I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).
Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.
Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.
Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them.
That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.
Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.
That's incredibly dismissive of a product that some people find valuable enough to pay money for it. I'm not sure what ZIRP has to do with that, the post states he didn't take VC funding. Is UX not important to you?
If UX is important to you, how are you missing the point of the app? It seems you are going with the anti-hype against Electron apps and not engaging with the merits/substance of the app.
Nah, idc if it's electron or not.
What I do care about is if it is a _wrapper_ around someone else's application or not.
If you write your own whatsapp/telegram/whatever client, be my guest. But just taking someone else's product and bare-minimum repackaging it is not the level of merit that would warrant 10 years of literally anything; let alone asking for payment for it.
Impostorware
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Also, just think about what a slap in the face this is for the people putting in the hard work of actually building the aforementioned web clients.
Some random other person comes along, takes their stuff and receives all the credit.
Which, yeah, okay, utilizing market inefficiencies. So that's clever.
But it is also rather unethical.
In my book, anyway.
Your ethics may vary.
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Having empathy is good and important and all, but you need to point it at the right people.
However, those rarely are the ones that are good at storytelling (in which Franz absolutely exceeds. Good job.)
Anyway. I repeat myself.
My point is that I think you might've automatically deployed a defense script, which is good in itself, but bad when you're being effectively manipulated into deploying it against your own interests.
> I decided to rewrite all of the prose in my own voice.
Soo... it didn't just sound like genai but was genai?
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Huh. From the article:
> If anyone complains about my verbosity or sentence structure — as they usually do, which is the reason I originally let the AI write the prose, among other reasons obsoleted by templating — they can go fuck themselves.
This is kinda sad, honestly.
But also should show the author that doing what people try to bully you into doing will not stop them from bullying you.
Just stick with your unique voice man. If people don't want to read that that's fine. They do not have to. You're fine
If someone gives them shit about their writing, that's on the critic for being shitty. If they use AI to write, that's on them for being fake. But, to write online at all requires being ready to have people be shitty to you and ideally not reacting in a way that makes the situation worse. Sounds like they need work on that part.
Anyway it is basically always possible for someone to find something legitimately bad about anything a person does. The question is, how much of an issue is that? Not much actually. So you have flaws. Fine, just be flawed. It had no affect on your life beyond your reaction to the attack. And putting aside that reaction is a prerequisite for learning anything useful (or discerning that there is nothing to learn) from the experience.
Good people will trust good intentions through the flaws, while shitty people will write off your work and your intentions because of the flaws (and try to make sure you feel bad about it in the process). But it's always they're too weak to express disagreement maturely, or sometimes because they're bitter and threatened by your good intentions directly. Either way, it's their flaw, not yours.
You're literally doing exactly the bullying I was trying to avoid, even while denouncing it. I like em-dashes. I have AuDHD, and they help me represent how I think.
Why did you point at the em-dashes? It looks very much as though you're accusing the author of an update that was also generated (possible but they seem sincere enough about wanting honest feedback on the content, and making changes for that). Or you're saying the author - and maybe everyone in general? - should no longer use em-dashes because they're a LLM smell. Yeah I'd feel offended too. It's a real pity I can't find em-dashes on my keyboard, or I'd stick them in this comment.
Right so it’s gonna be a litmus test for knowledge workers going forward if they can separate style over substance. Genai tells are style. You have to be able to evaluate the ideas.
> Why would normal people even want to become an unpaid janitor for someone else's stuff?
Social validation. Or, to be slightly more generous, sort of a compulsory way to force someone more experienced to provide some mentorship, by compelling them to review your pull requests.
That’s the point here, though. The maintainers of Ladybird don’t want to be compelled to mentor people making throwaway contributions without a commitment to the project. It’s pretty frustrating to try to mentor an absentee mentee who isn’t actually ready to learn from you.
You make a strong point. Large parts of a decision like this have less to do with what you can get from the community, but what you have person-hours available to do with it. The core team is pretty small, and a lot of these automatically coded PRs are bound to be huge. They’re taking back their own time to focus on their own project.
> Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the code contributions, but also massively impact the other, non-tangible contributions like ideas, eyes on code, etc. That feels way worse.
These "contributions", while they did exist in small quantities, mostly were not actually what you've described there.
Instead, those boiled down to unsolicited opinions, hostile takeover attempts, value extraction, general drama and just overall overhead over simply building code.
This was not always the case, but the GitHub model of building FOSS (and removal of all friction) certainly made it the new default.
Said model was always unsustainable, but the burn rate made it sustainable enough so that we could just throw more humans at the problem to replace the burnt-out ones.
AI pushed the burn rate over the replacement rate.
=> We will likely see more projects adapt this or a similar stance I think.
It always seemed like a weird default to let people (esp strangers) submit PRs that weren't tied to an issue nor approved.
What do you mean you just spent a week implementing something in secret?
AI makes it extra silly because now you can craft up your unsolicited code change in minutes, making it extra obvious that code changes should spawn from real discussion and agreement.
TFA is part of looking for new processes that actually work. Dunno why people are having such rose tinted glasses about pull requests. Open an issue, talk to people. Have an idea? Then get people to cosign it.
