@jani@floss.social

· 7mo ago

Using a free software stack, you could be an effective developer with a relatively low budget. A cheap or used laptop and an internet subscription.

LLM coding is changing that too. You either need a very powerful and expensive machine to run a local model, or (currently more likely) an LLM subscription. We are lead to believe you have to pay a monthly fee to be an effective developer.

The prospect of your output as a developer being tied to a proprietary service seems risky at best.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@corbet It will be interesting to see how the use of the Assisted-by tag develops. I'm sure not everyone uses it. And if it changes the reception of a patch to be negative, surely people will be less forthcoming about LLM usage too. And, of course, a contribution based on a lie is not a great way to build trust either. I also see trivial patches with Assisted-by that make me think, why? Couldn't you have done this yourself and learned something in the process.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 13mo ago

I'll never stop programming.

I'll keep coding as long as I'm able to. It's the ultimate brain teaser. I don't care for sudoku and the like; I'd rather write a sudoku solver (again, in new languages) than solve sudokus manually.

And, obviously, telling a language model to do that for me has no appeal. It's like asking a person who loves sudokus if they'd like to use a sudoku solver instead.

#CoderForever

floss.social

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@ljs@mastodonapp.uk @kees@hachyderm.io Oh, and the primary reason I only whine and moan here instead of sending patches is that the damn thing is written in Perl. Plus I don't want to get Cc'd for patches touching get_maintainer.pl in the future. No wait. 😉

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@tante@tldr.nettime.org You're writing this on an European, open source version of Twitter. 🤔

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@pitrh@mastodon.social I'm inclined to think "The evolution of natural language for programming" will be a hotter topic still. It's another abstraction layer. Programming will, in some ways anyway, be accessible to more people than before. At the same time, this is not incompatible with my original post, and LLM coding has tons of ethical and legal hurdles as well.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@ananas@scicomm.xyz @tante@tldr.nettime.org Point being, do you think an European open source version of, say, Instagram or TikTok would be exactly the same either?

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@kusma The "Keeping the brain active" part reminds me of something I posted way back: https://floss.social/@jani/115146400583453613

floss.social

Jani Nikula: "I'll never stop programming. I'll keep coding as…" - FLOSS.social

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@ljs@mastodonapp.uk @kees@hachyderm.io @vbabka@mastodon.social Right, MAINTAINERS changes should also include all the other MAINTAINERS entries it impacts.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@kees@hachyderm.io I'm eagerly waiting for your upcoming patches to get_maintainer.pl next. 😉

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@tshirtman@mas.to I suppose there are a lot of professions, including in computing, where the regular tools in the field are prohibitively expensive for individuals. In that sense, an LLM subscription is likely a reasonable cost. The cost of keeping up with hardware that can run the latest and greatest local models is less predictable. That said, it's still a fairly big change for regular software developers.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@RandySimons@mastodon.social @leeg@fosstodon.org The point is not just about the money. When you bought that Visual C++ license, you knew you could use it as long as you wished, regardless of whether the vendor went belly up or discontinued the product or decided they didn't want you or anyone in your country as a customer. If you want to avoid that lock-in, the hardware cost is significant, and recurring.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@tuban_muzuru@beige.party Good for you. Did you read the post you replied to?

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 6mo ago

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk No, carbon dating is the opposite of fresh dates.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@araly@gamedev.lgbt Also a good point.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@jsr Bryan Adams having been born in 1959, the similar nostalgia-based song about 2010 would be written by someone born in 2000.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 5mo ago

When do we see the first open source project maintained by an AI agent?

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@leeg@fosstodon.org It's certainly an acceleration of the hardware requirements for computers unlike anything we've seen in the past decades.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@RandySimons@mastodon.social @leeg@fosstodon.org I think we have a difference of opinion on how useful the local models that run on inexpensive hardware are, and how the evolution of language models require beefier hardware faster than any other field in software development. Maybe that will change in the future, and hardware evolution catches up again. Other than that, I completely agree using a local model avoids the lock-in and rent on LLM subscriptions. That is the model I would personally prefer as well.

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Jani Nikula @jani@floss.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@ljs@mastodonapp.uk @kees@hachyderm.io Yeah, returning stuff from git history should only be a fallback for files without maintainers. I get my fair share of these Cc's and I'm always like WTF why am I included. IMO it should also only include the most specific maintainers by default. If you have the maintainer for file foo/bar/baz, don't include the maintainer for foo/bar or foo.

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