79 karma · joined July 7, 2025
There are itches too big for a single player to scratch. There are things that only a broad alliance of interests can properly build. Bridge these alignments and independence will cross with intent.
The first of these alignments and the one that enables all others is more and better bridges. Build legitimate authority that can employ pooled resources and capabilities towards important objectives that are not rightly the domain of any one of who comprises the alliance.
These are information communication technology problems. Open source is a development model that is critical to delivering the solutions.
https://discord.gg/gxptWX6aCR https://github.com/positron-solutions/MuTate https://bsky.app/profile/positron26.bsky.social
Ping us on GitHub to get in touch.
Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.
The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.
That last few years of being under 18 can feel completely immoral. "Study hard. Learn skills you will need in life." Meanwhile GPA inflation from unconcerned minders of public institutions will put food on their own table, so accessing anything that will actually move your life ahead will generally require money or ingenuity.
Piracy isn't my religion, but I find it a critical relief valve protecting individual self-determination, especially for young people. Over-centralization of capability into hosted services creates a wall for a problem that needed more relief valves.
Both the "user configuration" and the library are configuration masquerading as code. One is dynamically evaluated, the other compiled.
I just figure users of Zed know this... so what are we pretending to talk about?
But I can't wait for the moral panic driving us to all pussy-foot around LLMs to die with prejudice.
Virgins often at some point in their lives assume that not having sex means they have achieved some higher level of self-control, a privileged position upon a high precipice from which they can judge others. They gather, stew, and throw stones at individuals who are going to and fro, living their lives.
Any and every gathering can mob individuals. It is not inherently moral to find yourself in a troupe. You have not reached "consensus" except within a single Discord room, a subreddit, some cesspool of comments on HN. No amount of back-slapping idiocy and corrupt self-evaluation will make any mob any more than just that.
I often say that the difference between an engineer and a mechanic is that the engineer can make a rocket fly the first time (given enough time). Still, good engineers know that time is a trade-off, that exposing errors and motivating problems sooner is very, very worth it. They contain failures. They pull errors forward in time.
But along come those most enabled by LLMs, the idiotic brigades of co-enablers who know only the high quality software made by others. They are experts in what they must be provided in order to open their wallets, and they bring this expertise into the arena of those sharing ideas. Ideas are rough, and idiots are not fond of them.
Lo the brigades demand the engineer never to show them anything that is not perfect. The brigades complain endlessly of laziness while giving no effort themselves. The brigades expect engineers with twenty years of experience make the inefficient time tradeoff of coding everything by hand even before having any idea if what they're building will be wanted by the world.
The brigades want the perfect software, but not the ugly, filthy process from which it is forged. They want it to impress them the first time they see it. They want it to be easy, low-price, available at the push of a button. They want it yesterday and without bugs. Add "Don't use LLMs!" to the list of unreasonable and ignorant demands.
The brigades hate a world where you can't trust a project from its heft and good looking README alone. They hate that what they have never had any interest in reading at all can now no longer be blindly trusted. They hate these LLMs. They hate them, HATE THEM!!! They hate the laziness, the long-winded replies, the hallucinations...
At the culmination of their frustrations, the brigades turn to the engineer with precise instruction: "Give me only the answer. Make no mistakes." We owe these lazy shits nothing.
HN is exaggerating to feel close to the action. It's childish.
There is a trench off of Tokyo that is likely to rupture in our lifetimes, and people who have other people to check on don't care about HN's disaster fantasies.
7 is not really top news of the day.
People with friends and family exposed don't really appreciate being false-alarmed with 7s and 6s.
The reason barking at open source will only get the dog thrown into the river is because there is a whole lot more cumulative power distributed among companies and consumers who don't want two incumbents to dictate which kinds of alternatives can exist.
Note that those rushing to the "all corpos evil" talking points will turn around and advocate delegating these decisions to "the government." This is the same government that they also claim is bought by the corporations. It's also the same government that will enforce the regulatory capture on behalf of the yucky corporation against the broad, diverse interests.
Thinking big vs small while embracing the biggest of the big is some kind of inconsistency that people need to deal with by looking in the mirror and finding some awareness. Nuance. If your problem model is wrong, so is every solution you propose except if your wrong model may get lucky from time to time. Not every broken model is a broken clock. Some broken models cannot admit the right answer ever.
