yblu

used to be one of the “sharers,” maintaining a fairly popular blog, writing tutorials on platforms like DZone and CodeProject, answering questions on StackOverflow, and creating open-source projects that collectively amassed millions of downloads.

At one point, I decided to monetize one of my open-source projects by creating a commercial fork. That’s when a group of people, none of whom had contributed to the project in any way, started a witch hunt over a few super trivial lines of code they accused me of “stealing” from contributors. Despite having the full support of all actual contributors, the backlash from these outsiders left me drained and disillusioned. So I stopped sharing my work and contributing to open source altogether—and honestly, I’m happier for it.

To all the Jimmy Millers who genuinely appreciate the goodwill of creators: be aware that there are people who will leech off it or even destroy it.

This looks awesome. Maybe a stupid question: appID is public, does it mean anyone can query everyone else's database if they know the appID?

Okay, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned the worst possible outcome. Let's use the words of Sam Altman, the risk here is "light out for all of us", and let's just assume it meant we would still live, just in darkness. Or whatever plausible bad case outcome you could imagine. Do you see any negative outcome is possible at all? If you do, would you at least be cautious so that we could avoid such an outcome? That would be the behavior I expect to see in leading AI scientists and yet...

You disagreed with me, but at least you acknowledged there was risk, even though we could disagree about the odd or potential impact. Yet, folks like Yann LeCun ridiculed anyone who thought there was a risk AI could endanger us or harm our way of life. What do we know about experts who are always confident (usually on TV) about things that haven't happened yet?

What I found disheartening was many of those scientists, especially those on the "nothing to worry about" camp, seemed not to entertain the thought that they could be wrong, considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction. If there's a chance AI poses an existential threat to us, even if it is 0.00000001% (I made that up), should they be at least a bit more humble? This is uncharted domain and I find it incredible that many talk like they already have all the answers.

Wonder what will happen to house prices. Flatten out or drop soon?

They lost their money on the short position because the price went up, instead of going down. Had other people noticed about the hack as early as they had assumed and the price went down as they had assumed, they would have made a lot of money.

I used to maintain several popular open-source projects and contribute to even more popular ones. It was always fun at the beginning, especially because I built them for my own needs. But I kept getting asked to fix bugs or improve things even long after my needs had expired. I tried the donation route for a little while but it didn't go anywhere - I received maybe a few hours worth of money (versus hundreds if not thousands of hours I had spent working on those projects). I also tried releasing a paid version for one of the projects and got buried with hate mails and, unfortunately, online abuse. That was when I stopped working on open-source and I'm happier than ever.

I'm very happy for people who make it from doing serious open-source work. I think they deserve it. But at the same time I feel bad for those who build or maintain no less serious or popular work and yet couldn't make enough to worth even a portion of the time they'd spend.