What? If anything the tech press is overwhelmingly sycophantic towards both startups and Big Tech alike, often just passing along talking points verbatim without any critical analysis at all.
Also, being "anti-AI" isn't being "anti-tech". AI is a marketing buzzword.
For sure- I haven't forgotten just how thoroughly deified the likes of Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sam Bankman-Fried were in the tech press at one point.
I don't know why people keep sharing this. It's highly offensive and inflammatory. Plenty of open source projects consider themselves a community which welcome newcomers, take governance seriously, and ensure that even if suggestions or contributions are rejected, it's done in a thoughtful and considerate way. Acting like a jerk isn't a blueprint for how to be a good maintainer, it's how to be a jerk. And this "us experts vs. entitled users" mentality is cultural poison.
> Plenty of open source projects consider themselves
I don't think that the article is incompatible with that. If you benefit from an open source project, that's good. If you benefit from more (a community, documentation, support, ...), that's even better! But you are not entitled to any of that.
> And this "us experts vs. entitled users" mentality is cultural poison.
I can't say what the author's mentality is, but after a lot of open source, my opinion is this: users of open source code tend to not understand that they are not entitled to anything at all. I don't say it in a bad way: they just aren't.
If you read the discussions here, it's obvious: many users of open source genuinely believe that it is not enough to share work for free: if one feels like sharing their work for free, they somehow "should have the decency to share even more work for free" (like documentation, support, reviews). But that is wrong! Again:
- If someone shares code for free, it's nice.
- If someone shares code for free, and documents it for free, and reviews PRs for free, and offers support for free, it's even nicer.
That's all there is. Maybe that someone is an asshole. You don't have to like them, you don't have to use their code, you don't have to engage with them. It's not a good thing to be an asshole. But still, you are not entitled to anything. Just take whatever you want from what is offered to you, and don't complain about not receiving even more.
We're talking about the internet, pal. It can be traced to How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. "Hackers" normalized the idea that if you can code you don't need basic decency and manner.
Calling someone a jerk for their views on how OSS should or shouldn’t function isn’t appropriate.
It’s actually completely out of line and smacks of the very entitlement described in the piece.
Don’t agree with his views? Go make your own project and run it however you want.
Cultural poison? The truly cultured understand that a monoculture would be the real poison. There’s room for all modes of operation in OSS. Without “jerks”, there’d be no Linux and there would be nothing else of high value either.
If you want to sit around and hold hands then find a project where they do that, or maybe just take up finger painting.
> Plenty of open source projects consider themselves a community which welcome newcomers, take governance seriously
Rich is taking governance very seriously. Others aren't and give nobodies the right to vote. In any case, he's factually correct. Nothing in open source implies anything about any type of governance, as "Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period".
It is sane but not rational, sometimes factually correct in places, highly offensive, and inflammatory. I don't use Clojure and reading it makes me never want to use Clojure.
Everybody is entitled to say (but not dictate) how something should work. Holding and expressing opinions is an innate human right, and the developed world only takes it away in extreme circumstances. Talking about open source governance is not an extreme circumstance.
We are not legally entitled to basic politeness, but politeness is enforced socially rather than morally, and failing to be polite means risking social consequences. If I used Clojure and I read the linked article, I would avoid hiring Cognitech, which is the exact problem Rich mentions.
> It is sane but not rational, sometimes factually correct in places, highly offensive, and inflammatory.
Calling this offensive and inflammatory can only come from someone who is extremely conflict-avoidant. For my Italian sensibilities, it's quite milquetoast.
You might need to go back and read that one again, this is the faintest criticism of a lengthy screed in which the person you are replying to labels user-hostile behaviours as "acting like a jerk" and generally disapproves.
Your counter argument to this is to just be contrarian and imply they are a jerk... because, well, you don't agree with them. You didn't add substance to the discussion (facts, evidence, argument seeking middle ground), you just sought to set fire to someone because you were uncomfortable with the dim prospect you might be wrong/guilty of acting like this/be the subject of the criticism.
Do you see how this undermines your point of view/actually re-enforces the validity of the criticism?
Gotta love a world in which a tool which has ingested "all the world's libraries" is now trotted out as a solution to replace those libraries.
You know what would happen if all the people who handwrote and maintained those libraries revoked their code from the training datasets and forbid their use by the models?
:clown face emoji:
This LLM-maxxing is always a myopic one-way argument. The LLMs steal logic from the humans who invent it, then people claim those humans are no longer required. Yet, in the end, it's humans all the way down. It's never not.
> You know what would happen if all the people who handwrote and maintained those libraries revoked their code from the training datasets and forbid their use by the models?
The MCP servers combined with agentic search solved this possibility, just this year superseding RAG methods but all techniques have their place. I don't see much of a future for RAG though, given its computational intensity.
Long story short, training and fine tuning is no longer necessary for an LLM to understand the latest libraries, and therefore the "permission" to train would not even be something applicable to debate
it's a fast moving field, best not to have a strong opinion about anything
How would they know what superior code is? They're trained on all code. My expectation and experience has been that they write median code in the best-case scenario (small greenfields projects, deeply specified, etc).
"Year of X" is so cringe. They said it was all about Agents last year... yawn. Wake me up when they have something to show that makes people go "wow this is amazing" and has real economic consequences.
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