Correct. And certainly not to people and companies who'd like to use my work to deny end users the rights to control their computing.
That's the whole point of the GPL to me. The code I release is not an unconditional gift. It definitely has strings attached on purpose.
LLMs completely break this. I'm helping very rich people build the systems they impose to the world and that have awful externalities, and these systems help others build proprietary software. I can't say I'm too happy about this.
I think you are splitting hairs. Yes those models “exist”, if by exist you mean they have dual-licensing setups with different tiers (community, professional, etc).
The point is that most individuals who open source their code do so without expecting financial returns from it. In that context, whether Carmack has a $1 or $1e9 doesn’t make a difference.
I'm not splitting hairs, it's a crucial aspect and a common misconception that it would be quite helpful to get rid of (hence my reaction). And no, it's not necessarily dual licensing (why not though) or different tiers, or fauxpensource or whatever, there are many projects which are completely open source. See for instance Nextcloud, XWiki, PostgreSQL, Linux...
Again, as I said, I was only reacting to that specific part of your comment, because it is obviously wrong.
(and thus the rest can't follow since you use it to draw a conclusion -- which doesn't mean you can't fix this, I don't know, actually I didn't get your point and I don't see how it counters what you replied to -- but I'm not really concerned about this part)
> The point is that most individuals who open source their code do so without expecting financial returns from it. In that context, whether Carmack has a $1 or $1e9 doesn’t make a difference.
Bruh, there are thousands of projects, maybe tens of thousands, that survive solely on donations, hundreds thousands written by hungry students trying to land their first gig. Maybe you’re right in “free as in beer” sense, but you’re certainly, majorly wrong in general OSS definition.
It's normal for HN to be preoccupied with the major technical trend of the moment, and this is unquestionably the biggest technical trend in many years.
People can argue about where to insert it in the list, but it is certainly in the top 5 of many decades (smartphones, web, PCs, etc.) That's why it's inescapable.
Your complaint isn't really about simonw's comment, but rather the fact that it was heavily upvoted - in other words, you were dissenting from the community reaction to the comment. That's understandable; in fact it's a fundamental problem with forums and upvoting systems: the same few massive topics suck in all the smaller ones until we get one big ball of topic mud: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Has there ever been any other topic that was not only the subject of the majority of submissions, but also had a subset of users repeatedly butting into completely unrelated discussions to go "b-but what about <thing>? we need to talk about <thing> here too! how can I relate this to <thing>? look at my <thing> product!"?
You can't just roll in to a random post to tell people about your revolutionary new AI agent for the 50th time this week and expect them not to be at least mildly annoyed.
I'm with you, but he wasn't telling us about his agent, he was saying "this is a cool technology and I've been wanting to use it to make a thing". The thing just happened to be LLM-adjacent.
Almost all of his comments "just happen" to be LLM-adjacent. At some point it stops "just happening" and it becomes clear that certain people (or their AI bots) are frequenting discussion spaces for the sole purpose of seeking out opportunities to bring up AI and self-promote.
Simon has been here since way before LLMs were a thing, and it's fairly obvious (to me, at least) that he's genuinely excited about LLMs, he's not just spamming sales or anything.
The entire thing is just quotes and a retelling of events. The closest thing to a "take" I could find is this:
> I have no idea how this one is going to play out. I’m personally leaning towards the idea that the rewrite is legitimate, but the arguments on both sides of this are entirely credible.
Which effectively says nothing. It doesn't add anything the discussion around the topic, informed or not, and the post doesn't seem to serve any purpose beyond existing as an excuse to be linked to and siphon attention away from the original discussion (I wonder if the sponsor banner at the top of the blog could have something to do with that...?)
Literally just a quote from his fellow member of the "never stops talking about AI" club, Karpathy. No substance, no elaboration, just something someone else said or did pasted on his blog followed by a short agreement. Again, doesn't add anything or serve any real purpose, but was for some reason submitted to HN[1], and I may be misremembering but I believe it had more upvotes/comments than the original[2] at one point.
I think my coverage of the Mark Pilgrim situation added value in that most people probably aren't aware that Mark Pilgrim removed himself from internet life in 2011, which is relevant to the chardet story.
That second Karpathy example is from my link blog. Here's my post describing how I try to add something new when I write about things on my link blog: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
In the case of that Karpathy post I was amplifying the idea that "Claw" is now the generic name for that class of software, which is notable.
