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Comment by barbariangrunge | Hacker News Reader

It feels weird to see so many companies sending their codebases to an ai company in exchange for feedback on their practices. People used to be more secretive about their tech years ago

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I thought of this recently as well. SaaS and the modern "cloud" services really have radically changed the game in this regard. Even as recently as 10 years ago, the idea that you would willingly exfiltrate your most precious data to some company, where they would then essentially "own" it (in the sense that your data is in their database, and you don't have direct database access to it. You can only access it through what they provide an API for), would have been really difficult to fathom. We had nearly everything "on prem."

In many ways I think the change is good. It's certainly more convenient. But the radical shift in mindset is something I deeply regret. The SaaS-ification of everything, where the user has zero control over anything (even installation of updates) has had a majorly negative impact on my life. I loathe the fact that every few days, something important to my workflow/routine is probably going to break in some way from a CI/CD deploy that contained a bug, and I'll be stuck until they patch it. And of course there are times when you are mid-something, and the app starts 500ing and you click refresh, and congratulations! You're the first user of the massive UI overhaul that you didn't want or need, so now you get to re-learn how to use the app!

As a dev I love SaaS. It's so wonderfully convenient for me! As a user, I hate it.

I think it's because we're more used to sending our codebases to Github, Vercel, and other places?

Also, it seems that for most web sites and apps, it's more about the craft and speed of execution than the code itself, so I've stopped being paranoid about this kind of stuff. I don't think deep tech engineering co's should use these things though.

Isn’t most tech just assembling API calls in a nice looking UI? Very little innovation happening at most companies.

My employer has banned Copilot (and presumably this app as well), for what it's worth. I'm guessing most large employers will end up doing the same if they're at all paranoid about their code, although by that time Copilot may offer an on-site version, or at least a version that can be deployed to an enterprise's cloud instance.

Maybe people have finally realized that code is not an asset.

Seems like a pretty naive comment, do you think the Google maps codebase isn’t an asset, for example ?

Well, I think there's value to both points - how much of the maps code would you need to be able to get something working, and how much work would it take to implement all the custom internal dependencies that would probably be missing?

I'm sure there are very complex valuable pieces of code within the maps codebase (or any other), but it would be a fairly massive task finding those pieces, extracting them, and getting them to work properly in a different codebase...

The data is way more valuable than the codebase. Being able to display a bunch of image tiles is cool, but not a mysterious unsolved problem.

Why doesn’t Google open source it then?

Open sourcing something requires extra work.

Open up their whole code base for research purposes?

It's a huge endeavour, because the company would have to convince their stakeholders that this is not harmful for the company competitive advantage. Try to convince your company executives to opensource their code. If it's easy - then share your reasoning, maybe the world will listen, but most likely not, as secrecy is generally perceived as competitive advantage.

It's not an asset for engineers. It is for companies.

The code is already sent to github and hosting provider. We just have to trust that multi billion dollar companies have more to loose by using our code. And most of the codes that people work with is not rocket science, so unless openai directly sells the code to the competitor, the potential losses is likely not big.

Given the recent EU cybersecurity directive requiring code to be audited it's not so weird. However they will partly break this model with their AI regulation directive that is in the works.

It will revert as consumer computers get more powerful and the LLMs simultaneously get more efficient to run with fewer computational resources

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