I really don't like the narrative of 'X is killing Y', or 'Z is dead' Everything being treated as an existential threat.
I'm also not particularly fond of the other extreme of toxic positivity where any problem is just a challenge and everybody is excited to take them on.
Once seems to understate the level of agency people have and the other seems to overstate.
The world is changing. Adapting does seem to be the rational approach.
I don't think Open Source is being killed but it does need to manage the current situation in a way that provides the best outcome.
I have been thinking that there may be merit in AI branches or forks. Open source projects direct any AI produced PRs to the AI branch. Maintainers of that branch curate the changes to send upstream. The maintainers of the original branch need not take an active involvement in the AI branch. If the AI branch is inadequately maintained or curated, then upstream simply receives no patches. In a sense it creates an opportunity for people who want to contribute. It produces a new area where people can compartmentalise their involvement without disrupting the wider project. This would lower the barrier of entry to productively supporting an open source project.
I doubt the benefit of resume-padding will persist long in an AI world. By the very nature of their act, they are showing what they are claiming to do is unremarkable.
I actually started writing a very similar essay, but the hyperbole got too out of hand – open source isn't dying anytime soon.
I do think that SDKs and utility-focused libraries are going to mostly go away, though, and that's less flashy but does have interesting implications imo.
I'm inclined to agree somewhat about libraries. I'm not entirely certain that it is a bad thing.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say libraries will change in form. There is a very broad spectrum of what libraries do. Some of the very small may just become purpose written inline code. Some of the large, hated-but-necessary libraries might get reduced into manageable chunks if people who use them can utilise AI to strip them down to the necessary component. Projects like that are things that are a lot of work for an individual that make it easier to just bite the bullet and use the bloated mass library. Getting an opportunity to make an AI do that drudge work might lower the threshold that some of those things will be improved.
I also wonder about the idea of skills as libraries. I have already found that I am starting to put code into skills for the AI to use as templates for output. Developing code in this way would let you add the specific abilities of a library to any skill supporting AI.
I once had a visit from cops about dodgy cheques I had been writing. Weirdly they were more ready to believe I hadn't written the cheques, than the were about me not leaving my chequebook at a brothel I hadn't visited.
The last time I wrote a cheque I had to cross out the 19 to write in the year. I think they only gave up on that line of questioning when I provided enough evidence to say that the bank had not given me any chequebooks to lose.
I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people. I'm guessing it counts as identity theft.
Identity theft is not helped by processes that demand certainty and expediency causing pressure on employees to provide both even when they are not available. In a similar credit card issue with my partner, after all of the mess of departments trying to make it other departments' problems, my partner received an email saying that; in accordance with the phone conversation, the issue had been resolved. Having had no such phone conversation this caused a bit of panic, but upon contacting the bank they said that they had tried calling but there was no answer, but they were not allowed to resolve the issue unless they had directly spoken to the customer, so she just wrote that in, otherwise it would keep on causing problems down the line.
On the other hand I have leveraged such processes to my advantage to essentially steal my own identity. For a long time I possessed no photo-id, It was actually buying a house that proved to be the intractable problem that forced me to get a passport (I also wanted to travel) . There were numerous things that required photo ID to exist even if they had not laid eyes on it themselves. It seems rather odd to me, but somehow just the idea that I have it seems enough. Luckily I was once in a situation where I needed photo ID at a time when there was sufficient context to prove my identity by other means. A staff member fudged the system to make it work. That resulted in me acquiring a form of non-photo ID that had been recorded as being verified by photo ID. I leveraged that as a form of pseudo proof-of-photo-id for a number of years.
> I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people.
You can order legit cheques online from third party cheque printers to save money vs what banks charge for cheques, you don't need any insider access to get cheques printed.
The main thing here would need standardisation is the environment in which the skill operates. The skill instructions are interpreted by the AI, any support scripts are. Interpreted by the environment.
You don't want to give an English description of how to compress LZMA and then let the AI do it token by token. Although that would be a pretty good arduous methodical benchmark task for an AI.
I'd be interested to hear what you thought of the programming architecture.
Excluding the bug side of things. If they did everything they were supposed to how hard was it to get them to perform a task that distributed the work through the machine.
I read some stuff on, I forget, maybe *lisp? I found it rather impenetrable.
On top of this, have there been any advances pin software development in the subsequent years that would have been a good fit for the architecture.
