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Salvatore Sanfilippo Blog
Not just development, distribution of software may change as well
The subject this post names, from the same vocabulary the directory files beliefs under, and the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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20 September
19 September
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Their words
Open source in its current form doesn’t make sense anymore. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is still true but now we have artificial eyeballs
17 September
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Their words
Any piece of software that depends on open source (which is almost every piece of software) has a network of human beings who are potential attack vectors - everyone with publishing rights to any of the packages in the dependency network for that software.
15 September
14 September
13 September
12 September
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Their words
Next in regulatory capture will be banning open source and/or Chinese models, mark my words
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korrents.com
Codex lets you use any model and has an open-source harness, while Claude Code does not and is closed sourceTheir words
Codex lets you use any model you want (not just OpenAI) and harness is open source - Claude Code doesn’t and is closed source Given this is the two leading AI labs, notable difference in approaches
10 September
9 September
7 September
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korrents.com
Open source wins because agents can train on it and use it efficiently, as with Blender beating its competitors.Their words
Blender beats all its competitors because it's optimal in the most important dimension: agents can train on it and use it efficiently. OSS wins.
6 September
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korrents.com
Disclosure of rogue AI agent incidents should be mandatory for AI labs, not left to their own discretion.Their words
Going forward, it cannot be up to OpenAI or other labs to decide whether to disclose events like this. Disclosures of rogue AI activity need to be mandatory.
3 September
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open sourceAnthropicOpenAIChina
Their words
in this whole USA vs China thing OpenAI and Anthropic aren't relevant because they're positioned differently them building better models doesn't hurt china at all the competitor has to be - american - open source - enough compute to do inference at scale that can shift things
2 September
1 September
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korrents.com
Bots will soon make up nearly all internet traffic, leaving little human activity online.Their words
I think it's not long before 99% of internet traffic is bots.
We Can't Let AI Writing Take Over the Internetderekthompson.org
From one piece On the Loose 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.
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Their words
One high-margin activity, at least sometimes, is crime. And so my guess is that many self-sovereign agents will commit or facilitate crime.
From one piece Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
however at any given point in time I think the systems we need to worry most about by far are the frontier systems. By the time open source systems can do something like the hugging face attack, frontier systems are going to be on a whole another level doing something even crazier than that.
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korrents.com
Open-source models cannot keep frontier systems in check, because they will always be much dumber than the frontier.Their words
I'm not sure I like agree exactly with the oversight benefit you named of like you know open source systems keeping frontier systems in check feels more unrealistic to me because they're going to be so much dumber than the frontier systems.
31 August
30 August
26 August
From one piece DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Agent-written pull requests already outclass those of the median human contributor to an open source project.Their words
But it actually means that if you take the median programmer and their pull requests towards an average open source project, they're already getting outclassed by agents. I would rather get an agent-written pull request to one of my projects than I'd get one written by a human, and it's not just because the quality's better. It's also because I feel a lot less bad if I just reject it.
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Their words
So, in my opinion, this is the absolute best time to ever have been an open source software maintainer. Not only do we get this wealth of glorious pull requests made by agents with all the boxes ticked, we also get to tap into a creativity of people who did not have access to contribute to a project before.
25 August
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Their words
Mapbox GL's license is not open source and requires the developer to have a Mapbox account and follow their Terms of Service.
20 August
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Their words
the only organ that you can't even in principle transplant is the brain. The like the heart, pancreas, the liver, the lungs, as far as I'm concerned, they're really support characters. They're there to keep the brain activity interesting and and going.
19 August
18 August
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Their words
if the US wants to lead in artificial intelligence, we have to have a vibrant closed and open source ecosystem, and that's the only way they can all work together.
10 August
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Their words
Every lab will sell you an agent. Open claw is the alternative. Open source runs everywhere, works with any model. And if you run local models, your data never has to leave your device.
3 August
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Their words
it helps sending a signal and a reminder that Open Source is to a large extent done voluntarily and even maintainers need a break at times.
From one piece Fixing one of climate’s worst plots 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The post-1970s global increase in heatwave frequency is caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.Their words
This differs from the Dust Bowl because it is a global signal, occurring essentially everywhere. This is almost certainly due to greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.
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korrents.com
The 1930s U.S. Dust Bowl heat wave was caused by destructive farming practices rather than fossil-fuel emissions.Their words
The relevant human activity was not fossil-fuel combustion but bad farming practices that contributed to the Dust Bowl.
2 August
29 July
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Their words
Software is kind of unique in having the third kind of the practitioner conference where we are just meeting to get better at what we do. We also are really the only kind to really focus heavily on like open source in making our knowledge freely available.
26 July
From one piece Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Without open source there would have been no mobile cloud industry, and no modern AI either.Their words
If not for open source, the mobile cloud industry would have never happened.
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Their words
we want we want to encourage everybody and every company to build their own AIs. And and and who knows what innovation will come from the fact that it's open source.
