@drwho @jonny you work on FOSS for maybe the same reason you started: you have an itch that must be scratched. You share it to help people with a similar itch. You use code you trust because it helps you scratch (but maybe vendor it).

“Success” of OSS in enterprise tech was a wish granted by a monkey’s paw. Go back to the roots.

@drwho
I'm realizing my off the cuff thoughts here are being taken a bit more literally than I intended - there's a whole aura to AI code that isn't just timestamp and contributor count, its pretty easy to tell when something was written by a human being. I was mostly commenting on the similarity between what's happened to perception of video and perception of code - that in general post AI things have a higher threshold of trust and require closer scrutiny. I certainly would never lead nor encourage some witch hunt to prove humanity or vice versa, just like if I find some random GH repo lying around I take a closer look at who did it and how it was written.

tl;dr not giving up on FOSS

@hipsterelectron
Ok, well that is a very literal reading of what I'm saying here, but I see how you might read it that way. Maybe a closer phrasing to what I meant is just what I wrote above, "much like how people use pre/post AI as a marker for whether a video is likely to be real or not, I use pre/post AI as one of several indicators when I am evaluating a piece of software". Basically I was being glib.

I don't think its nihilistic, I still write code and still run code written recently, and of course all the other sources of provenance and social proof and etc. still exist. I guess the analogy to the video case is instructive - real videos still get taken and its important to not dismiss all recent videos as fabrications, but for recent videos you have to take extra special consideration of where it came from and other contextual markers surrounding it