I always thought it was an under explored idea, having to compete with architectures that were supported by a sotware environment that had much longer to develop.
I used them at the (US) Naval Research Laboratory, programming in a dialect of C called C*. This automatically distributed arrays among the many processors, similar to how modern Fortran can work with coarrays.
If the problem was very data-parallel, one could get nearly perfect linear speedups.
My thought was that to do applications with agents, what you really need is a filesystem and perhaps an entire access rights policy that can handle the notion of agent-acting-on-behalf-of
I'm not sure if Unix groups could be leveraged for this, it would have to be some creative bending of the mechanism which would probably rile the elders.
Perhaps subusers or co-users are needed. They have their own privilege settings and can do the intersection of their own privileges and the client for which they act.
The main distinction would be the things they create are owned by their client, and they can potentially create things and then revoke their own access to them effectively protecting things from future agent activity, but leaving all of the control in the users hands.
Not only are they using regional specific knowledge, but they use regional relative concepts.
Many people do not agree that ant rhymes with aunt.
The recent Homophones of words meaning brutal.
Gorey, Grimm, Grizzly, Scarry.
I am guessin that Grimm is a eponym which makes it nebulous at best, eponyms take a lot of use to be regarded in objective terms rather than as invoking an arbartrary property of the name holder. Kafkaesque rises to that use. I don't think Grimm does.
I have no idea if Scarry is supposed to be a homonym for scary. Which it neither sounds like nor means brutal.
Perhaps there is another word that means brutal that sounds like however the person who makes connections thinks Scarry is pronounced.
In which case it would be a homonym of a synonym of brutal.
I also do not live in the same country as only connect, yet do not have such issues with their walls.
The real problem is that while you might be wrong about an answer, once you lose faith that the puzzle setter is right, you can never be sure if your guess is wrong or they are wrong. It is no longer a puzzle and you are playing 'what have I got in my pocket?'.
'Grimm' is a homophone of 'grim', 'Grizzly' is a homophobe of 'grisly', 'Scarry' is a homophone in US English of 'scary', 'Gorey' is a homophone of 'gory'.
'Gory', 'grisly', 'grim' and 'scary' do all roughly mean brutal.
'Grimm' as the name of the brothers is a red herring connection, with Gorey and Scarry also names of children's authors.
Gory, grisly and grim can be seen as synonymous on a axis maybe close to brutal. They refer to the appearance. brutal evokes the action that happened. The other words are about how things ended up.
An autopsy can be gory, grisly and depending on circumstances, grim. It is not brutal.
Scary is about a state of mind.
so you have appearance, appearance, appearance, and state-of-mind being considered similar to an action descriptor.
And that would be OK as a clue if Silverstein was a red herring, Grizzly was also a children's author and Scarry sounded like scary (and also meant something in the same ballpark as Gory, Grim, and Grisly)
I have certainly encountered variations on it from multiple technologies. There does seem to be a perception amongst younger people that electric cars are just a thing who's time has come. Without seeing the struggles that people went through to make that time come, it is quite easy to see how someone could miss that being in the right place at the right time happened because of the effort it took for there to be a right place and right time.
Specifically with Elon Muck, media coverage and public opinion are a mass of contradictions. He's the man single handedly destroying his businesses as he is on-track to becoming the worlds first trillionaire. He's just taking credit for the effort of the hard working and clever people who work from him, while seemingly being personally responsible for any incident that occurs.
I realise the man is a walking bag of neuroses with a can-do attitude, but I sometimes wish publications would restrict their reporting to the bad(and indeed good if he decides to do that again) things he actually does, rather than run mutually exclusive accusations.
I shall echo the comment of pibaker with one caveat.
>The exact same sentiment is widely observed across this entire website.
You do see this sentiment across this website, but this doesn't mean that it is a view held by the majority of people here, the people motivated to act can create the illusion that their opinions are more widely held than they are.
A few days ago I posted a comment which, in it's entirety reads
>Perhaps things would work out better if people didn't say mean things regardless of who it's about.
>You can still criticise without being mean.
The comment sits at -4 today, and has one antagonistic response. I don't really think most people disagree with this sentiment.
The antagonistic response came from the same one person as the comment in this thread.
There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter.
Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay.
You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all.
A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do.
Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers.
Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts.
A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual.
In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.
reply