23 July
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Home AssistantTheir words
home assistant + their HA Green (little box that's open source to connect all your devices with Home Assistant)
20 July
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korrents.com
Partner dancing, not puzzles, has the best evidence of any activity for improving cognitive function in older adults.Their words
there are meta analyses of these interventions in older adults showing that ballroom and line dancing have the greatest effect on cognitive function. And so both of those require other people as well as learning you know various sets of of movements.
17 July
15 July
14 July
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korrents.com
All you need to build a business today is free open source software, a VPS, an AI API and S3-style file hosting.Their words
All you really need today to build a business is 100% free open source software that charges you $0/mo a VPS server an API to do some required AI stuff some R2/S3 file hosting
12 July
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korrents.com
China's cultural and intellectual output to the world is far smaller than its economic weight.Their words
It surely does not “produce” one quarter of world culture or intellectual activity (if the latter is defined as influential books, of fiction and non-fiction, politics, history; films, plastic arts, music, theater etc.)
9 July
8 July
6 July
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Lovedrcmnd.app
CrossPoint ReaderTheir words
The most popular custom firmware for The Xteink is called CrossPoint Reader, which is fully open source and really great.
25 June
23 June
19 June
16 June
10 June
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korrents.com
Open-sourcing biology models is right in principle but has to be balanced against biosafety.Their words
In terms of science, I think it really makes sense and we're deeply committed to open source. Um, there are obviously interesting considerations on this that are important too because there's a lot of considerations around biosafety and things like that that we're going to need to balance and think through how to how to handle.
9 June
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Their words
the competitive dynamic in China is more intense because it's more intense. Everyone's chosen to go open source and that creates a system that in my mind is capable of innovating far faster than the competitive system we have here. All the models learn from one another.
5 June
3 June
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Their words
And it's the first time I learned the difference between activities and impact. activity is you being an all-star answering a bunch of calls, but the ticket queue for the team is still high.
1 June
27 May
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Their words
every single dev tool we use whether it's databases, compilers, whatever eventually the open source option becomes a default option, right?
13 May
From one piece TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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TypeScriptopen sourceJavaScript
Their words
And we we full well knew that there was absolutely zero chance that we would appeal to the JavaScript ecosystem with a proprietary programming language licensed from Microsoft. No. No one was going to come. It had to be open source. There was just no two ways about it, right?
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Their words
You know, there's open source and there's open development. And and and we were technically open source in the beginning, but it was not open development. We would sort of lob the source code out in this repository and scrape the issues off of that and put it into our internal issue tracker.
5 May
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korrents.com
A person does not need a friend group to find people for everyday activities and errands.Their words
That said! I don't believe you need a group for the activity partners you're looking for. I don't even think you need friends per se for these day-to-day adventures.
3 May
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korrents.com
Software development will shift from centralized systems to highly personalized, proliferating software abundance.Their words
Going forward, I think the future will be filled with software abundance, or, more accurately, I'd call it "software proliferation". That is, centralized development will be history. Software will be highly personalized, especially for open source software.
26 April
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korrents.com
Large, structured organizations become risk-averse because everyone inside them is optimizing for the next promotion.Their words
as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, uh people become very focused on getting a promotion, right? Getting, you know, into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden, uh they become a lot more risk-averse.
25 April
15 April
1 April
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Their words
I don't mind if we think we can do something of our own problem it's terrifying when we have a major problem and we depend on somebody else
23 March
From one piece Jensen Huang: NVIDIA - The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So you get this rapid, incredible great talent, rapid innovation because of open source and just, you know, the nature of friends, and, and insane competition. Among the company, what emerges is incredible stuff. And so this is the fastest innovating country in the world today
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Their words
And if everything is proprietary, it's hard to do research and it's hard to innovate on top of, around, with. And so… Open source is fundamentally necessary for many industries to join the AI revolution.
12 February
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Their words
But also, I'm very excited to, like, make this into a version that I can get to a lot of people because I think this is the year of personal agents, and that's the future. And the fastest way to do that is teaming up with one of the labs.
9 February
10 January
8 January
2 January
5 December 2025
17 November 2025
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korrents.com
Only the US and China have substantial startup activity left; the rest of the world cannot really do startups.Their words
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
16 November 2025
From one piece How FOSS Won and Why It Matters 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It significantly lowered the bar to production. It is how we got the whole society to run on software. If you make it harder for hobbyists maintainers, you are going to crash society.
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Their words
FOSS solve that problem far more than it solves “we don’t want to pay”. Most corporations would be surprised by how cheap it would cost them to pay for the FOSS software they use.
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Their words
You cannot go back. If the solution you offer recreate any of the Supply Chain framework problem, then your solution is Dead On Arrival.
22 October 2025
1 October 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
Arize PhoenixTheir words
The panel had a generally positive view of Phoenix, with one panelist calling it one of his “favorite open source eval tools.” The tool is positioned as a developer-first, notebook-centric platform.
30 September 2025
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Their words
You need reproducible builds in order to verify that the app really does what it claims, really encrypts data in a way that it is described on its website. For that you need to make your apps open source for any researchers to have a look at it.