It's very much a bimodal distribution: an enthusiast subset and an allergic subset. It's impossible to satisfy both, but that's the dynamic of HN anyhow: guaranteed to dissatisfy everybody! It's a strange game; the only to win is to complain.
> I mean I don’t have to remember the horrible git command line anymore
Every time I see a comment like this, I have to wonder what the heck other devs were doing. Don’t you know there were shell aliases, and snippet managers, and a ton of other tools already? I never had to commit special commands to memory, and I could always reference them faster than it takes to query any LLM.
The point I’m making is there are tons of solutions. Deterministic, fast, low-energy, customisable. Which is why I said “I have to wonder what the heck other devs were doing”. As in, have you never looked for a solution to your frustration? Hard to believe there was nothing out there before which wouldn’t have improved your Git command-line experience. Like, say, one of the myriad GUI tools which exist.
> Because it’s custom there is no standard curriculum you could point me to etc.
Not true. There are tons of resources out there not only explaining the solutions but even how different people use them and why.
If I sat with you for ten minutes and you explained me the exact difficulties you have, I doubt I couldn’t have suggested something.
- create a new email address somewhere else, preferably with your own domain
- redirect all your emails to your new account
- send an auto reply: "I don't use this email address anymore, and I may not see this email. My new address is XXX"
The third point is a lie that nudges people into updating their addressnook a lot faster. If you just silently redirect they might not even notice. But you can explain in a sentence why you are doing this.
This redirect+auto reply can be left in place forever.
The uncountable aspect of many English words is highly unintuitive to many of us.
Information. Code. Software.
Hardware.
I suspect many people don't even know they are uncountable.
I suppose for software we should just use programs or applications. But that's slightly more specific than software!
In French we can have both: le logiciel as some uncountable mass, or un/des/N logiciels if you need to count them.
Why the hell do I need to cut information into pieces to count it?
Both English and French are cursed languages, but English loses on this one.
And then there's the trousers. And now you need to say "a pair of" to talk about one unit of them. Though to be completely fair we have that for the glasses (lunettes) and the scissors as well.
> I suspect many people don't even know they are uncountable.
Well, most English speakers may not know the term, but they can feel the concept just fine.
> In French we can have both: le logiciel as some uncountable mass, or un/des/N logiciels if you need to count them.
This mostly works in English (and other European languages) as well, e.g. "Two teas/beers, please" etc. But in English this turn of phrase is much more restricted which is indeed a shame.
Now that you say it, when speaking about software code, it might not be very common to use the plural form in French too, it's indeed more like water, some uncountable mass. I don't think I would be shocked though.
There's even a paragraph saying it's good for the environment. This means Apple really cares about the environment. That's good! So I suppose I can install my community OS of choice painlessly after Apple decides to stop supporting it so it doesn't turn into e-waste that day despite being perfectly good hardware for many more years?
I also suppose parts can be easily replaced without also replacing everything including the motherboard should something stop working?
Sarcasm, obviously, but until they do these things, their environment selling point is just irritating and scandalous and they should just focus on the other selling points.
Try "aware, even vaguely, of the privacy issues standard smartphones pose".
(I would bet more than 5% have at least a vague notion of open source though, and a positive a priori - also possibly mixing it with source-available, which would be on par with some people we can read on HN)
That's not what I observe. Many non technical people have ethical concerns.
This fantasy among the technical crowd here that the general public only cares about cheap and convenient, which is at best condescending, needs to die. Convincing oneself of this only takes meeting non technical people.
Every non-technical person I’ve talked to doesn’t seem to care. In many cases I think it’s because they don’t really understand or the threat is too abstract. For example, collecting information to display ads and manipulate an algorithm to influence how a person thinks, feels, and consumes, for fun and profit.
Since they can’t see it, think they’re above it, and see stuff that makes them laugh, they just keep going. Never mind all the misinformation these same people send me or how worked up they get about various political issues they never seemed to care about before.
This is the boat a lot of people I know fall into. They will get upset about a lot of stuff, but have a massive blind spot when it comes to online and device privacy, even if I try to point it out. I’m usually trying to point it out as they are trying to convince me to join Facebook and Instagram. If I get worked up over some privacy overreach in something I’m trying to use, they just kind of shrug. A fiend of mine spent all morning ranting to me about streaming services, but isn’t cancelling any of them.
