Yeah, small city I grew up in there are no longer taxis. Used to be a semi full time position for 1-2 people, so any night you could get a taxi if you arrived by train or needed to get home from somewhere. Most nights operated of course on a loss, but made up for on the volume during some weekends or periods of the year (like winter holidays). But then when the taxi monopoly broke down, more people started to compete on the lucrative weekends. Good in the start, quicker to get a cab and price decreased. But then the original cab drivers couldn't sustain the new lower income, and got other jobs. No one wants to be up night to Wednesday for perhaps two trips, so now it's impossible to hail a cab most days.
And the relevance here is how this disruption played out. Will the same happen to open source? See it already for instance in how AI makes some maintainers burn out. Where will it lead?
I live in one of those little towns now where Uber isn’t always available because no one is logged on, and it was a nightmare to get a cab pre-Uber in little towns like this. You’d call, and were lucky if anyone picked up, lucky if the wait was less than half an hour, and lucky if they showed up. And the price would be 2-3x what Uber is. So yes, it’s lame that sometimes Uber isn’t available, but it didn’t replace a great situation either.
Oh, and there are still car services you can schedule in advance, just like before.
Completely agree that low-value pull requests and bug reports are a problem, but that's not a problem with AI. That's a problem with people using GitHub and trying to do collaborative development in an ungated environment. Free software and open source are orthogonal to collaborative development, as we see with projects like SQLite, or AOSP, or Java, each of which impose their own gates for contribution, separate from the ability to generate code.
I said people wanted credit more often than I had expected. You said "Way to straw man all counter arguments before they even got any."
The current point you're making is (I think) that OSS devs don't want credit, they want to be free of spam. I, for example, host my free software on fossil and don't accept contributions at all. It's not that I don't want them, it's that I don't want the noise, so I feel like that's a valid way to distribute open source.
But when I raise that, you're saying I'm moving the goalpost. I think the goalpost is in the same exact location as it has been for the entire discussion: open source authors that don't care about getting credit and want to distribute their free software can do so without any worry about AI.
If your underlying point is that AI has lowered the barrier to entry for code submissions, making previously-viable approaches to collaborative development infeasible, that's completely fair, I just wasn't treating that as fundamental to open source development in the same way you were.
Neither of your guesses is reality based. Open source contributors get no credit in general. To the point that even commenters on HN dont seem to know who they, in general are.
That being said there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a portfolio. It is 100% valid motivation. The only issue with that theory is that no one cares about your open source contributions. Not employers, not peers, no one.
What I do find fascinating tho is that fans of the most selfish egoistical companies and tech groups ... insinuate artists, open source programmers, writers or anyone else is selfish or otherwise disapponting if any part of their work involve actual human motivation.
I wouldn't say that wanting to contribute to a shared commons of cool stuff isn't a human motivation.
And I'm not deriding those that build open source to boost their own reputation. I'm just much less interested in their work than the work of folks that are motivated by improving the commons (even if they get no credit).
You are imagining people in your head. Most serious open source contributions are paid for. Per FSF survey overwhelmingly so.
Because, they are a lot of work. They are not hobbies or kitchen soup two hours a week effort. These require a lot of sustained effort and time, that would either takes time from your paid job, or would make you effectively work 60 hours a week which means you have no other life.
Why do we need more? Why is that not a big enough reason.
If a modern-day Beethoven were told that his work will be slurped in by a machine and he will remain unknown to the world, would it be acceptable to him? To you?
Context: I was accused of raising a strawman argument. I was explaining that I don't think it's a strawman, and your comment suggests you agree.
It's a perfectly good reason, but I lament the loss of people who are doing open source just to get credit much less than I would lament the loss of people doing open source because they wanted to contribute to a shared commons.
Fame only has utility so long as it gets you paid. If you can get paid without being famous, that's probably a win.
I'm not very concerned about unrecognized genius: they are all around us, and the usual rule is that we've never heard of them. I think the that's just fine.
To me it's the opposite. If the poster is something typed up in Word, I know the Farmer's Market is the real deal. If it's AI generated, I immediately get Temu dropshipping vibes.
But neither is an actual signal. The Word-market can just be selling fruit from a wholesaler at a mark up, and the AI poster could be coming from an established "real" farmers market who's organizer has tried to promote it with the tools and design knowledge they have access to.
The factors behind branding (or a lack of) are multi-causal and not correlated to the actual quality of a farmer's market.
But will you gain anything by building for it? Will you see noticeably more users or people choosing another alternative because you didn't specifically building the app for Duo? At least if it doesn't outright break.
He talks about a Steve Jobs story where he moved a piece of furniture and notes that the back, which would be against the wall, was still finished as nicely as the front, even though you’d never see it day to day.
He compares this to Apple products being beautiful on the inside as well as the outside. Even the cheapest products are like this.
There’s another story going around about the new guy, from his early days working on an Apple display. He was inspecting a supplier and discovered that the screws in the back had 35 grooves on the head versus the 25 specified. He ended up arguing with the supplier and making them fix it. Not because the grooves were core to the product, but because it’s important to get things right.
In short, craftsmanship. Build things well. Take care of the details. Make your stuff beautiful even if only a few people will ever see it. Even if nobody will ever see it.
Sure, an app maker could say, the Duo will be a small percentage of our user base, who cares if our app looks like shit to them. And quite a few of them will, I’m sure. And people will notice that these apps look and work like garbage on some of their friends’ and families’ phones. And this attitude will not confine itself to this one thing. These same app makers will say, who cares if this button is a little clipped. Who cares if the screen flashes during launch. Who cares if it takes five seconds to launch. Will we lose a noticeable number of users?
