Ok... How about this? All (human) models of the universe are "Ptolemaic" to some degree. That is, they work but don't necessarily describe the true underlying structure ().
So it is a mistake to assume that any model is actually true.
Therefore complex numbers are just another modeling language, useful in certain contexts. All mathematics is just a modeling language.
() If you doubt this, ask yourself the question: Will the science of particle physics have changed in 100 years?
Yes I have wondered about that. I feel the same about Attention based networks, may be we are not using the most befitting coordinate system to understand them.
When it comes to anything tech related, the HN crowd are trend setters.
And.... the world is crying out for a google alternative. If it ever appears, the tech savvy people will be the first to move, followed by everyone else.
"It's made me realize that the love of money corrupts".
Yep. How about $1 per PR. The submitter gets to choose from a list of charities. No refund if the PR is accepted.
The goal is to get rid of junk PR's. This would work. There could be a central payment system, which any open source project can integrate with. It could accept payment in say India, of the Indian PPP of $1, so you aren't shutting out poorer developers.
I would not pay any amount of money, even a trivial one, for the privilege of being able to do free work for a project - and I don't think I'm an outlier here.
Another way to think of it is: paying $1 to have your pr and concerns elevated above the supermajority sea (that which will be ai driven contributions). For that cost, it's a steal of the deal.
Then, from the perspective of "it's a donation to a project you care about" it becomes even more rational. But the project itself getting the money has all the problems others have outlined already, so that idea's a bit bust.
But I'm already donating my time by creating a PR, it definitely would disincentivize me to make PRs if I had to also pay in addition to already doing the actual work. Just always such a shame that the good people have to suffer because of the actions of the shitty people...
If that's actually the opinion of the maintainer, why even accept PRs at all? At that point, just categorically deny any. I was thinking more of actual community projects that _want_ community PRs. Those seem to have welcomed my contributions in the past, but of course they were not just AI slop or other low effort PRs.
Most of my PRs are drive-by PRs: I have an problem, maybe a bug or missing feature, that annoyed me enough to fix it. And because I want to use future versions without the work of maintaining a fork I instead invest the work to upstream the fix. A step that is sometimes more work than the fix itself. At that point I wouldn't mind paying $1 to get that PR looked at and merged.
But that is not the only type of PR. We clearly need escape hatches for people who engage with a project on a deeper level.
I find I think harder with AI programming. It generates the code, but I have to approve the overall design and then approve every single line. I will edit and rearrange the code until it is correct.
But since the AI is generating a lot of code, it is challenging me. It also allows me to tackle problems in unfamiliar areas. I need to properly understand the solutions, which again is challenging. I know that if I don't understand exactly what the code is doing and have confidence in the design and reliability, it will come back and bite me when I release it into the wild. A lesson learnt the hard way during many decades of programming.
So it is a mistake to assume that any model is actually true.
Therefore complex numbers are just another modeling language, useful in certain contexts. All mathematics is just a modeling language.
() If you doubt this, ask yourself the question: Will the science of particle physics have changed in 100 years?
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