There is a restriction - the useful models are closed source proprietary services that cost money to be used effectively, and those models require vast and expensive infrastructure for training that isn't available to the public. I can't apply the four freedoms to Claude or OpenAI or Grok. I can't fork a billion dollar data center. A bunch of weights isn't the same as source code.
What's more, because people are using these services to generate code they can't understand that code and won't be able to edit or redistribute that code without access to those services.
That's anything but "the purest form of open source." It's even more of a proprietary lock-in than we had to begin with.
And often the most useful software is closed source proprietary things that cost money to be used effectively. That hasn't stopped open source from building impressive and useable systems that are serviceable enough for most use cases. You can't fork photoshop, but GIMP (for all its warts) exists and you can use it for photo manipulation. You can't fork Solidworks, but FreeCAD and OpenSCAD exist, and you can use them to do 3d modeling. You can't fork Eagle, but KiCad exists and you can design your own PCBs with it. You can't fork Windows or MacOS but Linux and BSD exist and they probably already run most of your hardware. You can't fork Oracle, but Postgres and MariaDB exist and you can run a business on them. Unless we stupidly legally lock AI training and model creation to massive proprietary corporations, why do you think the same won't hold true for open AI models and projects? Maybe Claude will always be a better code agent than AInix or whatever, but as long as AInix is good enough, that doesn't matter any more than it matters that Solidworks is better than FreeCAD.
I see little real difference between using proprietary software and using AI to generate software in terms of the freedoms allowed to the end user. The entire point of the free software ethos is that the end user should be in control to the degree that they want to be, not merely to the degree that a proprietary service allows. If nothing else the obliteration of programming culture and education and the mass deskilling created by the normalization of AI works against that ethos. It turns programming into just another form of capitalist consumption.
Which is all well and good if you don't care about such things and just want the end product but AI shouldn't be conflated with FOSS. A tool that strips knowledge away from people is antithetical to the culture even if the end product is high quality.
AI is a tool like any other. AI doesn't inherently "strip knowledge away from people" any more than an IDE, or a GUI or a modern computer does. Yes, you can use AI to blindly do things without learning. And you can use GParted to blindly format a drive without ever learning what cylinders and sectors are. And you can use GIMP plugins to blur images without ever having to learn matrix multiplication. Or you can use drop box and never have to learn how to use rsync, samba and chron. But you can also use AI to learn things like which obscure emacs functions you can string together to customize your emacs config in a way that suits you better. Or how to programmatically invoke disabled junit tests from within another test so that you can test that an annotation that decorates a unit test does the things around that test execution that you expect. That last by the way is a real thing I did, and something that is difficult if not impossible to search for with normal search tools because the terms that you need to use are much more likely to get you results for generally enabling and disabling unit tests.
If a user chooses to use AI in a way that strips knowledge away from them, and doesn't contribute to their learning, that is a choice they are making but there is nothing inherent in AI that requires it anymore than choosing to code in a higher level language inherently prevents you from learning assembly language.
The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.
The mods have said that they consider the cynicism and "curmudgeonliness" in the community to be a problem and they want newer people coming in. The most direct way to accomplish that would be to drive the old grumps out and replace them with a younger pro-AI userbase. After all, every startup YC will fund in the forseeable future will be first and foremost an AI startup. There just isn't going to be a place here for people who actually enjoy programming as an art, or the human element in any creative activity, nor any benefit to YC in maintaining that culture.
You can't serve humanity and the machine, you have to choose a master. YC has no choice but to choose the machine because that's where the money is, so HN has no choice but to follow suit. Hacker News is an AI forum.
I'm not suggesting there is some kind of conspiracy afoot but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to just give in let nature take its course.
For the last two years I've been noticing that most comments that are somewhat "strange" are from accounts that are either outright green, or just < 1 yo.
By strange I mean comments I stopped at to check what's going on: mainly uncivil, overly hateful, etc.
There are also users who create multiple accounts that are obviously tied to the same person, after the previous one gets banned. It's an epidemic.
Unless you're one of those people who only ever use HN and make it a part of your identity, sure. You can just leave for greener pastures. Or learn to care less.
Unfortunately most of what gets posted to HN or could conceivably be posted here is already LLM generated to some degree. Because content of interest to HN tends to be written by the same people who increasingly prefer to use an LLM for everything they do, machine-generated submissions are only going to increase over time. Tagging submissions as LLM generated is ultimately futile, as one might as well tag water as wet.
Also HN's design ethos of not having "silos" precludes having tags or filters or blocklists, since they want everyone to see the same content at the same time. This is the kind of thing you're going to have to use with a browser plugin or third party service if you want it at all.
I had it happen twice that I can remember. Once I hallucinated that I had a third arm that snaked around to my desk lamp, and just last night that someone whispered "hello" into my ear. Apparently that last one's pretty common.
People were already building cool side projects to completion and giving them love before AI.
You get downvoted for being weirdly ecstatic about AI "enabling" things that were already possible, while not caring about the human element that AI lacks.
People that say "things [...] were already possible" don't dream enough.
