Building Interactive UIs in VS Code with MCP Apps — Marlene Mhangami & Liam Hampton, GitHub

https://video.ut0pia.org/w/tY5Z1DyFikccN9zejxBF3L

Evals Are Broken, Use Them Anyway — Ara Khan, Cline

https://video.ut0pia.org/w/6HMRuf4R6DYrZLRPUAQ23u

Building safe Payment Infrastructure for the autonomous economy — Steve Kaliski, Stripe

https://video.ut0pia.org/w/wti1qW28Pbiupmc5uFco7w

This rsync thing has me thinking about the difference between the "free as in beer" model of free software and the "free as in freedom" model the FSF originally put forward. There are important differences, and it's meaningful when a project changes from one model to the other, which is one way to narrativize what's happened to rsync.

I think "free as in beer" software is more appropriately called "Libertarian and Open Source Software", or LOSS. Among other things it involves no obligations on other people, and expects no obligations in return (*). But this means it's an everyone for themselves, anti-communitarian endeavor. We should be honest about this. We should also be honest when a project changes state from FOSS to LOSS, because that's a meaningful change, and actually is a loss in my view.

I continue to believe that enthusiastic embrace of AI/LLM coding tools is a leading indicator of an impending FOSS→LOSS transition.

It seems to me at least one driver of the uproar over rsync is that a bunch of people thought it was a FOSS project but it had, in a short period of time, converted into a LOSS project and the shock was jolting (understandably). As a FOSS project, rsync served a community function, leading people to depend on it, make assumptions about its longer-term stability, and so on. Those are reasonable expectations of a communitarian project. As a LOSS project, rsync is under no obligations to anyone and the maintainer(s) can change the software at any time, for any reason, at their discretion alone. It seems rsync is a LOSS.

#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #FOSS #freedom #rsync #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs

(*) Putting aside whether this principle is consistently applied or hypocritical.