The real dynamic on display here is broad, correlated mass of overlapping interests, big and small. The big pile of people and entities that don't want to be governed by OpenAI and Anthropic can push harder and win the tug of war. You don't have to like your temporary allies all the time, but at least know who they are and when you are aligned.
I think Mozilla is chasing a past formula, but the projection isn't linear enough to remain consistent, and the critical parts of the outcome, utter centralization of the market dominance of the three C's, are left out of the equation.
We might get the consolation prize, a few nerds having competitive alternatives to applaud, but we will be left with the hidden costs: stagnation by bloated market leaders, consumers and businesses pouring trillions of dollars into the commercial offerings while open development wonders where money comes from, and the leakage of these imbalances into political and social spheres.
If we follow a Mozilla template and get to the peak of Mozilla's success at the web, look at what that really is. Facebook, Amazon, Google etc are orthogonal to that equation.
Outside pressure behind much of it.
In any case, there's a fundamental mismatch between pressure groups and the leverage they can exert through single-consensus. I don't know how to describe the other consensus that is on my brain, but it is distinct.
> Then GPL fans can
Checks out
I tire so much of complainers who want someone else to make all their tools infallible yet want to do nothing. Let's just full-stop there. They not only want to avoid working on the tools. They prefer if the tool does everything for them, and they prefer having things done for them without bound.
Complainers want easy APIs. When the API isn't easy enough, they want easy Kubernetes containers "programmed" by YAML. When that isn't easy enough, it's all point-and-click hosted services on GCP and Amazon. You people don't want to program. You want apps. Infallable apps. You want to be consumers, fed from the sky like little birds who endeavor only never to fledge, never to fly. And you want to pay nothing for it.
The secret you people need to figure out is that the lifestyle you think is sustainable is actually a commensal relationship with people building things for you. There is no vast alliance to wrest power from corporations, to dissolve capitalism, no grass roots movement to "shake things up." There is food falling from higher in the water column from an ecosystem filled with people who do things. Those above do not have time to look down, but if they did, all they would feel is overwhelming contempt, so they only look across at the horizon.
But why do people seek to confirm comments like this? Because Rust scary. Churn on, little ant mill. Let be free any who understand the pointlessness of this performance.
After all that, people can talk about averaging methods, but there's a lot to be done before what this blog is talking about is even available.
The reason solving just-in-time rendering is important is because queue priority is not actually supported by most drivers. Some extensions can give us global priority for the process, not real priority for queues. The right way then to avoid workload A from causing workload B to miss a latch is to put workload A into the idle time that would exist from running B just in time. This is itself a luxury based on the fact that workload B is lightweight enough that its own uncertainty can only rarely exceed the latch deadline.
At least on VRR displays, making B a bit late has much less dire consequences, but driving refresh from the application needs exclusive access to the display, and not all compositors want to provide this.
Please do reach out if it seems like I'm only still catching up. I'm sure someone knows a decent way to get sub-millisecond just-in-time rendering accuracy without watching the phase suddenly double on FRR. Ping https://github.com/positron-solutions/mutate and we can get in touch.
The worst part about all reactionary scares is that, because the behaviors are driven by emotion and feeling as opposed to any intentional course of action, the outcomes are usually counter productive. The current AI scare is exactly what you would want if you are OpenAI. Convince OSS, not to mention "free" software people, to run around dooming and ant milling each other about "AI bad" and pretty soon OSS is a poisonous minefield for any actual open AI, so OSS as a whole just sabotages itself and is mostly out of the fight.
I'm currently in the middle of trying to blow straight past this gatekeepy outer layer of the online discourse. What is a bit frustrating is knowing that while the seed will find the niches and begin spreading through invisible channels, in the visible channels, there's going to be all kinds of knee-jerk pushback from these anti-AI hardliners who can't distinguish between local AI and paying Anthropic for a license to use a computer. Worse, they don't care. The social psychosis of being empowered against some "others" is more important. Either that or they are bots.
And all of this is on top of what I've been saying for over a year. VRAM efficiency will kill the datacenter overspend. Local, online training will make it so that skilled users get better models over time, on their own data. Consultative AI is the future.
