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samj

44 karma · joined April 2, 2008

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/samj; my proof: https://keybase.io/samj/sigs/d4pi-zV2EFKhUJ1KuWgP9kAHAhh4o-s-JQkoKOUHXAI ]
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samj··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026)
Pagelove | https://pagelove.com | Founding Software Engineer | REMOTE | Full-time | $110k–$130k + early equity

Pagelove collapses the modern web stack into its simplest form: no databases, no APIs, no application servers. Just HTML that works like an app, scales like a CDN, and is AI-native by design.

The page becomes the application, API and persisted state. Humans and machines can read and update the same surface directly using CSS selectors over HTTP, rather than through separate HTML and API/MCP interfaces. With Pagelove, AI can finally build web applications without having to deal with the complexity of the full stack.

We’re seed-stage and well-funded, hiring our first non-founder engineer. The codebase is Rust, with work including distributed storage, HTTP caching/ETags, CRDTs, parser/DOM performance, CI and production infrastructure.

Our development process is heavily agentic: Claude Code and Codex do substantial implementation work, with humans focused on architecture, review and the hard problems.

https://ats.pagelove.com/roles/founding-software-engineer/

samj··on Shared Platform for Open Source Initiative (OSI) Reform
Item 1: Repeal the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID)

Item 2: Adopt a process for formal review of previously approved licenses

Item 3: Remove “code of silence” from Board Member Agreement

Item 4: Directors should be allowed to use FOSS for Board activities

samj··on I'm running for the OSI board maybe
This journalist didn't: "I’m a dues paying member and I didn’t receive it, and it’s highly possible that others deleted the email without opening it."

OSI’s Continually Changing Election Story https://fossforce.com/2025/02/osis-changing-election-story/

It wouldn't matter anyway as they announced the deadline as 17 February, which would mean midnight local time by default (and should mean midnight AoE, especially for an organisations purporting to be concerned with openness).

samj··on I'm running for the OSI board maybe
Bradley M Kuhn has since announced[1] the platform[2] Luke would have been running on (with a blog post for updates[3]):

Shared Platform for OSI Reform

Item 1. Repeal the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID)

Item 2. Adopt a process for formal review of previously approved licenses

Item 3. Remove “code of silence” from Board Member Agreement

Item 4. Directors should be allowed to use FOSS for Board activities

Which of these points are the OSI's current leadership so committed to blocking that they would make Luke's candidacy their hill to die on?

1. https://mas.to/@bkuhn@floss.social 2. https://codeberg.org/OSI-Reform-Platform/platform 3. https://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2025/02/28/osi-board-election.htm...

samj··on Meta's Llama Models Are Not Open Source but Open Weight According to Meta
This this is another issue, and it's why I'm not holding my breath for the data and will be satisfied with rebranding to the more appropriate Open Weight moniker (caveat: license).
samj··on Meta's Llama Models Are Not Open Source but Open Weight According to Meta
We’re finally starting to see some precision in language from the company, in that they consider that the Meta LLaMA AI models themselves are NOT in fact Open Source, rather Ope nWeight. Thank you for admitting on the public record what the Open Source community has been saying all along! The data is the source for AI and it’s not provided, though Harvard’s move is a step towards rectifying that.
samj··on OSI Board AMA at All Things Open
"Nobody disagrees about the principles [behind the OSAID], where we see disagreement is implementation"

The principles are the four essential freedoms of free software, and the one job the OSI had in implementation was to work out what had to be open to protect them.

Hint: it’s the data.

samj··on OSI Board AMA at All Things Open
“Some of the tension we've seen is in people that haven't made that mind shift to the wider picture and are just trying to apply what they are very familiar with, that they're experts at, and that made it more difficult.”

Like many of the objectors, I’ve been in Open Source since before there was Open Source or the OSI, and am now doing a masters specialising in ML while coding an AI OS. This is condescending BS from talking heads who don’t even claim to have AI expertise.

