Yup, some of my first contributions when I was a teenager, was to an open source project where I was able to find a couple of bugs, and implement a hacky solution that I shared with the team on the forum. My code was absolutely awful, but by having done both the effort of tracking down the cause of the bug, and one possible way of fixing it (which was badly coded, but worked), made the developers able to quickly turn around and edit my patches into actual patches that got merged into the project.
And it was actually a pretty good feeling. Made me feel that even as a newbie programmer, I was adding value to the community, which I was!
I've done the same for a fix in the Gold linker, which is now obsolete due to even faster linkers being available. Shout out to Ian Lance Taylor, his behavior as the maintainer was exemplary: very gracious and very responsive.
Thats the thing with giant PRs. They never really needed to be reviewed anyway. In cultures with strong review culture I have worked at, if you send me a thousand line PR and ask me to review it, I will look at the giant blob of text, and immediately fire off a "it's too long, can you cut it into smaller PRs?".
Because I don't trust myself to review a giant PR. It takes too much cognition to properly review it.
And now that people are making PRs with AI, this is even more important. If the AI was good enough to have coded it, please instruct it to make the changes in reviewable chunks.
> the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped
It's not about just skill. It's a matter of skill, time, and how critical the software you are writing is.
There is a lot of software that is not critical. That is not close to security mechanisms. And that even if the code quality is not the highest, it does not matter.
Even if you are the best coder in the world, you would already become more productive by using ai. Things that in the past you might have not coded yourself but delegated to an intern, or things that you wouldn't even delegate to an intern because they are just too boring to do like some refactorings.
Like I had this project at work that was written without typescript strict mode turned on. When I turned it on, it had over 700 errors. I might be better than AI to fix every single of one these errors. But my time is worth more than that in doing other things. But I can, and did, ask AI to fix every single one. And then I reviewed it batches, and something that my team wanted to do for multiple years and nobody had the time for, finally got done.
Yup. If you are bilingual, you quickly realize how some translations are very bad. How some translations are very good. And how hard it is to translate. With dry, simple text, it might be easy. But when it involves art?
Some jokes don't translate directly. There is pun. Sounds of words. Double meaning. Ambiguity. Cultural background. The creation of new words.
It can be reasonably argued that some poetry can be impossible to translate from some languages to others. A poem might be explained, but by a lenghty, dissecting explanation, that completely loses the point of it.
It is possible it is just time. Modern humans are considered to have existed for 300k~ years. Civilizations are about 6k years old.
So who knows. Maybe if you gave them an extra 10k years, they would have achived "civilization". It is not much for the scale of human existance. But it is longer than any of our civilizations has existed for.
And makes sense with agriculture and civilization coming together. Agriculture improved the carrying capacity of an acre of land dramatically from what it was from foraging and hunting.
Or maybe 100 years from now, your toaster will be powerful enough to run the game.
To me this is about both preserving the access to what consumers purchased, but also future preservation of art.
Copyright is not a natural right. It is a monopoly granted by the government to creators, specifically with the goal of the progress of art and science.
Games that completely die because their servers are shut off, in my opinion should just lose copyright outright. Why should the people via the government provide you with a monopoly on publishing something that you have stopped publishing?
From all their desperation in making sure api keys are not used in contexts where they are not supposed to, I would say that they actually appear to have services where their profit is negative, if a customer is actually using their api to the limits they set, they lose money. They wouldn't have been this desperate in trying to shut off OpenClaw if it wasn't this way. Most companies that provide api infrastructure love when a killer app using their api is made by outsiders.
And while you can beat low margin with scale, there is the famous joke "we lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume".
If you scale a low margin operation, you can become giant. If you scale a loss making operation, you go bankrupt.
Yup - the subscriptions are a VC subsidy. They've been phasing their enterprise customers directly onto API-pay-per-usage pricing (hence the recent reports from Uber and Microsoft about phasing out Claude code). Rest assured, many of their customers are happy paying for the value they get from Claude code.
The subscription is the loss leader to show you how good it is. And people think it's good and worth paying for.
