“Deterministic” compilers and reproducible builds are actually fairly difficult problems. (Yes I know technically the compiler is deterministic, but AI is also technically deterministic since you can set the seed).

I’ve read this article before. Found it very reductionist. For example, it says that weapons might be good for Ukraine, but they’re bad in general. You can’t just “in general” something like weapons or AI. They have thousands of different contexts and use cases. Sure, a weapon can make somebody homocidal in one context, but it might make somebody a militia in another context. AI can be a slop generator for a vibe coder, and a bug detection tool for Linus Torvalds.

I’m not a fan of how modern politics and social justice is so reductionist nowadays. “One aspect of X is bad, so we must reject X altogether”. Can we add even a little nuance to our discussions? This mindset is brainrot.

private/secret repositories where they worked on things without sharing with the world

There’s a name for this. Closed source. It might not technically be closed source, but it is in principle. Namely, getting to some result and making an impact on the world, without sharing the process of getting there.

They didn’t want to post to a Stack Overflow site because of “harvesters and scrapers digesting my answer and not giving me one cent or even credit”

they didn’t want to deal with the assholes of “Open Source”

These are almost the exact reasons why many choose to go closed source. Why FUTO has a weird license. Why Bitwarden just changed the license of all their apps.

“Open source” acts like people are willing to give things for free, and ask for nothing in return. In reality that is rarely true. Everybody has different ideas of what is proper compensation. Maybe it’s money. Maybe attribution. But right now everybody disagrees with each other, and people will choose closed source to be safe and avoid feeling exploited.

If this continues, then AI will destroy open source. Hopefully we figure out a solution soon.