Comment by Barrin92
5 months ago
I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make new stuff up in their own incestuous tupperware salesmen ecosystems.
I do pity the bug bounty people who rely on goodwill in their programs given that everything with a financial incentive is vulnerable. But otherwise the great thing about digital spaces is that there is, for practical purposes, unlimited space.
Every day there's another "how do you deal with the AI-apocalypse" article, I don't just ignore it
I think by "internet" they mean search engine results pages. If you restrict yourself to short, common queries and only look at the top 10 results on the page, then the space really is very limited. If all those top 10s for common queries start to get crowded out with AI slop, then people are going to start abandoning search.
Well, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).
Zero-contribution open source doesn't at all make it closed source.
It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes.
SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.
Minor correction: SQLite is not closed to contributions. It just has an unusually high bar to accepting contributions. The project does not commonly accept pull requests from random passers-by on the internet. But SQLite does accept outside contributed code from time to time. Key gates include that paperwork is in place to verify that the contributed code is in the public domain and that the code meets certain high quality standards.
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Maybe, but that's hardly comforting (and definitely not in the spirit of open source) if you're forced to take that decision, knowing it will hurt your project, because the alternative is getting DDoSed.
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> I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years
Bold assumption. On what will you run Emacs if average PC costs $12000? Yes. Even Raspberry Pi. It's not called war on general computing for nothing.
If you say the cloud, that will be cut up and reused by the next AI crawler.
AI will not be able to eat up all chip manufacturing capabilities forever. At some point the market will be saturated and PCs will get affordable again.
And COPA didn't succeed at first, but try and try and you get COPPA, and now age verification laws.
I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.
And if you get everyone on cloud? Then you can control Internet same way you can control TV or the press.
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True, but as they say, the market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent
We simply don't know how long this bubble will last
You can use old hardware.
Yeah, but it won't be cheap or easily repairable. And they don't make them anymore.
> It's not called war on general computing for nothing.
Companies paying too much for hardware to chase a bubble is not "war on general computing".
> Even Raspberry Pi.
What's preventing supply from catching up with demand in this situation?
If high prices stick around long term, there will be so many chip fabs ready to pump out $100 pi-equivalents that still let them have a 200% markup.
Also I can go buy a quite good mini PC with 16GB of RAM for $300. In what world does that price go up another 40x?