Meanwhile their chosen “co-design” process is literally the “Do Your Own Research (DYOR)” of technical standards:

“We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process.”

What a clown show. How do we get off this train?

samj··on Consensus and the Open Source AI Definition
Karsten correctly called the consensus on that thread, including my own view as one of the folks named in the article, that accepting less-than-open "public" datasets like the dumps of the Internet made available by the Common Crawl Foundation may have been an acceptable compromise to cast a wider net in recognition of AI industry norms. I no longer believe that to be the case, accepting the Open Source Definition (OSD) author Bruce Perens' view that the data IS the source, on the basis that it is what you need to modify in order to freely change the output of the system.

The OSI's position that ANY data is acceptable has shifted the Overton window of Open Source, and categorising it into open, public, obtainable, and unshareable non-public data, only to then accept all of them, is a form of doublespeak appearing to maintain openness while accommodating even the most restrictive data. We don't negotiate with terrorists.

Indeed, there are two dimensions to "Open" AI systems which "can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose" (per The Open Definition): openness, which is already well-covered by the Open Source Definition, and completeness, which is covered implicitly — after all, AI systems are software — but which would need to be specified in approved frameworks that could be self-applied like the MOF (were a new Class 0 to be created requiring open data licenses rather than "any license or unlicensed" like Class I).

In other words, the Open Source Definition (OSD) covers openness but not completeness (at least not explicitly, which is arguably a bug the community may want to fix in a future version so it covers both). The MOF covers completeness but not openness. The OSI's proposed OSAID covers neither, so any vendor using it to open-wash closed systems as Open Source AI rightly deserves ridicule as it is patently ridiculous.

samj··on OSI readies controversial open-source AI definition
That's why Open Source analyst Redmonk now "do not believe the term open source can or should be extended into the AI world." https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/10/22/from-open-source-to-a...

I don't necessarily agree and suggest the Open Source Definition could be extended to cover data in general (media, databases, and yes, models) with a single sentence, but the lowest risk option is to not touch something that has worked well for a quarter century.

The community is starting to regroup and discuss possible next steps over at https://discuss.opensourcedefinition.org

samj··on OSI readies controversial open-source AI definition
Yes, and Open Source started out with a much smaller set of software that has since grown exponentially thanks to the meaningful Open Source Definition.

We risk giving AI the same opportunity to grow in an open direction, and by our own hand. Massive own goal.

samj··on OSI readies controversial open-source AI definition
The OSI apparently doesn't have the mandate from its members to even work on this, let alone approve it.

The community is starting to regroup at https://discuss.opensourcedefinition.org because the OSI's own forums are now heavily censored.

I encourage you to join the discussion about the future of Open Source, the first option being to keep everything as is.

samj··on OSI readies controversial open-source AI definition
Nobody's asking for exact reproducibility — if the source code produces the software and it's appropriately licensed then it's Open Source.

Similarly, if you run the scripts and it produces the model then it's Open Source that happens to be AI.

To quote Bruce Perens (definition author): the training data IS the source code. Not a perfect analogy but better than a recipe calling for unicorn horns (e.g., FB/IG social graphs) and other toxic candy (e.g., NYT articles that will get users sued).

samj··on The OSI lacks competence to define Open Source AI
Normally yes, but said board is taking a very liberal view of "experts"; the "co-design" process literally says "everyone is an expert" (https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/costanza-chock/release/4):

"We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process."

The result is a proposed standard that does not do its one job: protect the four freedoms that define Open Source (and Free Software in general).

samj··on The OSI lacks competence to define Open Source AI
The "co-design" process is literally the "Do Your Own Research" of technical standards (https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/costanza-chock/release/4):

"We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process."

Not that they're practicing what they preach anyway - there's only one voice that matters and that's the OSI's Executive Director (https://discuss.opensource.org/t/proposal-to-achieve-consens...):

"We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert."

samj··on The OSI lacks competence to define Open Source AI
/me waves
samj··on Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
OP gives up drinking, decides the rest of his industry has to as well. I'll get right on that.
samj··on John McCarthy Has Died
"If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry."

