jamwise

The implicit arrangement in corporate use and contribution to open source is that everyone benefits. People contribute work and testing that improves libraries and tools that everyone else can use, making all our projects better. This includes corporations, many of which also engage in this mutual benefit by hiring actual developers to back open source projects. I think it’s a brilliant system, huge fan.

Enter LLMs training off that data. It looks similar on the surface, but if you think about the balance of cost and benefit it becomes clear it is no longer balanced. The training algorithms and models are closed source, and come at a hefty usage cost. AI companies saved hundreds of billions of dollars of paying humans to help train their algorithms by taking advantage of an open system that was open on with another kind of balance in mind.

So in short the work was offered for free within a specific kind of relationship. Now a powerful outsider is steamrolling and taking advantage of that existing open dynamic.

I have two issues with AI coding. The first is how giant trillion dollar companies are profiting off the accumulated labour of mostly open source developers who mostly offered their work for free. Open source had this pattern too but there was a kind of give and take that is not present here. The other is the atrophying of my own skills. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use it for my side projects since it’s become a requirement in my day job and I don’t want to forget how to code.

This creates a grey area for things like a personal blog. If you’re not trying to maintain skills, yeah I wish we could avoid supporting these companies, but I can’t be a hypocrite seeing as I have to use them for work, and I use my provided account as a personal tutor to learn cool stuff.

Hmm. I tend to have the opposite. With science usually the process of overwriting a credence means increasing understanding and getting a deeper perspective. No one is born knowing anything, and as we advance it’s inevitable to learn certain prior beliefs were wrong. Might as well make it a fun thing.

Well it was fun as a child to speculate. Definitely don’t think there are ruins from ancient Egyptians on Mars now LOL. But the possibility of signs of microbial life is fascinating from an evolutionary biology perspective.

Noooooo

Loved the movie as a kid, I watched the series also, and am currently rewatching it.

Yeah very cool filming locations. Also the university they filmed the Tollana planet is where they filmed certain scenes from the new Battlestar Galactica.

The 10 year old inside me is so incredibly excited. My actual 10 year old self was obsessed with tombs and ancient Egypt. I remember a whole summer I couldn't stop thinking about and talking about the "Sphinx on the face of Mars". Thankfully these days I have friends, but I have been rewatching all of Stargate so this is very timely.

Back when I was hiring my team we looked through HN posts quite a bit to reach out. It's a good resource for potential employers. With everyone trying to AI-ify everything these days, makes sense they'd try to do the same with their "platform".

Are we all just going to go back to doing everything IRL? At least until the humanoid robots start following us on the street.

Serializing has many uses.

- Memory might not look the same on all platforms, if your app is multi-platform you stop being able to share your data cross-platform.

- The internal data structures of your app will absolutely change as your app evolves, the binary data in memory is a raw result of your data structures. So you have to commit to never changing data structures, or create complicated binary migration tools to update memory when your app updates.

- Debugging corrupted memory is incredibly tedious any sometimes impossible. Having plain text serialized data makes debugging much more straightforward.

Top my my head I would suggest to focus more on improving performance on your serialization pipeline. There might be some subset of your data that is unlikely to ever change and is identical on all platforms, maybe your serializer is hybrid in that case.

I guess Spike Jonze was right all along.

Bad code as an invasive species is the freshest take I've heard. I have a hard enough time arguing with people that tech debt isn't about bad code, but shifting priorities and requirements. This is going to be a really useful analogy for me going forward, thanks!