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.
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
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.
Nonetheless, ancient rock art is precious, because it may convey a not-so-detailed message that would nonetheless be amazing to understand, if someday we can.
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
the math community needs to adopt a version of the ethical standards of experimental science. If you are using AI agents, you can't just give a proof (formalized or not), but need to also provide a detailed explanation of how these agents were used to get the result.
Open source training data 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.
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.
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.
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.
What you would want to do is have a detailed highdimensional readout of okay your your gallbladder and your liver and your kidney and your heart and changes all over your body and look at that and ask is there is there some kind of association between specific emotion states and changes some kind of complex change in your body and I would bet that there is but we just don't have those data yet
And so basically everything that we can verify reasonably well with some feedback loop, the AIS are doing pretty well on. And that's sufficient to make AR and D go quite fast and to continue. But there's some parts of of developing uh aligned and safe AIs that are more subtle, hard to check, depend on, you know, detailed in the weeds things.
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.
Um, and to give you an example of a a a use of a coding agent that works extremely well is you can ask today's models to translate software from one computer language to another very effectively because in that case you actually have a incredibly detailed specification.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Over the past three decades, scholars have identified a massive, unexplained gap in the timeline between the first domestication of crops and the emergence of the first agrarian states, complicating the narrative popularized by authors like Harari and Diamond.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't calculate every photon in the scene. You need really detailed approximations, and that's the field of computer graphics. It's about increasingly effective approximations of the laws of physics, which are just totally intractable.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Josh Hardman at Psychedelic Alpha provided a detailed live account of the advisory committee meeting, which I found very helpful in developing a more granular sense of how the meeting unfolded without having to watch it myself.
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.
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.
And I’ve said for a long time that you think of a quadrant of slow timelines for the start of AGI, long timelines, and then a short takeoff or a fast takeoff. I think short timeline, slow takeoff is the safest quadrant and the one I’d most like us to be in. But I do want to make sure we get that slow takeoff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.