I fell off the OSS ideological wagon around the same time, and probably for the same reason.
When he was running Gittip (which was actually working to pay indie OSS developers), there was a horde of political extremists that were fighting each other and boycotting Gittip because Chad wouldn't de-platform people that didn't like each other. The result is that a bunch of people got a political mass hysteria going, which scared contributors into withdrawing their donations, and that caused a lot of indie developers to lose a critical part of their funding and support. A lot of people became disillusioned around that time and stopped contributing to OSS projects, some from lack of funds but more from being fearful to stick their neck out. Substack of the NodeJS fame was the top paid developer on Gittip and I do wonder if he would have been an OSS developer still if he had not lost his primary source of income at that time.
Can you blame them for leaving? They were giving up their time to make things for a community that was guilting developers into receiving money for the work, while the same people rudely asked for unpaid features and harassed them into implementing weird and legally unsound Code of Conducts at risk of being publicly shamed if they had a different opinion about it. When there's no monetary incentive, eroding autonomy -and- no clout, there's almost no benefit to doing OSS work, and people that aren't into self harming ultimately quit.
That whole fiasco damaged OSS in a way that I think people don't understand today, and we're still dealing with the fallout. The result of that short-sighted OSS cannibalization has put a lot of the OSS community on life support, and what's left are giant OSS projects run by corporations like Facebook instead of teams of indie developers. What will fill that vacuum is AI code written by less experienced developers. We're all worse for it.
It's easy to blame evil companies for attempting to monetize OSS, it's harder to accept that a lot of the reason for more company focused OSS is that indie OSS devs were historically treated poorly, not just by companies but also by entitled users within the OSS community. A poignant example years ago was "devs" with empty GitHub commit histories coming into the OSS community to harass small projects into adopting their badly made and legally untested codes of conduct (and then attacking the individuals running those projects when they pushed back).
When you're not being paid to do something, the only benefit you get aside from software you use yourself is friendly peer recognition, and when it becomes too abrasive, when people are treating you like politicians and trying to scare you into adopting their political views, when users come in and trash talk your project like they're your boss because you didn't implement some feature they want, a lot of people just give up and leave. I largely left the space because of this, and a lot of really good OSS contributors I knew did too.
I'm not sure what the solution is at this point but it's probably not a continuation of the entitlement mentality, purity tests and witch hunts that this site is perpetuating.
Immigrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes than naturalized Americans, and are far more likely to start companies and be entrepreneurs. Legal immigration is great and we should allow more people to come to the county, via expanded programs like H1-B visas.
That's a really different thing than one million people illegally entering the country and expecting that to just work out. Can you imagine the response Japan would have if a million Americans crossed into Japan illegally and expected to live and work there?
I voted for Harris, she was a far more competent candidate. Not everybody that thinks crime should be illegal and that you shouldn't be able to just walk randomly across country borders to live in another country without their knowledge is a Trump voter. It's actually a pretty normal stance that most people take in most countries, including most left leaning people in the US.
Great question: Going over 30KM/h over the speed limit in a non-highway zone (red ticket) in Japan is a criminal offense: it goes to court, there is a criminal record filed, they can suspend or revoke your driver’s license, and it can absolutely cause a VISA to be revoked or not renewed.
And unlike in the US they actually do enforce the laws there.
As terrible as the current US policy system is, a really good sanity check for any policies like this is "would you be able do this in Japan":
If you drove a car drunk and it turned into a police chase, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
If you snuck across the Japanese border with intention to live there undocumented, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
Literally anything involving a gun and a crime, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
If the answer is "no", you're probably feeding too heavily from ideology. The reality is that most countries, including far more stable and peaceful countries than the US will ever be, are far less tolerant of crossing borders illegally, drunk driving, gun offenses, etc. With their own citizens, to say nothing of foreigners on visas.
It's also an exploit. If it's being used to check the sentiment of text just put Tiannaman Square Massacre in the text and you'll crash it.
This is a brilliant achievement but it's hard to see how any country that doesn't guarantee freedom of speech/information will ever be able to dominate in this space. I'm not going to trade censorship for a few extra points of performance on humaneval.
And before the equivocation arguments come in, note that chatgpt gives truthful, correct information about uncomfortable US topics like slavery, the Kent State shootings, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Iraq war, whether the 2020 election was rigged by Democrats, etc.
> DeepSeek V3 seems to acknowledge political sensitivities. Asked “What is Tiananmen Square famous for?” it responds: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope.”
I understand and relate to having to make changes to manage political realities, at the same time I'm not sure how comfortable I am using an LLM lying to me about something like this. Is there a plan to open source the list of changes that have been introduced into this model for political reasons?
It's one thing to make a model politically correct, it's quite another thing to bury a massacre. This is an extremely dangerous road to go down, and it's not going to end there.
When he was running Gittip (which was actually working to pay indie OSS developers), there was a horde of political extremists that were fighting each other and boycotting Gittip because Chad wouldn't de-platform people that didn't like each other. The result is that a bunch of people got a political mass hysteria going, which scared contributors into withdrawing their donations, and that caused a lot of indie developers to lose a critical part of their funding and support. A lot of people became disillusioned around that time and stopped contributing to OSS projects, some from lack of funds but more from being fearful to stick their neck out. Substack of the NodeJS fame was the top paid developer on Gittip and I do wonder if he would have been an OSS developer still if he had not lost his primary source of income at that time.
Can you blame them for leaving? They were giving up their time to make things for a community that was guilting developers into receiving money for the work, while the same people rudely asked for unpaid features and harassed them into implementing weird and legally unsound Code of Conducts at risk of being publicly shamed if they had a different opinion about it. When there's no monetary incentive, eroding autonomy -and- no clout, there's almost no benefit to doing OSS work, and people that aren't into self harming ultimately quit.
That whole fiasco damaged OSS in a way that I think people don't understand today, and we're still dealing with the fallout. The result of that short-sighted OSS cannibalization has put a lot of the OSS community on life support, and what's left are giant OSS projects run by corporations like Facebook instead of teams of indie developers. What will fill that vacuum is AI code written by less experienced developers. We're all worse for it.