I have to remind myself that this entire misstep is a result of a broken information space, late-stage traditional social, filled with people (and "people") who have been programmed for years on performative clap-backs and middling ideas.
So fortunate to have some life before internet perspective to lean back on. My instinct and old-world common sense can see a way out, but it is nonetheless frustrating to watch the online discourse essentially blinding itself while doubling down on all this hand wringing to no end, accomplishing nothing more than burning a few witches and salting their own lands. You couldn't want it any better if you were busy entrenching.
The reason I'm not on X is because I just won't use a platform owned by someone who thinks Nazi salutes are just free expression (of desire to censor political opposition into utter powerlessness before purging them), so I'm not complaining about the Blue in Bluesky.
Nonetheless what it's abundantly clear that whatever audience I need to connect with, I cannot effectively do it on BlueSky. They need desperate overhaul to fix the self-selection bias that is likely making the platform appealing to only a very certain kind of ant.
That HN was a neat community fifteen years ago, but like all things cool made by early adopters, it will eventually attract a following hoping to be somewhere, to exist among people doing things, but the tragedy of such followings is that they bring with them their toxicity, their immunity to their own poison, and drown out what they depend on until the early adopters early adopt away.
The real slop is all this lazy concern farming from an ant mill that is powerless to do anything except validate its own hand wringing.
Calling what out? Did we suddenly invent a durable Turing test that will last more than six months? (We didn't, but some people "just know")
The only durable metric is if the article is good, if the ideas are good. Everything else is complaining about Bob Dylan's electric guitar.
It's all still supporting the accuracy of my statement, that CatB was more about the FSF than anything.
Do you have some grievances for me or was damning ESR supposed to make me self-destruct?
Stating facts is nice, but the conclusion you're trying to get to is just a tangent about ESR. In 1988. How do you relate this to arguments I made?
> later criticised when it was other people's work
Seems like first-hand learning and applying those lessons to more relatable projects, such as those after 1988? Are we still a society that rewards learning or must all mistakes be worn permanently and shamefully so that the malcontents can endlessly self-validate in their misery?
The authz language is pretty funny. Free speech has always been self-inconsistent. If I may use my free speech to organize a fascist takeover of society, is free speech without limit not potentially a tool of its own destruction? If one is, as ESR is, so concerned with free speech, would there not then be a need for authz? If you argue that controls on free speech are a hypocrisy, isn't that also what a fascist would argue while angling to eliminate barriers to the use of free speech so that they can use it to end free speech?
The license is fun. I'm sure I have equally amusing writings stashed away somewhere. Amid this evidence of early tension, stewing, and ideological turmoil, I do sense within ESR a dissatisfaction with the FSF. Would this not foreshadow that CatB was later aimed at the FSF and that ESR was motivated for a long time and therefore, while he ultimately presented a different message informed by many other developments and a long time to think and refine, all along grappling with an irritation at something deep within the FSF that he could not reconcile with?
Doesn't this continue to argue in a very straight line that CatB was all about the FSF and that the cathedral development model's similarities to corporate waterfall were just incidental?
The criterion is the development process, not the complexity. Linux is complex, but not a Cathedral.
I don't want to split hair with your words more. For context, FSF hard liners since the dawn of the OSI were distorting the meaning of CatB to deflect criticism from themselves. FSF supporters also very successfully promoted "FLOSS" instead of bare _OSS, giving lots of later-comers the illusion that "free/libre" was an expansion pack for OSS when OSS came later, a very intentional evolution of the dogmatic "free" software movement.
The choice of "Cathedral" is an extremely obvious symbol when you consider the Protestant reformation as a defiance of Vatican, an overly central system where decisions can only flow from the top. There are a lot of metaphors ESR could have chosen from, but the "cathedral" rhymed with the undertones of the real tension between the many OSS practitioners who have divers motivations and the FSF's plan to slap GNU stickers on every piece of software on Earth while blessing their own cardinals at the FSF Vatican and excommunicating any dissent. Given that kind of very overt signalling, it's just not defensible to argue any other primary target than the FSF and the overly central development process they were dependent on to maintain control over projects.