There is some reason to think their margins will improve, also: they couldn't really plan for the capacity they've needed so far this year, so they're paying through the nose for it. That's fine because they can pass the cost onto customers and give a more reliable service at cost. But in a few years, they should be able to get those costs under control (presuming some ops excellence. Something Google has in spades)
Commentary and criticism are by law protected as fair use. Why would revenue share be done "ideally"? News reporting is also covered under fair use, do you expect news organizations to pay for reporting on movies?
Ideally fair use would be defended, it is the law of the land, and when a takedown notice was emitted maliciously, with known bad faith, the actor that did that would have to pay for the amount of time that the legal content was down.
I believe the parent comment was saying that the YT poster should have gotten some revenue share. Since the work they put in would in theory be enhancing the original work. Obviously these sort of things are created and consumed primarily by “super fans” who probably buy director cuts etc etc .
At least that’s how I read the comment and I agree.
I don't think those laws will last. They were written in the 70s before youtube. Ideally the law would allow the critique but recongize it's the IP drawing in the users, and sharing some of the revenue.
Fair use was common law with judicial precedents for a couple hundred years before it became a statutory law in 1976.
Why would fair use law go away? Fair use for the purpose of critique is maybe the best & most favored defense of fair use by the Copyright Office, and ties together necessary copyright exceptions for supporting Free Speech and journalism, among other good reasons. Things also seem to be moving in the opposite direction with recent precedent deeming some AI uses transformative fair use. YouTube has done more that it’s fair share of playing fast and loose with copyrights for a profit, but YouTube, and more broadly Google, depends on fair use for massive portions of their business. I don’t see fair use going anywhere anytime soon.
I never said you shouldn't be able to use it, I only said you should have to share revenue if you use someone else's work. "fair use" and critique would still be a thing.
I don't know if fair use laws will last, but I hope they do, and definitely disagree that sharing revenue would somehow be ideal.
I've read criticism of media I've never even heard of (and learned some insightful things), so clearly the original IP isn't always the pull, and even if it was I don't understand how talking about something suddenly means I need to pay the person who owns the intellectual property of the thing I'm talking about. I think it would make criticism less likely and put us in an even worse situation than today, when large corporations often use the DMCA to take down clearly fair-use criticism. Just a further stifling of speech.
Also, fair use has been around since the eighteenth century, even if in the US the US 1976 Copyright Act made fair use statutory.
Can't answer for others, but I look at this law from the viewpoint of foreign workers, cause I am a foreigner worker. In Canada. Decided to absolutely never immigrate to the US due to the US blatant rise in xenophobia.
And the US has proven me correct over and over again in that assessment. Will watch with great pleasure the brain drain your country will face, and I honestly hope your economy will completely collapse.
> I honestly hope your economy will completely collapse.
The U.S. passed restrictive immigration laws in 1921. The foreign born population dropped to under 5% by 1970 (compared to 15% today). The decade on either side of that was a golden age for Silicon Valley.
For the record, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Patrick and John Collison, and Jerry Yang are foreign-born. Probably more would not have been here if their parents had not been allowed to immigrate. Now that you mention it, I would trade a few of them away, but I doubt the market would like to erase their work.
I don't have a particular love for any of them, but the point was they generated billions in value for the valley in what some consider a golden age.
Google at least, I think people would say there was a period of near-universally believing it was a good thing, and an immigrant was a co-founder.
It definitely shaped our society. And if you think it's for the worse, might that suggest college-educated Anglo-adapting immigrants are more dangerous to us than the ones right-wingers are telling us to focus on?
Sergey Brin recently said having to pay taxes on his 280 billion to the state took him in and where he built his business was akin to the horrors of boleshivsm that his family fled from.
That is your “good” immigrant. He is the right winger.
The original point was only that a Silicon Valley "golden age" can coexist with immigration. Admittedly it could be a better argument if it holistically made a recommendation, but at least as a starting point it tries to refute that idea.
It can but not under the current system. People are far less likely to support social safety nets in a high immigration society. There just isn’t the social cohesion and trust necessary.
So in your ancap ideal, producers are not getting anything, why would I sign a contract with them if I can just copy it?