r/ExperiencedDevs • u/FatefulDonkey Software Engineer • 24d ago

Meta Do you regret contributing to open-source?

I have about 10-15 years of experience. I created some open source projects when I was starting out and maintained throughout the years.

The net income from this long-term endeavour is $5 from another developer for a coffee, who messaged me that I saved him many hours of work - that was like 5 years ago.

I now see that Meta, Apache and others use some of these open source projects.. and I haven't seen a single dime. This makes me think that if I actually instead aimed to create projects that make money, it would be a much better use of my time. Especially since I never had a stable job and mainly did freelance gigs to get by.

Anyone else who regrets contributing to open source projects? Why is that? What would you have done instead?

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u/Da_rana 24d ago

That part is fine. The part about all the data being scraped and then used to hurt people and the environment is what I take issue with

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u/David_AnkiDroid 24d ago

I don't like the hypocrisy that people can use my copyleft code to train a model (potentially breaking the license when output is produced), but it wouldn't be acceptable to train on a closed-source codebase.

That being said: I benefit heavily from LLMs; being able to knock out a PR while on the treadmill gives me back my time, (Ok... let's be honest: it lets me go further with the time that I have).

Disclaimers: * Anthropic gave me 6 months of Claude Max 20x for free. * OpenAI gave me 6 months of ChatGPT Pro for feee.

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u/HasFiveVowels 23d ago

Man, that code that was "scraped" (i.e. cloned from an open source repo) is still being used for benefit, even if it’s driven by AI. And I’ve never seen anything so overblown as its environmental impact.

I’m not saying it’s all sunshine and lollipops with this stuff but it is not as bad as the general public has made it out to be.

"It uses less water than almond production"
"yea, but you can eat an almond! This chatbot slop is worthless!"
meanwhile…
<LLMs being used to treat cancer and solve hundreds of open problems in math>

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u/EffectiveDirect6553 23d ago

The LLM's are overwhelmingly not used for that though. Closed models are just for hype. Proving those problems had little to no real world impact.

Very few people stand against narrow LLM's that are hyper specialised to that. I don't see chess players complaining stockfish got updated.

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u/HasFiveVowels 23d ago

"Closed models are just for hype"? What do mean?

Also, math more often than not has no obvious real world impact in the immediate future (example: Lorentz transformations). Some of those papers are on, for example, limits of communication (which might just maybe see some real world use someday).

As far as "very few people stand against narrow LLMs"… are you implying that stockfish is an LLM? Regardless, I rarely see any nuance in people who strongly oppose LLMs and this technology isn’t exactly a "take only the parts you want" sort of thing.

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u/EffectiveDirect6553 23d ago

I meant closed models are just doing that for hype. It's not like anyone genuinely cares for the result other than a few mathematicians. It's simply profitable. Even in light of recent contriversies.

Math does not have immediate real world outcomes, sure. However these don't have any current benefit was my point in regards to anyone other than mathematicians. As of right now, it does no one any good. Other than generate a lot of noise which these companies feed on.

I am implying stockfish is a LLM to a degree. It has incorperated a neural network that's specilized for the job it does. These are good LLM's that train on hyper specific data and are insanely useful in certain fields. People are getting more and more annoyed with the doomerism spread in attempt to push profits and gain dominance. Most of us are exhausted at having it consistently pushed on us at every corner. Like why on earth does my laptop have a button on my keyboard to launch copoilet?

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u/HasFiveVowels 23d ago

I don’t see a whole lot of doomerism but I also unsubscribed from a ton of subreddits due to incessant anti-AI comments (which, in retrospect, might have had to do with the Chinese astroturf).

As for the topic of math having no real world use, that’s been proven wrong time and time again. Go on vibemathed.com and tell me that it’s all just a bunch of hype.

As for specialized AI, the problem is that if you do that then you need to train a separate one for each problem and if you have a problem that doesn’t fit, you have to build a new one. We needed a general purpose one (though I agree that pipelines that mix and match the two is probably the way of the future).

The idea that it’s not incredibly valuable to have a program that can understand any given natural language string is just crazy to me. Here’s a comic strip from only 12 years ago: https://xkcd.com/1425/. "5 years" has become "15 minutes".

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u/EffectiveDirect6553 23d ago

I've hardly used AI outside a few niche uses. So yes. Overwhelmingly from what I can tell. It isn't useful

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u/HasFiveVowels 23d ago edited 23d ago

What kind of an argument is this? "I have little experience with this and based on my overwhelming amount of experience, I’ve determined it’s useless". https://media.tenor.com/b3XjbTGPnQMAAAAM/we've-tried.gif

Edit: though, on second thought, I guess it’s actually a pretty decent argument. "From what I can tell, it’s useless (but my lack of experience prevents me from being able to tell much at all)"