What a clever trick to throw more money (governmental subsidies) into a sinking ship (xAI and "AI" in general). Perplexingly this maneuver will probably boost stock prices thus creating more monopoly money to burn resources with.
I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting underpaid data workers.
However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally.
Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
But could someone else create a W3C proposal that could counteract WEI? It wouldn't have to implementation-specific but rather one or more principles drawing a line in the sand that shouldn't be crossed like what WEI is built to achieve?
AI progress won't be dead in the water if it respects copyright laws. Yes, being free to just freely grab any data is infinitely easier. But having to rely on properly licensed datasets or asking users for consent should be the norm for ML development IMHO.
Also, If we had trained some A.I. on the Windows codebase and started freely using suggestions given by it I bet Microsoft would scream copyright infringement in a heartbeat.
So happy to learn of this and I wish them best of luck in their efforts. And I'm surprised to find so many people klinging to Copilot.
We shouldn't shed any tears for a megacorporation which shows such blatant disregard for the licensed works of people's labour.
Yes, AI is here to stay but we should be able to build AI that respects copyright. Yes, it's easier to just steal data and call it fair use. Whether or not that's stealing will be interesting to try in court.
However, I’m happy if this means money will be invested in innovation towards saving the planet, rather than finding new ways to burn resources with proof-of-work-based crypto.
Very much agree. Though there’s a line between implementing cryptographic algorithms yourself vs. implementing cookie based authentication.
Cryptography is something I’d leave to standard libraries. However, when it comes to authentication it might not be that hard to implement some cookie or token logic as long as the actual cryptography is handled by some well tested library.
I don't think my article shuts the door on domain specific languages even though it doesn't offer it as an answer. It could be an answer. By relying a bit less on frameworks and writing more code ourselves we have the chance to make our code fit the domain we're working with better. For now I wanted to wrestle a bit with the idea of always pulling in frameworks to do things.
> If your thing has been built so often already that much of the logic can be factored out into a framework, great - may as well use that
I agree, though that often comes with some costs and tradeoffs like I tried to outline in the article.
That's true we might not have been able to mobilize so much productivity so quickly for business without throwing frameworks at the problem. However, I think also a lot of effort might have been wasted by reinventing wheels and rewriting application many times over because some framework or language fell out of fashion and hiring for it became difficult.
Yes! It's like we've taught people to fish with the new latest in fishing equipment, but we failed to teach them some tried and true fishing principles. Haha, maybe this analogy breaks down. But yeah, I find that we focus almost too hard on keeping up with framework release notes instead of trying to see if we can distill some common patterns relevant across frameworks.
Your mention of composing dataflows reminded of this project https://nodered.org/ which I haven't tried myself but sounds a bit like what Yahoo Pipes was back in the day.
I'm also curious about how simple we can make self-hosting on bare metal hardware. These days I've been looking a bit into Gnu Guix where you can define a whole server system using lisp syntax. My current explorative sideproject is to try and setup a Gitea service with Guix on a Raspberry PI.
I think one such counter-incentive could be, "whatever tech you choose you'll have to live with the consequences by owning maintenance and future development." However, in our fast-paced industry people can switch roles and jobs so quick that they'll never have to face the consequences of their tech-choices.
You can take this JavaScript snippet and save it as a clickable bookmark (hence the name bookmarklet) in you browser. I've named this "re-open in Nitter". I deleted my Twitter account a while back but sometimes I get handed a Twitter link. This snippet let's me quickly re-open the link in Nitter which is a nag-free way to browse Twitter without having an account. :)
I’m actively working to change this as a CTO in a small digital agency. Can’t say that I’ve completely solved it but I’ve started challenging my peers when they use the words hope, belief and especially magic to describe what they’re up against. We’re professionals not hobbyists. Our codebases should get easier not harder to work with over time.
We have a sister organization which is larger and with their own CTO. I’ve tried to boil the ocean and inspire change across both companies, it was hard, for now I'm just focusing on trying to inoculate the new hires against accepting any sub-optimal bureaucracy. Though I see that need to find some way to train them to be so open and confident that they can start to challenge processes when they need to.
I have a lot of hope in the new hires though. Culture is hard to change but definitely doable. It’s all about who you hire, fire, praise and incentivize.
Thanks for the question. Well. I put my AGPLv3-licensed code on GitHub to help other developers. I didn’t do this to help GitHub / Microsoft build a closed-source tool to monopolize the (F)OSS market.
It’s interesting how incumbent companies such as Google and GitHub try to capitalize on their user data with machine learning in any way they can to maximize shareholder value.
GH and MS spend a lot of time talking about how important open source is to them. They didn’t exactly prove this by building Copilot to be so oblivious about licensing. Either they took a gamble and hope they’d get away with it or it didn’t occur to them that this would be a problem at all. Either way, I’ve lost faith in GH's ability to act in the best interest of its users and the larger open source community.
It’s a free market and I hope to see more competition in this space: Both from GitHub-alternatives that respect code-licenses and from self-hosting alternatives.
I used to admire GitHub for being a fully bootstrapped company and free to pursue a path in the world they believed in as a company.
Since the Microsoft acquisition it’s becoming painfully obvious how unhealthily centralized the dev world has become, and they seem to strive to become ever more entrenched in the name of maximizing shareholder value.
I only have a small amount of open source projects on GH but I intend to vote with my feet and abandon the platform by self-hosting Gitea. By itself it won’t be a big splash but I’m inspired by posts such as this and I hope to inspire someone else in turn. Of all people we devs should be able to find good ways to decentralize.