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Comment by lioeters

6 days ago

Also a few days before that:

> I expect OSS to go the opposite direction: no human contribution allowed. Slop will be a nostalgic relic of 2025 & 2026.

We should have seen this coming after they got acquired by Anthropic, but it's still disappointing. I'm not against large language models as a technology, just thoroughly disgusted how these "AI" companies rose to power, eating the software industry and the rest of society. It's creating a very unhealthy dependency.

Think a few steps ahead and start preparing a slop-free software stack and community. That includes Zig and its ecosystem. Even if we (and future generations) don't manage to live entirely without slop, it's more important than ever to ensure a sustainable computing culture, free as in freedom.

46 comments

lioeters

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tempaccount5050  6 days ago

Software companies have been about automating human labor since the invention of computers. It's the whole damn point. Why do you think finance used to be (sometimes still is) the head of the IT dept? Because we automated accounting away. Then typists. Then secretaries. Then drafting. Etc etc.

  • wiseowise  6 days ago

    > It's the whole damn point.

    Believe it or not, for some of us it’s not “the whole damn point”.

  • sdevonoes  6 days ago

    There are software components out there that are the backbone of our industry, and they are not governed by multibillion dollar companies. Linux, postgres, HTTP, TCP/IP, qemu,…

    It’s not that anthropic/google/openai/etc are unavoidable

    • tomnipotent  6 days ago

      > they are not governed by multibillion dollar companies

      Every tech you mentioned is absolutely governed by multibillion dollar companies. Something like 75-85% of OSS code is contributed by employees doing their day job. Most Linux and Postgres contributions come from those same employees. HTTP and TCP/IP are managed by standard bodies and industry working groups that, you guessed it, are governed by multibillion dollar companies. Red Hat and IBM are responsible for 40-60% of contributions to Qemu.

      4 replies →

shmichael  5 days ago

So you argue we discriminate based on who/what wrote the code, instead of what's in it?

Let's take this to a different domain, self driving cars. Would you equally argue for human driving? I'm pretty sure over time it will become clear to everyone that machines will be able to outperform humans consistently at this task, to the degree that human driving will become illegal. But for now the press likes to focus on any failure of machine driving, taking for granted human drivers are the largest or second largest cause of premature death in many countries.

Coding (in many ways, but not all) is a more open ended and versatile task than driving, so it's natural that current iterations seem untrustworthy, but ignoring the trajectory is erring on conservatism, and doesn't seem to me to be grounded in any sound reasoning.

foxes  6 days ago

How could it possibly be open source if it requires proprietary models developed by a few companies to writs the code.

Seems like that would make open source entirely controlled by open ai, anthropic et al.

  • brabel  5 days ago

    Open source and open weight models are already really good. I don’t think anyone really depends on the big AI companies anymore, if they go away, the open source models seem to be already sufficiently good to take the torch and will continue to improve thanks to research. They may require money to train , but the cost of that is already covered quite well and if these model became the mainstream way to use AI , more money from governments and research institutions would be poured into them.

    That is actually a very plausible scenario!