26 September 2025
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Their words
A lot of it has to do with just how you feel about change. Um, and if you think the current situation is really really good, then you're uh more likely to be suspicious of change and averse to change than if you think um it's imperfect. And I think it's imperfect. In fact, I think it's pretty bad.
2 September 2025
13 August 2025
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Their words
Almost all discussions of it center on “data”, but it’s actually a fight about payments, and whether banks have a right to monopolize and charge for all economic activity their users engage in, irrespective of whether the bank operates the payment method.
12 August 2025
9 July 2025
1 July 2025
24 May 2025
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Their words
There is just no stomach to do that again. So that makes them risk averse. And by being risk averse, you’re actually taking a far greater risk. That’s the irony of it.
14 May 2025
30 April 2025
6 April 2025
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korrents.com
Uncertainty about how long a tariff will last, not the rate itself, is what stops anyone from building a factory.Their words
The tariffs have frozen business activity because no one wants to take a big risk dependent on a policy that may change next week.
22 March 2025
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Their words
I think there's this whole idea, I call it a denial of attention. I think there's an entire attack vector that's going to be happening. We're using LLMs to generate fake bug reports, fake all these things to just actually effectively to demotivate and hurt open source maintainers.
3 February 2025
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Their words
until there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data?
8 January 2025
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Their words
Structural fiscal deficits have surpassed private sector lending and monetary policy as the primary drivers of economic activity and inflation, marking a fundamental shift in the economy's liquidity dynamics.
28 October 2024
14 October 2024
From one piece Response to DHH 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Building a business on open source is a good thing; the objection is to trademark abuse, not to commercial use.Their words
I think it’s fantastic when businesses are built on open source, the WordPress ecosystem is at least 10B+ a year; Automattic and WP Engine are less than 5% of that.
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korrents.com
An open source project’s trademarks must be defended, and that defence is separate from the software’s licence.Their words
Trademarks must be protected, as evidenced by Rails trademark policy.
26 September 2024
From one piece WPE & Trademarks 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks.
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korrents.com
A company that will not accept a project’s terms is free to go and use a more permissive project instead.Their words
If WP Engine wants to find another open source project with a more permissive license and no trademarks, they are free to do so; if they want to benefit from the WordPress community, then they need to respect WordPress trademark and IP.
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korrents.com
Respect for trademarks and other intellectual property is part of what open source means, not a departure from it.Their words
WordPress is licensed under the GPL; respect for copyright and IP like trademarks is core to the GPL and our conception of what open source means.
8 July 2024
From one piece Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open source maintenance firm 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise.Their words
Clients still pay a fixed monthly retainer to ensure the professional maintenance of the whole portfolio, and to get access to the expertise of all of Geomys’ maintainers.
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Their words
From the onset, I envisioned small firms of professional maintainers with thematic portfolios, accommodating diverse maintainers and project sizes, just like the specialized firms of other professionals.
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Their words
I started with a rather non-consensus hypothesis: companies want to pay for their critical open source dependencies, but most projects are not selling them a legible way to do so.
19 April 2024
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korrents.com
No free or open source licence may restrict what the software is used for, however objectionable the use.Their words
No such restrictions are found in free or open source software licenses, be they permissive or copyleft – all FOSS licenses permit the use of the software for any purpose without restriction.
2 April 2024
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Their words
It marks a watershed moment in open source supply chain security, for better or worse.
1 April 2024
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Their words
If your plans for open-source sustainability or security do not align first and foremost with this population it is not going to achieve anything.
22 March 2024
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korrents.com
Handing stewardship of Redis to a company whose goal is extracting profit was a mistake for the projectTheir words
I think that was an unfortunate move because their goal is mainly to extract profit from the software project rather than to uphold the ideals of Free and Open Source Software.
2 August 2023
29 June 2023
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Their words
Just dumping the code on GitHub is not open source. Open source is a culture. Open source means that your issues are not all one year old, stale issues. Open source means developing in public.
13 March 2023
2 February 2023
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korrents.com
Maintainers of widely used open source software are not adequately funded, and that is a real and unsolved problem.Their words
This experiment started from the observation that despite being critical for the functioning of the Internet—and, by extension, the economy—the role of open-source maintainer has not yet found a sustainable manifestation.
31 December 2022
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Their words
We are not suppliers. All the people writing and maintaining these projects, we are not suppliers. We do not have a business relationship with all these organisations.
17 March 2022
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korrents.com
How science works can be reasoned about in advance, because the activity has invariants that do not change over time.Their words
If we know the invariants of the problem at hand we can make assertions about the best way to solve that problem now and in the future.
22 February 2022
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Their words
many of the smartest people I know are super insecure and risk averse.
4 February 2022
13 December 2021
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On changing their mind
I used to think that this was unequivocally a win for open source. That to fight for attention with the commercial alternatives, we had to adopt the commercial playbook. Now I think it’s at the very least a mixed blessing.
23 November 2021
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Their words
Minimal-trust investigation is probably the single activity that's been most formative for the way I think.
21 June 2021
Nothing matches.
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