Comment by socketcluster
1 day ago
Yep, I had the same reaction. It was like. "Huh? What? Actual acknowledgement of contributions? Cannot compute." They even made the requirements just low enough for me to qualify. We'll see if I actually get the deal though but this could be the most generous thing that ever happened to me in the open source sphere. I have a tendency to fall through every possible crack so this is an actual shock to me.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely see the cynical side that Claude may potentially benefit from learning my high quality coding practices as a result of this... This is clearly also a way to source high quality training data. Maintainers of open source projects with 5K+ stars are among the most competent engineers you can find and they're not biased towards unnecessary complexity as most corporate folks are. The reason is simple; if you code for free, there is no incentive to maximize billable hours; it's the opposite. This is a real gold-mine of quality coding data. AI companies should be fighting over us.
But still, I think this is nice in either case. These days, I appreciate people using even cold calculated logic as a motivation for doing the right thing. I'm tired of people being irrational and doing the wrong thing because the wrong thing sounds more marketable to investors.
I don't know of any good backbone service or library with 5K+ stars, only npm or python hyped bozos. There is certainly not any competence in github stars. Aren't any GNU libs maintained on GitHub? No, they are mostly not. Just very few.
Yeah well it's like money these days; having a $10 million net worth doesn't actually say much about a person; maybe it fell on their lap because they knew the right people or maybe they had to struggle to earn every cent. It's the same with GitHub stars.
Unfortunately, those who had it easy tend to get much more attention and are much more visible; attention is how they got there in the first place so of course there is not much merit behind their work. A lot of software tooling is a Potemkin village. It's over-hyped and developers/users are forced into it by their boss who happens to be an investor in the project founder's company.
It often seems like nobody from Millennial or Gen Z generations built any good popular software tool or library... It's like nothing innovative came out since the time of Linux, GNU and GIT... No competent software developers since John Carmack? It's not true of course, it's just that we are a heavily suppressed and manipulated generation. Firstly, we are demoralized, so there are less of us actually putting in the effort to build quality stuff, but even those who do, our work is often marginalized and covered up by algorithms. Often nipped in the bud.
We have to consider that Linus Torvalds didn't build Linux all by himself. Had the community not come together and made all these distros, today, nobody would even know what Linux is and Linus Torvalds would be a failed developer living in the shadow of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.