.

on the console side, the 2600 itself had some components go out which had to be replaced back in the day (remember when you'd take your console to the video game shop and they'd repair it?). The 800 itself didnt have any failures but the 810 disk drive was always a nightmare.

my comparisons are all to the SNES so admittedly these are all unfair comparisons, I never had an NES.

I was a total Atari kid and I still have my 2600 and my 800 on me. If Atari was the one distributing an NES like system IMO they would have just fucked it up. While I loved my atari devices, they were also extremely unreliable mechanically / electronically. The build quality of Nintendo devices (I own about 10 Nintendo devices going back to the SNES that's plugged into my TV with a modern HDMI adapter today) is worlds beyond what Atari was able to pull off in my experience. Granted the Nintendo devices have the advantage of more sophisticated technology but Atari I think really had a cheaper build mentality.

This is all going to hinge in a tremendous way based on what kind of app you have and who your users are.

got a family friend who keeps posting on Facebook big "Fight Datacenters!" photos / posters that are extremely obviously AI generated

it's quite cringe, like a not-so-subtle troll on the people who share the image

Fun post but sort of ironic to end with a lecture on "cultural hegemony" from....a Brit!

there is significant resistance to air conditioning in Europe at many levels (all of which are invalid or solvable):

* "not technically feasible" - people talk about old buildings with oddly shaped windows

* "can't afford it" - as you see here. people talk about the units themselves and the electricity bills

* "our infrastructure can't handle it" - this has to do with things like grids overheating, failing

* "our infrastructure can't handle <the regulations>" - things like nuclear reactors in France not allowed to raise the temperature of rivers by another N degrees during a heat wave

* "it's bad for global warming" - a little late for that, probably should save lives first

literally hospitals in europe don't have AC throughout the entire building yet. global warming is really coming at them fast

Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write.

federal

I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it.

You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.

Sure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work

execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs.

reading this article I think that is not what happened in this specific case:

Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions.

“Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said. But “we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.”

That is, Ford had been slowly relying more and more on automated tools (if the "rehiring" is over three years, then this all precedes our current "AI" ecosystem) and realized that now that they want to add modern AI tools, they need experienced engineers to train the newer systems, and are hiring people from the open market, where some of these folks were former Ford employees, but nothing like "were laid off due to AI".

That is this doesnt sound at all like "Ford fired 350 engineers to be replaced with AI and is now backtracking", which is certainly what the headline here implied.

As I said - on mainland. That study was done on a peninsula community surrounded by water, except on the north side, which was mostly a nature preserve where a 6 foot high fence on that side prevented new deer from entering.

So yes "kill all the deer" (like nearly ALL deer) works if you're in a small community that is 95% sealed off.

Realistically, "we have no solution to tick borne disease except for hiring tens of thousands of full time hunters continuously shooting animals in residential areas to keep the deer population on the brink of extinction" is not a sufficient solution for me.

And I live in a town where we have lots of those guys. It's fine. But scaling them up to the point that we don't need to spray for ticks anymore, you'd have them falling out of trees in playgrounds.

the "bubble" is all about, "companies are burning tons of money to provide these models and not recouping their investments"

open source models would strictly be the usual army of free labor getting paid elsewhere

the sovereign AI thing is fascinating to me for many reasons:

* it's time to build out stacks! servers, deployments, things! Especially in Europe. Hence sovereign AI is already a big sales buzzword for lots of hardware and hardware adjacent companies - NVIDIA (obviously), Cisco, Oracle and my own employer, Red Hat (hooray!)

* It makes the whole "AI is a bubble" thing completely irrelevant. OpenAI and Anthropic are no longer relevant, AI models themselves no longer need to "make money", and hopefully lots of really good / free ones start becoming commonplace. Ed Zitron goes out of business.

* How fascinating that Trump/ Hegseth maybe didnt completely create this but boy did they throw a thousand gallons of gas on the fire, bullying Anthropic around and scaring the crap out of every government, institution and business that's not 100% US only who is using Claude. nice job idiots!

* Can models be maybe trained with little more focus on only what they need to know? They need to know code, math, business, science. They don't need to know how to rip off movies or art. These LLMs would hopefully not be spamming Amazon with shitty books and Instagram with fake influencers (but I'm likely being too hopeful)

and then Chomsky goes on to form a deep online friendship with Jeffrey Epstein

and the rabbits and chipmunks and mice and squirrels, as well as that you have to kill basically all deer to the point of about 8 deer per square mile, since one deer can carry 2000-3000 new ticks. which is basically impossible on mainland because new deer just wander over.

claude because it would be more ethical, grok because I can just trip it and it will shatter into pieces

We definitely noticed behavioral differences in 3.14 regarding gc which could show up in particular test suites we have that are purposely ensuring all objects of a certain type were collected after a gc.collect() run. Between this and other issues (changes to the runtime API for typing, the first decently runnable version of free-threading, kind of a longer time for some C-based dependencies to catch up), the transition for my projects (SQLAlchemy) to 3.14 was generally more bumpy than that of say 3.12 or 3.13. will be interesting to see if 3.14.5 allows us to relax some changes we had to make to the test suite.

Palantir, whose software is widely used by US defence and intelligence agencies, has faced growing scrutiny in parts of Europe as governments reassess their dependence on American technology companies.

I think it's great. Europe and other regions will be building out their own tech stacks, decreasing global dependence on big US players like AWS and Palantir, creating lots more jobs for programmers and much broader ecosystems for doing things.

yes. github has very minimal controls for PRs (either shut them off completely, or not at all) but through GH webhooks you can essentially script "auto-close" of PRs that dont have correct preliminary approval.

it's time for there to be some really nice workflow tooling that people can plug into their GH repos that does this and other things.

one paragraph in the three mile long TOS the homeowner clicks OK on and problem solved ?