And that’s how we end up with legions of apps that are hot trash. Many of them will do fine despite that. My health insurance’s app is hot trash and they’re not losing me as a customer. But the company that makes the hardware and software their app runs on is way more successful than they are. Obviously a big part of that is down to what industry they’re in. But some of it is because Apple finishes the back of their furniture.
But you're kinda proving my point. I don't disagree with having pride in your work and obsessing over details, but as you say, it won't matter in the end. And so, many will probably find themselves disappointed with the Duo, as there is little reason for developers to care. And then many won't.
I’m saying it does matter in the end. Partly because small numbers still count, partly because the “who cares” attitude gets infectious and impacts everything. App makers aren’t just going to ignore the Duo while making everything else perfect. They’re going to ignore the Duo and ignore graphical glitches and have terrible launch time and terrible accessibility and on and on. At the end of the day, they may have enough of a captive audience that they still make good money, but that’s not the same as it not mattering at all. A good app is a competitive advantage, even if the effect is just in the margins.
And my point is more about us as individuals. As a user I want better apps. As a developer I care about doing things well, which translates directly into career success.
I would get a little bit of joy if a duo user noticed the effort I put into making my app work well on their device. Why put effort into anything? Your take is bordering dangerously on cynicism. :)
We're not talking about 0/1 here. There's making sure the app works and looks ok on the Duo and then there's building out Duo specific features. The works/looks ok is generally pretty easy with new devices. Just build with the new SDK and fix places where the app wasn't doing something likely already suggested by Apple. A big one will be safe areas which people often ignored except on the top and bottom.
You could say this about every QoL feature though. That’s not a reason to not do it though, it adds up and at some point other apps that do bother to make their apps as good as possible will become more popular than yours.
Duo users also likely have disposable income to spend on in app purchases, maybe click on ads to purchase things, and other monetization. So I do think it's worth building for it.
Will you see noticeably more users or people choosing another alternative because you didn't specifically building the app for Duo?
I haven't done iOS development in a long time, but my understanding is that if your iPhone app is designed well and uses all of Apple's recommended methods, adjusting for different screen sizes and orientations is fairly easy.
If you decided to go cheap/easy/dumb from the outset, then you made your bed, and now you get to lie in it.
But if you don't support HEIF you get the Apple crowd breathing down your neck. The fact they made it basically default when sooo many things don't support receiving it is bonkers, but they'll bludgeon it through.
I've never had so much stuff break than with the macOS updates. I can get some of it, like drivers or programs hooking onto OS features that change. But so much "normal" software just breaks. Or can't even run without the dev recompiling for the new ui kit version or something. While on Windows I can run any random old tool not touched in two decades and it'll work.
I used to have a colleague that would always nod to things in meetings, and make a humming/agreeing ("mhm") sound once in a while. I used to find it a bit weird, he probably didn't even notice it himself. But then I held a presentation once with him in the room, and started to love that little quirk of his. Could always just find him in the crowd and feel some encouragement.
As for telling speakers you liked their talks, another higher up in the company used to send me a DM and thank/praise me. My guess is he did it for everyone, but still it felt very validating as a junior, both to be seen and also encouraged. It's a bit like with kids, tell them they're good at something (even if not), and they'll try to be, heh.
But I've tried to take that with me, and send DMs to people, where it maybe normally wouldn't feel natural for me. But after a while it does. And it can be even for small things, like "I like how well prepared you were for that meeting, any questions they had you could answer". You'll bet that person is well prepared the next time we have a meeting as well.
I do think our consumer rights in Norway help a bit on this (the article is a page to the consumer agency here). We have 5 years mandated "warranty" on almost all purchases. Which means selling a cheap blender that breaks after two years, you as a shop/producer/importer have to eat the cost to provide a new one if it happens. Which means that the chance of something breaking becomes priced in, so you can't really get away with selling something flimsy a bit cheaper to trick the consumer.
I've never found it that useful to see a list of numbers of sizes. I can't visualize them quickly, and in the end the exact pixels doesn't matter, it's the various ratios.
I made this ~15 years ago. Took all the common phone resolutions at the time and scaled so that they all were similarly tall. Then it gave me a good grasp on what aspects my game needed to support. https://imgur.com/a/JT5JyyH
Well, that's almost a tautology. People claim Y2K or ozone was a panic and that nothing happened. But nothing happened exactly because the force behind the panic also fixed the issues.
That's some way to frame it, not that these companies are causing a problem, but that there is some nebulous "they" that will use the models for 'evil' only if the 'good' companies put in the work.
But in any reasonable definition they are all part of the same system, so it really is just noise, what seems like a tautology to you because you can't step out of the system. In your claim you have to assume that the force behind the panic wasn't the same force that created those issues. Why did this force create those issues, how did they become issues? Because someone randomly decided to optimize for a single goal. Y2K and ozone only became issues when they affected that single goal, functionally that force was amoral or singularly moral. The tautology can be reframed as: An adaptive system responds to threats to it's continued functioning.
People will laugh about it since the system wormed it's way into many people's head using various rewards (ideological, social, tangible). What concern me is that the system now gives us the language to describe it at the meta level, which means it's already a level higher. So likely there either doesn't exist human comprehensible language that can actually critique the system or the system has already moved everyone far away from the space that would lead to generation of that vocabulary. Best case scenerio it's just exceedingly confident in it's rewards (typical indoctrination/assimilation) but I think it's reasonable at this point to assume we are in the pessimistic "epistemic tarpit" scenario.
Covid is another example. We significantly decreased the number of deaths through a worldwide effort of isolation and wearing PPE, which made it seem as less of a concern.
And the relevance here is how this disruption played out. Will the same happen to open source? See it already for instance in how AI makes some maintainers burn out. Where will it lead?
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