Mastodawn

Re: genAI killing open source, one strategy I've been pursuing lately is closed-sourcing everything going forward, but forming human relationships with other developers. I then literally just... send them code for stuff that would help their projects, from my own codebases, and tell them they can feel free to integrate it without owing me anything.

I've been feeling pretty good about that strategy so far. I like that it places my human relationships first, without exposing my work to either corporate exploitation or LLM mining (for later corporate exploitation).

turns out you can just tell people "hey I have a small private package to do this thing that you're struggling with, do you want me to just add you to the private repo so you can reference or copy it wholesale? Just credit me."

@zkat One problem is that personal relationships can sour. If you're building a piece of software that you need, and you rely on personal relationships to provide dependencies, what if they suddenly hate you?

My friend group had a breakup because one person had a video production business, got a friend's permission to show them in a video, then the friend changed their mind. Rather than simply talk to the video pal, they sent a takedown request to YouTube, threatening the business's existence.

Shauna GM Mar 5

That is a problem, but structuring our lives and work around relationships gives us an incentive to learn relational skills and build stronger relationships to mitigate the problems.

@shauna I think what I was trying to get at is that open source offers / offered a promise of being able to build on code without depending on any specific personal or business relationship, that the work could continue without anyone being indispensable. You can see how that could be twisted to help capitalists, but it is also dangerous to communities for any person or group/corporation to be impossible to replace.

Forget friend breakups, what if the author dies... Can you invite helpers now?

Shauna GM Mar 5

I think I understand your perspective here. But I also think that the tech industry, whether big tech or open source or crypto or AI, is constantly holding out the false promise that if you just use this tool or that tech, you won't have to worry about human relationships. And to me this is a pyrrhic victory, if it's even achievable at all. When tools replace relationships everything gets very fragile.

crypticcelery 🔜 EH23 Mar 5

@zkat at first I was gonna say something like “but that will be hard to discover, especially to people new to the field/a topic or not well connected (yet)”. And while I do think some of that applies, it also sounds like an opportunity, like you say, for fostering community (not like search engines are really good these days anymore).
I love the idea of more chatty hubs around this where like minds find people in need / with a solution lying around, whilst excluding slopmongers.

@crypticcelery @zkat I had the same thought. This sounds like it'll make things harder to find without scaling it up. But not scaling up in any technical sense. And it turns out scaling up human relationships is called "community".

Where is this community and how can I become a part of it?

@zkat this is what i've been wanting to do yeah

@zkat less "free as in freedom" more "if you knock on my door and ask for help i'll give you dinner and a couch", yknow

@zkat nice and neighbourly

@zkat basically software mutual aid

Darius Kazemi Mar 5

@zkat a return to the early ARPANET model

@darius oldie but a goodie

🌸 Ⓐnarkitty lumi-nhac

@zkat you could have your code on a platform with a stronger moral compass, like codeberg, and license it under gplv3 to dissuade corporations

that's what i'm doing, at least

🌸 Ⓐnarkitty lumi-nhac

@zkat i feel it's also important to cultivate communities around this. ones that will go against corporate exploitation and stick up for eachother

@lumi so people can just train their models on it and then do a """clean room""" rewrite? No thanks. Also, I'm tired of doing free labor for companies. Even GPL stuff will get used by them.

🌸 Ⓐnarkitty lumi-nhac

@zkat i understand your concerns, i personally don't have an answer to the threat of slopcoding, just a bunch of thoughts. the whole ""clean room"" rewrite thing is so disgusting (tbh everything the tech industry currently does is disgusting...)

trying to keep our code out of the slop machines is, i feel, a losing battle, and we would sacrifice way more than we stand to gain in doing so

so i think it is more valuable to shame usage of genai, especially shaming promotion of it. and to cultivate communities that stand against it

@zkat @lumi I don't even know if licenses matter any more to companies and their AI. They just slurp everything, ignore all licenses, and declare it as "fair use". I agree that as much as I want to share my stuff, I also don't want to be doing free labor at that scale either.

Kevin Russell Mar 5

Open source with added AI is a "Dead Fork"

And don't just delete, copy 0 and 1s over it.

@zkat This is actually awesome. It's like old school tape trading but for code.

Federico Mena Quintero Mar 5

@zkat If we can solve the hardest problem in computer science, transferring a file from one computer to another, this sounds like a pretty good and community-friendly scheme.

@federicomena tbh it's not that hard. Just use private repos and grant even temporary access to fellow maintainers on a needs-based basis. For extra points, scope that access to certain subtrees of the repo.

@zkat human bond source