nice thanks!

yeah same here, the whole thing is incredibly relatable

Ah, I never read the book. Sounds like it could be entertaining.

cry harder

still entertaining, and does describe how large corps work internally fairly accurately based on my experience

so brave

I was complaining about copilot specifically, which is an embarrassingly terrible product

🤣

I’ve heard about this kind of shit, but never seen it myself.

yeah most companies don’t even bother with the courtesy email anymore

The talk is reality check for anyone who thinks open source is still in its honeymoon phase. He basically argues that we have been living through a Gilded Age of open source from about 2000 to 2020 where everything looked like rapid growth and success on the surface while the foundation was actually rotting. Just like the original Gilded Age had its robber barons and railroad monopolies he points out that we have traded genuine freedom for the convenience of proprietary platforms like GitHub and Slack. He is pretty blunt about the fact that the industry has shifted from community driven passion projects to venture capital backed rug pulls where companies like Redis or HashiCorp just swap licenses the moment they need to squeeze more profit out of users.

He highlights how the XZ backdoor and the Log4Shell mess exposed that the entire internet is basically held together by three tired volunteers in a trench coat and how new regulations might actually make those people legally liable for bugs. He also goes off on how AI is being shoved into everything not because it helps developers but because VCs want to replace them, and he is clearly not a fan of how companies like Red Hat and Fedora are tying everything to AI tools now. It is a really sobering look at how we stopped caring about the principles of free software and just became pragmatic consumers who are okay with locked down ecosystems like macOS or Android as long as they are shiny.

He thinks we can still fix this but it requires us to stop being spectators and actually start mentoring the next generation on why these values mattered in the first place. He basically says that if we just treat open source as a way to get free labor for corporations it is going to end up as a dead hobby like ham radio. The main takeaway is that the era of easy growth is over and if we actually want a future where we control our own computers we have to stop picking the convenient path and start fighting for the principled one again.

Is it oversampling or just the fact there are a lot of users from China?

I thought horny chatbots were their latest business model?

To definitively say whether something is or isn’t conscious we’d first need to have a clear definition of what we mean by consciousness in functional terms. So far, there are a number of competing theories, and the definition will vary based on which theory you subscribe to. I’m personally a fan of the higher order theory of consciousness which suggests that conscious experience constitutes higher order thoughts which observe other thoughts, awareness of your own thoughts is the self referential property that would be a plausible explanation. To show that a model was conscious in this framework, you’d have to show that there are secondary patterns that occur in response to the primary patters which are a result of a stimulus.

Right, it’s the lack of any double checking that’s shocking. I use LLMs to make mermaid diagrams of code all the time, it’s super useful, but you have to actually read through what it generates.

Honestly, that’s the most amazing revelation here. Turns out there’s no human reviewing what the agent does, and no testing environment to make sure stuff that gets pushed to prod is even minimally working.

when life imitates art, amazing how that was made a decade ago too

Indeed, it is.

Technically, they have software that sometimes decides to lobotomize other software.

Not that I’ve seen.