— John McCarthy (speaking at the MIT Centennial in 1961).

It's been pointed out that McCarthy used the term "utility" rather than "cloud", but many of us would argue they are one and the same. Indeed Wikipedia defines it as:

"Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet)."

In any case, can anyone think of anyone more deserving of the honour of the title "father of cloud computing" than McCarthy? I certainly can't.

samj··on Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life, Shrugs
According to Skud (who was also suspended) you have to do this before you get suspended — now she "can’t use Google Takeout to export [her] profile and stream": http://infotrope.net/2011/07/22/ive-been-suspended-from-goog...
samj··on Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life, Shrugs
Skud observed (http://infotrope.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/plus06.png) that she "can’t use Google Takeout to export [her] profile and stream" after having been suspended herself: http://infotrope.net/2011/07/22/ive-been-suspended-from-goog...
samj··on Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
Facebook lists provide (barely) adequate functionality for users with large and/or complex social networks to constrain sharing but, like Circles, they're a PITA to set up. Fiven most people don't need them it's no surprise they're buried in the UI, particularly given they constrain rather than encourage sharing.
samj··on Ex-Wave, Ex-Plus engineer on Google Plus
Perhaps Facebook just understand that for a social network to be successful you need to encourage sharing at all costs; Google+'s Circles actively constrain sharing, increase complexity and raise the barrier to entry.
samj··on rel="shortlink" - URL shortening that doesn't hurt the internet
In addition to space constrained applications such as SMS (and artificially space constrained applications like Twitter) shortlinks are also required anywhere humans are required to remember and/or enter them - that is, when they are printed, recited over radio or displayed on televisions. This is a very important use case that people often ignore.

Sam

samj··on Short URL hints / autodiscovery RFC
So is it short_url or short_uri or short-url or short-uri or "short url" or "short uri" or shorturl or shorturi?

"shortlink (http://code.google.com/p/shortlink/) doesn't have any of the disadvantages of its predecessors...

Sam

samj··on Why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than 99%
Everyone likes a good demo so check out my follow up post 'Towards a Flash free YouTube killer...'

Sam

1. http://samj.net/2009/02/towards-flash-free-youtube-killer-wa...

samj··on Why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than 99%
I just did and about 5% of my (tech savvy) users don't have Flash, but then again more than half of them use Firefox and less than 15% are on IE so not particularly representative.
samj··on Why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than 99%
For the vast majority of people looking at that claim the message is "Flash content reaches 99.0% of Internet viewers".

Sam

samj··on Why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than 99%
35 million netbooks will ship this year, and that's set to rise to 139 million by 2013[1]. Say some of the main models were to ship with Android[2], or even a webkit-based or Firefox 3.1 (coming soon[3]) browser... then imagine that sites like Facebook and YouTube were to start serving up the VIDEO tag to compatible user agents. All of a sudden there is a lot less incentive to fight with binary flash plugins (when everything else is open source).

This could well happen virtually overnight.

Sam

1. http://www.abiresearch.com/press/1355-35+Million+Netbook+Shi... 2. http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/asus-developing.html 3. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/Schedule

samj··on Why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than 99%
Is a desktop a desktop computer[1] or the desktop metaphor[2]? Anyway maybe a real world test of active Internet users (e.g. daily or weekly) would be more interesting than a survey (if less flattering).

You previously claimed[3] that "Sometimes multiple implementations are useful, but the unique value in SWF (and, to a lesser extent, PDF) is in the predictability of its rendering." PDF's far from dead so maybe now's a good time to open up the player side of Flash a bit. Otherwise you may well find an increasingly large percentage of the tens of millions of netbooks built each year shipping without it.

Sam

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_computer 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_metaphor 3. http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/06/apple-working-on-adobe-flas...