keep debtors and investors from ripping apart a company and then transferring the debt to the ones running it

So instead we get “vulture capitalism” as an entire ecosystem of companies, doing this but with more diffuse consequences, by spreading out the bag holders far and wide (but always among the powerless). Fits like a glove with the general “privatize profits, socialize losses” strategy of wealth extraction we like so much.

Corporate person-hood is a stain on humanity and the world. We should never have shifted culpability and direct experience of negative consequences away from human beings, ever.

Made me think of a Far Side comic lol

Uvalde showed us all what cops are. Nothing else needs to be learned or said about police, that disgusting event told us every single thing worth knowing.

The very hardest part of designing software, and especially designing abstractions that aim to streamline use of other tools, is deciding exactly where you draw the line(s) between intended flexibility (user should be able and find it easy to do what they want), and opinionated “do it my way here, and I’ll constrain options for doing otherwise”.

You have very clear and thoughtful lines drawn here, about where the flexibility starts and ends, and where the opinionated “this is the point of the package/approach, so do it this way” parts are, too.

Sincerely that’s a big compliment and something I see as a strong signal about your software design instincts. Well done! (I haven’t played with it yet, to be clear, lol)

This sounds really interesting, I’m looking forward to reading the comments here in detail and looking at the project, might even end up incorporating it into my own!

I’m working on something that addresses the same problem in a different way, the problem of constraining or delineating the specifically non-deterministic behavior one wants to involve in a complex workflow. Your approach is interesting and has a lot of conceptual overlap with mine, regarding things like strictly defining compliance criteria and rejecting noncompliant outputs, and chaining discrete steps into a packaged kind of “super step” that integrates non-deterministic substeps into a somewhat more deterministic output, etc.

How involved was it to build it to comply with the OpenAI API format? I haven’t looked into that myself but may.

Woof, after reading your “contributions” here, are you this fucking insufferable IRL or do you keep it behind a keyboard?

Goddamn. I’m assuming you work in tech in some capacity? Shout-out to anyone unlucky enough to white-knuckle through a workday with you, avoiding an HR incident would be a legitimate challenge, holy fuck.

I was in a fight with some coked up racists in my youth (we were prolly gonna lose that one, lmao) and that precise sound legitimately stopped the fight. Don’t get the wrong idea, we dipped too, it wasn’t “for” us lol

Top left just looks like actual Jigsaw to me.

Thank you, interesting read.

Paywalled.

If you’ve never seen anything dangerous or overly bad in a “normal” public restroom, first off, that’s amazing. Congratulations, truly.

But beyond that - with that statement alone, you just told everyone who can read that you have absolutely no fucking idea about even a single relevant detail for this topic you have opinions about. Remarkable, just sincerely a breathtaking degree of self-admitted cluelessness.

I have some important messages for your cousins, can you put me in touch?

Damn 😳

Literally everything is so annoyingly nuanced, couldn’t agree more lol. Cheers!

(Edit: well. Certainly not everything.)

Okay, I see what you mean. I’m usually pretty sensitive to things that smell like exploitation for financial gain, and it didn’t trigger that response for me.

But after hearing some of the less hostile takes here (like yours) I think I have to acknowledge it’s me, there may be some bias I’m unaware of going into my reading on this one.

Thanks for elaborating.

What a great reply, I think I sincerely understand your POV now, as well as the similar ones from others.

Thanks!

I don’t think you can compare high quality mature OSS projects to busking. I love buskers and busking, I’m old school punk. But the analogy to busking in the software world would be just random devs’ small personal projects.

The better analogy for a big mature project and the phenomena the author is describing:

• team of people create a large scale professional grade musical performance and allow attendance for free
• til now, enough people come to the free show that spend money in other ways to sustain the whole thing
• now, gigantic companies stole everything in the show, put it into their giant entertainment library, giving nothing back, and there are no longer enough attendees to support the free show

I can see disagreeing with what to do about the problem, but it’s bizarre to me to see the “fuck AI in every way” place turn around and attack this guy.

Would you say more? Are you saying he hasn’t contributed the open source stuff he claims? Or that someone else wrote this for him? Something else?

That seems like an extremely uncharitable read (to be clear, I don’t know him either).

But he’s not just a “contributor”, I think we need a word that better describes people like him. It sounds like he’s shaped his career and the software he’s written, thoughtfully in the direction of open source.

He’s saying the previously established way of having a career and OSS projects has been broken by the introduction of AI agents.

How are you getting “shareholder”??

Exactly right.

As such, any bleating about markets being driven by “consumer choice” is either hopelessly out of date / embarrassingly naive - or malicious.

Just as consumer sales are a rounding error, so is consumer choice - it’s a direct relationship.

This extends a lot farther than the AI bubble, we have allowed corporations to merge and monopolize, and “investors” to gamble on it all, to where they completely invert the relationship.

They shape our experience by constraining choice, dictating only options with profit margins and heinous licensing terms that work exclusively and overwhelmingly in their favor.