Maybe you were born a few decades too late. I feel I was born (a few decades?) too early.
I want the world with cures for cancer, holodecks, brain uploads, immortality, jet packs, surfing on Titan, etc.
I legitimately enjoy the future we're hurtling towards. It's the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species. I hated the world where "Apple iPhones" were the pinnacle of human achievement.
We might be able to vibe engineer our own iPhones in a few years. That'll be fun.
The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.
And for those of us who can engineer, we're making 10x, 20x what we were before. I'm filling my life with all kinds of fun side projects, toys, games, utility software, automations. I don't look at libraries and software packages anymore - I just build what I need.
This is like 3D printing for software.
I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I am so excited about everything I'm going to be building. Time was a limit before. There is no limit now.
> FFS we've stood on the moon.
And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
>The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.
Learning to program has never been easier or more accessible. Being able to build a website has been accessible to non-techies for years. I'll admit using an AI is convenient but "beyond remarkable" is pushing it. If anything it's a bit of a tragedy. In exchange for that convenience people are buying into a closed, third party mass surveillance infrastructure generating code they can't understand, can't repair, can't edit or redistribute. From a FOSS point of view AI is objectively worse than what we had. And that's not even getting into the flood of slop and disinformation destroying the web.
>I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I can't imagine you needed all of this done within a month and couldn't find existing solutions for most of it. It seems more like you're addicted than being productive.
And I still don't see the line between you vibe-coding a productivity app something something holograms and brain uploads and surfing on Titan.
>And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
No, we aren't. We're no closer to than than we were 60 years ago. If you think Elon Musk is actually going to accomplish anything of the sort I think you're bound for disappointment.
Like a lot of people you may be confusing randomness with creativity.
You can make a Markov chain generate the phrase "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud." That doesn't make the Markov chain creative. Creativity implies intent, which AI doesn't have. "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud" doesn't communicate anything meaningful.
edit: I guess it was a reference to a thing I never saw.
You're baking a lot of philosophy into "creativity requires intent." We can't even prove qualia are universal, which is a prerequisite for "intent" beyond "neurons firing" (what about hypothetical aliens without neurons, could they have "intent"?) and if you skip that, humans don't even understand themselves, this has been well studied, so any "intent" is a post hoc justification in more cases than not.
The nature of creativity is an implicitly philosophical matter, and you can't criticize me for that when you're putting qualia on the table.
Semantic arguments aren't interesting. Do you believe that creativity doesn't require intent, that intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, or that intent is only relevant if LLMs possess it? It's difficult for me to parse an actual rebuttal from your comment.
So "intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense?"
You're requiring me to first solve the hard problem of consciousness before making an argument you consider credible but I have yet to see a counterargument on your part which meets the same criteria, and you would need to do so to prove my statement is a "house of cards" versus simply an opinion with which you disagree.
I think yours is the more difficult argument. I can't really grasp a definition of art that doesn't presuppose intent.
Imagine any Ansel Adams picture was taken by a monkey. Are they suddenly trash? Imagine your favorite haiku was instead created by a parrot mashing together overheard snippets from its owner. Again trash? The argument gets frighteningly literal when you consider people like Jackson Pollock.
Ansel Adams had a process that incorporated on his understanding of optics, film, light and aesthetics. He didn't just point a camera in an arbitrary direction and push a button. I don't think a monkey could take an "Ansel Adams picture." If one took a picture that resembled an Ansel Adams picture... somehow... it would be a novelty but I wouldn't consider it art. No one would say "this monkey is equivalent to Ansel Adams in every meaningful sense" or that "Ansel Adams clearly doesn't have intent behind his photos because a monkey made this" or that "this monkey's intent is the same as Ansel Adams because it took a photo that resembles the artist's work."
And a parrot repeating words isn't creating art either, even if it repeats a haiku, any more than a Xerox machine copying a book is writing a novel. No one considers a parrot a poet. The person who wrote the haiku clearly intended to say something. Random words strung together which just happen to meet the syllable requirements aren't a haiku.
And believe it or not there was intent and even technique in Jackson Pollock's work. All of the modern and "postmodern" art that Hacker News likes to deride had something to say, and it expressed something unique about the artist and their cultural context and sometimes their relationship to the art movement itself. The "banana taped to a wall" was an intentional criticism of consumer culture. There was intent behind Duchamp's urinal (it was testing the boundaries of what the art community considered legitimate.) That intent is there even if you don't respect it because the work appears superficially simple. None of it was purely random or purely mechanistic.
If you told an AI to generate something in the style of Studio Ghibli it would copy the superficial elements of the technique but it would never spontaneously create Princess Mononoke because it doesn't have (nor can it comprehend) Hayao Miyazaki's views on environmentalism and industrialism, nor his experiences living in post WW2 Japan. What makes Ghibli movies art is not simply the aesthetic but the human element.
What's more, because people are using these services to generate code they can't understand that code and won't be able to edit or redistribute that code without access to those services.
That's anything but "the purest form of open source." It's even more of a proprietary lock-in than we had to begin with.
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