I think it was different pre-AI. Someone might come in and spend days getting some understanding of the codebase before they contribute some minor fix. Over time they might stick around a make some more of these, progressively gaining trust so when they do take on something bigger the maintainers will know they aren't wasting their time reviewing it.
Now they can drop a multi thousand line poorly understood PR day 1.
As someone who maintained FOSS libraries pre-AI, I think the frequency might have changed, but large drive-by PRs with thousands of changes happened before too, I've been on the receiving end of those many times. Usually they fundamentally change the architecture too, then the submitter get offended/sad/surprised when you tell them you impossibly could accept it and they should stop wasting their time contributing without discussing first. Usually ends with some threats how their fork will take all the contributors or something like that.
What I don't get, is why these LLM users aren't asking their LLM for how to contribute and how the project prefers to contribute, and how they can make sure it's accepted? Literally, the very same tools they use to code, can be used to make sure their PR follows all guidelines, from discussions to acceptance of the PR itself, it's right there, they literally just have to prompt for it! Such a lazy group of people.
Good faith PRs were also suffering under the current model. Ive opened PRs by hand on small projects to try and fix personal issues that probably affected others. Then the PRs languish for months or in one case literal years under the deluge of ai slop being spammed at the repo. I’m not going to ping the maintainers constantly when I know they are struggling so I’m left running my fork and no one else gets the benefit.
Big projects pre-AI also can have hundreds of rotting PRs. It's a lot of work to go through them, and unsolicited PRs are kind of the wrong way to spend time as a maintainer.
AI just makes it so obvious how bad of a process it is that we can't ignore it anymore, and now we need to finally figure out good processes.
Even little stuff like: I've created issues on the Claude Code github that got agreement and then led to code changes. Why isn't there a default, built-in way for my issues to rise above the zero-effort chaff? If you finally do the work of vetting someone's PR, why isn't there a built-in (hidden) way to +1 someone so we can see that they have some reputation with the project on their future issues/PRs?
Personally, I do believe that math as a discipline has this huge issue of being mostly incomprehensible garbage.
Not because the actual truth encoded in it would be this complex, but because the encoding scheme just sucks.
I see it as a packaging problem that has so far not been painful enough to trigger any meaningful change.
With this LLM-driven collapse, that might finally change.
Idk I'm hopeful.
Math is literally the law of the universe.
It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring only found in small chunks of the population to truly click.
If you have a problem with the math notation, you should open a law book, and look at the terminology mess they have going on. I like math notation, because it can be simply converted into natural language, thus removing the notation from the equation and leaving pure logic. Once you have that, thinking about it and working out what the original notation actually meant should be on you, that's how you build an understanding of math.
> Math is literally the law of the universe. It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring
Ok, I'm all for overhauling math notation and teaching but this doesn't follow. Most animals can't do Math, even if they can do arithmetic. Clearly living in the universe doesn't guarantee you can learn how it works. There's no reason to believe we slightly smarter animals are universally entitled to understand it either.
Just tried it and honestly it's a terrible experience lacking any sort of intent or reason.
Which is unsurprising in the AI space.
You get a wall of text showing you various random fine-tuned models by random people, and that is basically it.
Actual sane default requirements like "just give me the normal AI labs", "please filter for dense only" and "I want this exact context size at this quant" are not part of the tool, apparently. Neither is "compare these quants for me for the same model".
Or maybe it's just hidden enough that I did not find them before I've stopped caring.
Conway's law is at it again.
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Edit:
I have since then had qwen3.6 ponder the codebase and think about my complaints.
Seems to require a major data model overhaul to actually fix those, so they're legit.
Which I didn't doubt, but nice to have some extra fabricated confirmation after it initially refused and said "nooooo the readme says otherwise nooo hypfer is just a hater noo"
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Edit 2:
It gets worse the longer I stare at it. This could've been a web calculator.
We need benchmarks by engine, cli switch sets, and device with filters by cpu, gpu, and type. And if someone could please aggregate that in a way where people can upload results and just automatically see the best of any model for their device that would be a killer app.
I've wanted to vibe code a tuning app, that pumps data through your CPU-GPU-RAM to try and determine the best parameters for each model, but I think it's just too much work compared to manually running by hand a one-liner and changing things here and there.
I have found these things to be fully exasperating, to be honest, even though I am seeking information about a pretty "known" machine — a 64GB M1 Max MBP.
(Honestly I think Apple's "AI push" could do worse than just focus on a curated model library, a couple of Apple-standard Gemini distillations, an OS-level model manager and some sort of tweak of their containers system to do what Docker's sbx does. They could demystify a lot of this shit.)
> The argument for speculative decoding is stronger on CPU than on GPU.
Uh. Uuuh.
No?
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Also
> While a GPU has a massive pool of ultra-fast High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), a CPU relies on small, lightning-fast “caches” (L1, L2, L3) built directly onto the processor chip.
What purpose does the quoting of "caches" serve there?
Is this AI writing written by that model running on that host?
I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).
Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.
Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.
Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them. That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.
Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.
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