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Posts
6
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1375
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I remember basically every house or apartment I’ve lived in, and every office I’ve worked in. Probably quite a few stores and restaurants I’ve frequented, schools I’ve attended. I can recall neighborhood layouts. Basically anything spatial.

    Now, can I tell you what someone’s name is two minutes after they’ve told me? Not a chance.

  • Many already did, and many more will, but I doubt it was for this reason. I’m not a huge fan of GitHub, but it’s not because they require you to be verified in order to submit stuff.

  • Open source exists just fine without anonymous contributors, and the value difference between closed source is not that contributors can be pseudonymous or anonymous, it’s that anyone can be a contributor.

    I am an open source maintainer. I do not want unfettered anonymous access to submit things to my repositories. I welcome feedback, criticisms, bug reports, feature requests, pull requests, and support requests, but I do not want any of that from anonymous users. If someone abuses me or other members of my open source communities, I want there to be potential recourse.

    Anyone on earth is welcome to download my code and do whatever they want with it (as long as they follow the license terms) completely anonymously, but I do not welcome communications from them anonymously. I don’t feel like that’s unreasonable, and I’m happy that GitHub is a place where I can have those kind of restrictions.

    If you want a more “Wild West” approach to social coding where anonymous users can submit things to your repos, you’re free to host your projects elsewhere.

  • You’re just wrong if you think the most valuable people to an open source project are anonymous randos.

    I would think it would be astoundingly obvious that the most valuable people are the core team members. They do all of the maintenance work. They guide the project’s direction and define its mission. They implement new features and do most of the bug fixing. They triage, handle releases, coordinate.

    Look at the commit stats of any major project; there are a handful of people who do >90% of the work. Those are the most valuable people to open source. They are who keep these projects going year after year.

    Anonymous randos might fix a low-pri bug once in a while, but they don’t actually help a project much. It’s vastly more likely that anonymous randos will just add more work to a core dev’s plate and provide nothing of value. Now, please note that I’m not talking about new devs. Plenty of new devs will start by submitting some bug fixes to help projects. Those are actually helpful. I’m talking about randos. People who go by new pseudonyms not tied to any established Internet presence. And this problem has only gotten exponentially worse with AI.

    I’m assuming, from the way you talk about it, that you’ve never been a part of a large open source project‘s community. You should try it. It’s extremely rewarding work (in that it makes you feel accomplished, you will not be paid for it). You’ll see that the work you label as busywork is actually what makes the project both valuable and maintainable.

    I actually run some large open source projects:

    https://github.com/hperrin/svelte-material-ui

    https://github.com/sciactive/pnotify

    And a bunch of smaller ones:

    https://github.com/sciactive/tinygesture

    https://github.com/sciactive/nephele

    https://github.com/sciactive/nymphjs

    https://github.com/hperrin/stream-overlay

    https://github.com/sciactive/quickdav

    So I’m speaking from experience here.

    Just to give you an example, if you look at the v9 branch of SMUI, you’ll see the work I’ve been doing on it lately to separate it from the upstream library that has been abandoned. All of that work will not change the outward utility of the project one bit from v8, but it is absolutely necessary if the project is going to continue into the future. This kind of work will always fall on a core dev. No random passerby is ever going to do weeks of grinding labor just to make sure the project has a path forward.

    So yes, the occasional bug fix or performance improvement from an anonymous stranger is nice, but no, it is not necessary nor the most important part. And to me not worth opening the project up to potential unaccountable abuse from bad actors.

  • Ah, that’s what you mean. Yes, I remember the internet before Facebook. I also remember software development before distributed version control. It was easier to keep track of incoming patches when they were all in email. Not better, but easier.

    I’ve been managing open source libraries and projects for two decades. In general, community involvement is good, but anonymous, ephemeral community “members” are very rarely helpful, and way more often a pain in the ass.

  • How is this any different than the thin clients that have existed for decades? They never sell well because people don’t want to do all their computing elsewhere.

  • Why would that possibly matter to you?

  • I’m not sure I would want completely anonymous, unknown, and unaccountable actors to be able to comment, submit issues, and submit PRs on my repos. So, it’s annoying, but the alternative is so much worse.

  • In semantic versioning the first number is for any change to a public API that is not backward compatible. It could be incredibly small, like fixing a typo, but if it changes the API your users are using in an incompatible way, you’re supposed to bump that number.

  • If the establishment democrats will get the fuck out of the way and stop letting corporations run the country, then yes, we can come back from this. Listen to progressives like AOC and Mamdani, stop blocking them.

  • That doesn’t sound like an AI voice in that it used generative AI. It sounds like someone just fed the English into a Hispanic voice on a regular text to speech engine. I could be wrong though.

  • Most people cannot begin to comprehend that just having the field on the form doesn’t magically make it do anything. Like, yeah, I can add a field to the form in five minutes, but if you want it to actually work, it’ll take time.

  • Great article. That guy is legitimately being driven insane.

  • Yeah. 3D printing a gun is a great way to blow your hand off.

  • I have a bit of an issue with the title, considering federated end to end encrypted messaging has existed since, at the latest, 1991.

  • Oh, cool, I definitely trust them again. 🙄

  • Maybe you could say that AI training is not a use of the program, it is a use of the source code.

  • Technically, a lot of them already disallow this without maintaining copyright notices, which the AI companies aren’t doing. I doubt the AI companies would follow the new license, but at least it would be even more explicitly illegal.