My experience is that you can't "convince" people out of Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, because the platforms themselves convince people to use them. They always emit that background radiation of "You're missing out on VERY important stuff".
It's literally brainwashing by design. My dad is convinced everybody should use Facebook to be informed or they'll be "left behind". My peers are convinced you're socially a loser if you don't have Instagram. Privacy concerns are not even an afterthought.
And this brainwashing sits on top of the dopamine/reward center related neurochemical effects of these apps, which are very mild, much milder than any typical substance addictions for most people.
It took me aboout 3 months of abstinence of Reddit and HN for it to finally click that I didn't actually need them at any capacity in my life.
The blind spot is all too obvious for those with eyes to see. I can tell which app is a person's drug of choice within ~5 minutes of meeting them. Over time, these algorithm-driven apps even (subtly) change a person's personality.
Most of the non-technical but politically-attuned people I know are the ones who are actually concerned about the Apple+Google monopoly. The technical people are the ones who don't care.
I suppose it depends on the area then. Or maybe I'm in my own bubble.
Most people I know aren't particularly technical, and many of them are at least concerned or aware of these topics, even if they haven't taken any concrete actions (yet).
Keep trying to gently spread the word then, that's a good thing to do (without being annoying!). It takes time, but it eventually pays.
I also have a lot of friends who deleted WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. over the years due to privacy concerns. I also know a few people who have dumb phones for the same reason. I have gotten a couple friends to install NetGuard firewall on their Android phones and gave them a quick tutorial how to whitelist new apps and they are very happy that they have some sort of control about what comes in/goes out of their phones. All of the above groups are very non-technical. And on the other end, 50% of my technical friends don't seem to give a shit anymore - maybe they realize it's futile to even try, since the panopticon is multi-faceted and drains a lot of energy trying to keep prying eyes away. Ignorance can be bliss?
I think that group of people is divided between those who think they're above it and don't care at all and those who do care but feel powerless to stop it and try not to think about it. Both end up looking the same on the surface
I move them from the, “doesn’t think about it” to “thinks they’re above it”, when they make claims that their algorithm isn’t like that, they can see the manipulation tactics, etc… while at the same time being fired up over some nonsense they saw in their feed or thinking AI stuff is real. It’s clearly impacting them, but their hubris prevents them from seeing or admitting it.
> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
I would say we need both a sustainable free mobile OS in the long term, and a "less worse Android" today in the meantime.
Initiatives like FairPhone paying someone to upstream device support in the mainline kernel / postmarketOS are interesting for both approaches at the same time (but extra effort would be needed, the FairPhone 5 almost working under postmarketOS [1] is kinda irritating, I hope it reaches full support before Lineage OS stops being updated for this device).
Ignoring hardware support, Linux mobile OSes are quite usable now.
Hardware support is the next step, and only then we can imagine the proprietary apps we are forced to use to work there (though Waydroid provides some answer to this as well).
Another way of helping the cause would be, I suppose, lobbying for laws that forbid the dependency on an stock Google or Apple mobile OS. Or, maybe we can dream a bit, mandatory open source releases for those apps and standard APIs.
C has had fixed size int types since C99. And you've always been able to define struct layouts with perfect precision (struct padding is well defined and deterministic, and you can always use __attribute__(packed) and bit fields for manual padding).
Endianness might kill your portability in theory. but in practice, nobody uses big endian anymore. Unless you're shipping software for an IBM mainframe, little endian is portable.
You just define the structures in terms of some e.g. uint32_le etc types for which you provide conversion functions to native endianness. On a little endian platform the conversion is a no-op.
It can be made to work (as you point out), and the core idea is great, but the implementation is terrible. You have to stop and think about struct layout rules rather than declaring your intent and having the compiler check for errors. As usual C is a giant pile of exquisitely crafted footguns.
A "sane" version of the feature would provide for marking a struct as intended for ser/des at which point you'd be required to spell out every last alignment, endianness, and bit width detail. (You'd still have to remember to mark any structs used in conjunction with mmap but C wouldn't be any fun if it was safe.)
That's the whole point of the GPL to me. The code I release is not an unconditional gift. It definitely has strings attached on purpose.
LLMs completely break this. I'm helping very rich people build the systems they impose to the world and that have awful externalities, and these systems help others build proprietary software. I can't say I'm too happy about this.
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