X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
Also there doesn't seem that much discussion of code in there.
That's not the same. Whenever you do a google search, it only gives out what to do. The decision making ultimately ends up towards you.
In AI case however, its like replacing the person who used to make decisions about what to copy and implement. It makes you a proxy towards the AI's decision making. At least that is how I interpreted it.
Realistically, people do a lot of Googling "parse Json in Python" and going with whatever pops out, like "import json" probably. But there's other options out there.
With a LLM, you're almost certainly also going to get the standard json module if you just ask for a JSON parser.
But nobody says you have to stop there. For instance if I say I want "the fastest JSON module", it goes for orgjson instead.
And if I wasn't happy with that, I could ask it to just write a benchmark using every module available and actually measure what's optimal for my hardware and my data file.
Choices don't go anywhere, and a smart user can take advantage to evaluate possibilities for whatever factors might matter -- speed, size, number of dependencies, etc. I'd say smartly used LLMs make for better choices because you can do research much more easily. Benchmarks, prototypes, asking it to search for you whether a given library has a good reputation or not and is well maintained, etc.
Honestly I agree with this take. The problem is that, under the context of the people banned for using LLMs, no one makes decisions like this.
For instance, say I want to do some data analytics on a pretty large csv file. Of course before AI I would need to think of 1.How to open the CSV file 2. What is the specific data I want to extract 3. How to extract the data 4. How do I change the data into a specific format (say a list, a set etc ..) 5. How do I sort it. 6. How do I visualize it .... and so on. Those kinds of steps on how to write the code forces you to research the libraries and methods and decide what is required. (for instance using pandas in python)
Using AI for that task however, I wouldn't have done any decision for how to extract the data in question. Maybe the AI's decision was marginally better than mine (Writing a csv parser from scratch is faster for that specific data for example). Maybe in the case of data analytics, there is no point in the code cause in the end what is desired more is the visualization. But dumping the code into communities where people were interested in how you came to that decision falls short cause you didn't do it in actuality. I think that is the current issue at hand.
Yeah, but what's more likely to happen is that when you look inside the code you see thousands of lines of code of a handrolled parser and when you ask "why would you write your own rather than use some existing one here?" you only get silence in return.
Except that's exactly what the slop machine peddlers are saying. Why would you, a mere mortal, dare to question the decisions of the superhuman intelligence after all?
I haven't a clue what the peddlers are saying because I run uBlock Origin and do my best to never see an ad. I don't care or even know what they're advertising, and don't take my guidance from big tech CEOs.
> I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less.
How can this be true when the problem they’re dealing with is an explosion in the number of submissions? Even with some of these policies, the number of software projects being submitted to these subreddits is so much higher than a few years ago.
Doesn’t add up.
You can't share your own videos on /r/youtube, your own projects on /r/opensource, etc.
And the weird thing is that normally you would think this would be an overarching strategy by Reddit admins to keep users on site, like Facebook penalizes outbound links, but it's unpaid moderators unconsciously furthering Reddit's agenda.
Someone who makes youtube videos about Foo belongs to the Foo community, but they can't post on /r/Foo. Why? Because /r/Foo isn't the community of "Foo."
The "community" in this case refers specifically to a group of people on Reddit.
That is, the guy will never belong to the "community" because he is busy making videos on Youtube instead of posting comments on Reddit. And you can replace that with anything else. Someone who writes their own blog, or own books, or has an Instagram, TikTok, or even a Facebook page.
He would be considered a "high effort" OC creator in /r/foo if his videos were hosted on Reddit instead of on Youtube. That's how silly this whole thing is. This is not about "the community." This is about someone's personal Reddit group that they're moderator of.
Spam is a problem and has been since the dawn of the internet. Efforts to limit it will always affect innocent people to some degree but it's not really feasible to not do anything. And reddit especially has an astroturfing problem since it became such a popular source for recommendations. Like, just looking at GP's profile here kinda adds some context as to why they might say this change makes reddit useless to them.
X uses recommendations, so you don’t see all the projects and small accounts. You consume curated content.
Most of them aren't slop. They're actually quite useful, but I guess the anti-AI cult wants to silence all AI-aided projects in an attempt to point out how "there's no new software being written by AI".
For me the key thing is that a program that cannot be maintained and improved over time without introducing numerous regressions may as well have not existed, because even those that were useful at one point in time quickly cease to be so due to bugs cropping up from the project being a quivering, duct taped together mass of misery or because it stopped getting updates when the project owner found themselves painted into a corner and broke with an OS update.
Note that I am not a hardline anti-LLM type. I have my reservations, but do make use of them. I do however see a massive difference in quality between knowledgeable devs using them to augment their own abilities and non-devs or newbie devs just telling Claude to bake the whole pie.
- ffmpeg port
- a novel web browser engine
- multiple kernels/os projects
- POSIX shell
- a from scratch crypto implementation library of all commonly (and uncommonly) used crypto primitives
- new VCS that outperformed Git
- git rewritten in rust
- multiple custom new languages written in rust
- new experimental borrow checker
- from scratch new standard library
- countless (genuinely unique) command line tools
If there is something novel in the port, people usually write an article about that or at least mention it in the README.
Hyperbole much?
This is a direct response to AI slop destroying a community; what’s your solution to the AI spam problem?
This inherently restricts you to projects maintained by people who are willing to wade through a neck-deep cesspool of far-right content, either because they think it’s worth it (Twitter is, alas, still a good source for up-to-the-minute info) or because they agree with it. That’s a small subset of the OSS world. Everyone else has decamped to Bluesky and Mastodon, which are near intolerable in their own special ways.
It makes sense AI would explode on a platform now used by the bad parts of society.
The AI defense people don't seem to realize the funny things they say defending AI and how detached it is.
Lol calling reddit useless because mods are pumping the brakes on low quality AI slop posts. Hilarious.
Reddit mods aren't paid to deal with low effort auto submittions from LLMs. It ruins the subs.