I don't really care about grammar so long as the point is communicated. Some people are trying to write in a non-native language, or just need a bit of help. Whatever tooling that helps improve communication is great, I think the content is more important than the language used to communicate it.
Also your point could be made equally well about people using spellcheck.
I'm pretty sure we often see the abstract posted as a comment for a quick summary, and I don't see it downvoted as hard. Not everyone goes through the link.
But sure, they could have just posted that instead of going through GPT. Doesn't really matter much imo.
Working alone for 12 months seems kind of rough to me. It being whatever you want to work on is nice, but I don't think I would find it as fulfilling as just finding a new job where I can actually work with a team.
I also haven't worked on open source, not really, I could imagine there being communities that would make it significantly nicer to work on.
Plenty of opensource projects are built by communities. If you want to do opensource work with peers, you can always work on llvm, rust, Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel, wayland, SQLite, postgres, docker, OpenSSL, or all sorts of other high impact, important projects that run the world.
Most of the important, high impact opensource projects are built by teams.
And if you don’t like your job - well, it’s an open secret that contributing to llvm or chrome is a great way to get hired.
Well, maybe not SQLite. The three man developer team is very hardcore about keeping all contributions public domain/CCZero, not just open source, and so they very rarely accept contributions because they pose a risk, however small, of jeopardizing that status.
Not agreeing or disagreeing with the parent, but when I’ve seen this argument in the past it’s usually meant as “they’re not using GPL so nothing stops someone from copying the code, creating something new, and then not being forced to distribute their source.”
Essentially they usually mean it’s not Open Source if at some point the source code of downstream projects could be closed source.
Doesn't this theory apply to almost anyone with the capability to dual license. Which I thought was any project that had agreement from the original authors.
Yep. Or “free software” / FOSS. The term Open source was largely popularised by Eric Raymond and the OSI. It was coined with the release of the source code of Netscape navigator and was famously - and controversially - always business friendly.
Cool, good to hear. Seems like people do make friends in the space, and there is obviously a lot of cooperation involved in getting a change into a shared codebase.
Still wondering about what the actual community aspect of it looks like, beyond individual issues. Probably the best way to find out is to contribute ;)
I don't understand this sentiment. How are there developers that need to be around people? I spent 6 years alone in my house working from home only really visiting family once a week. I met someone and she moved in now sometimes I miss living alone lol
It'd be incredible to be paid to do whatever I want for a year. I have a billion projects I want to do but don't have time for.
That's actually my experience, too. Last July I've decided to take a year to work on https://lunni.dev/, but doing it alone was fun only for the first couple months. (Well, not alone alone—I do have a chat with a couple of my friends who use it, which helps a lot, but it still sucks to do it without a cofounder.)
Now I can barely do anything at all (re: Lunni, not in general), so I've decided to focus on finding a job instead (as I have maybe 3-4 more months of personal “runway”).
Netherlands too, even in my smaller city, I know of one that has a pretty serious space thanks to some grants.
But as others said, libraries can also fulfill the same function. I went to Zwolle recently and saw that they even seem to have a regular volunteer repair cafe. Thought that was super cool
Naturally, there's an adversarial game playing out, and we accelerate it massively. If the results of our small games enter the larger playspace, we're damned, so I get your concern.
Is there some scifi solution to step outside of the game? Are the problems involved in understanding the systems involved (to the extent that you can predict realistic risk and mitigate) solvable?
I don't know the level of realistic risk for a devastating virus naturally occurring, nor the potential for us to address it without this kind of research, so I don't know what is within reason here. It would be cool to see any studies that attempt to address these two questions.
Edit: And a systematic review of past and considered lab leak scenarios probably wouldn't hurt either. If we still have to do this work, and just decide it must be done by isolated monks/robots in space, for humanity ending risks I guess that's worth discussing
> I don't know the level of realistic risk for a devastating virus naturally occurring
If we assume it is directly proportional to the number of people (more people to encounter animals, more people to incubate potential pandemics), there were roughly 450 billion people-years lived between the Black Plague and the Spanish Flu and the Spanish Flu and COVID-19.
That would put the next zoonotic spillover around 2065.
With earthquakes you at least have stress accumulating over time, even if the stress is not necessarily accumulating or being released at a constant rate.
A zoonotic spillover is pure repeated throws of the dice, no accumulated pressure.
Are most zoonotic crossovers more than one step or are most misadventures NONHUMAN => HUMAN? Either way if market activity doesn't change year on year then rate of dice rolls don't change on that front.
However there is no reason to believe that such misadventures take place in a single generation and immediately produce a viable and successful agent.
Producing something that spreads to humans but not will will none the less produce many orders of magnitude more useful and numerous dice rolls. Such actions may not be immediately obvious even if they were fatal. People after all get sick and die all the time.
I doubt we have enough data to meaningfully forecast risk.
I mean, we, a random assortment of software engineers on HN, almost certainly lack the data and expertise to forecast the risk of a pandemic.
My own self-critique above was more that, even if you could accurately deduce that there is a 1.54e-12 chance per person-year of a person encountering a novel disease that can spread as a global pandemic, you can't then schedule the next one for 450 billion people-years later, when the probability exceeds 50%, because it's a random occurrence and there's nothing stopping it from happening after ten or a trillion throws of the dice.
But I'll still stand by the logic of my original back of the envelope number; insomuch as the risk is proportional to the population, we should expect the next global pandemic twice as fast as the last one, and I think there's a good chance many of us will be alive to see it (as opposed to the gap between the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, where the survivors of the first were infants for the last and centenarians for this one).
> Is there some scifi solution to step outside of the game?
Of course there is, of course they already use it, and of course the people who think banning research is the peak of enlightenment aren't remotely interested in making this kind of distinction.
