The point this article makes, that suddenly agents can do the work of customizing free software, completely makes sense. But, the reality is that the Free Software movement is opposed to the way Lemons are built today, and would not accept a world like this. (Rightfully!)
My belief is that Lemons effectively kill open source in the long run, and generally speaking, people forget that Free Software is even a thing. The reasoning for that is simple: it’s too easy to produce a “clean” derivative with just the parts you need. Lemons do much better with a fully Lemoned codebase than they do with a hybrid. Incentives to “rewrite” also free people from “licensing burdens” while the law is fuzzy.
The key to this argument is that we won’t need to rely on Anthropic/OpenAI soon — will they exist in the same way they do today in 12-18 months? The “open” models are getting better and better, and people are figuring out ways to make inference run on lesser hardware. It already might be viable for people that don’t expect “instantaneous” and are doing more hybrid development.
But you’re also never going to convince the people who still only run vi on the Linux console, without Xorg…
I was hoping someone made this comment! It remains high on my list of Frontalot songs. Big fan of “I’ll Form the Head” and “Stoop Sale” also from that album as well.
I honestly don’t remember what the frame rate was, but it definitely improved when I upgraded to a Pentium 100. I distinctly remember a buddy giving me some RAM (2x4MB) which allowed me to play on the 486. I was so happy!
The DX2s _were_ a significant improvement over the 486DX, but I’ll admit, I might be remembering the excitement of getting to play Quake at all! The framerate may have been 15-20 fps and I just dealt with it,
The minimum requirements, on the box, were apparently Pentium 75Mhz. 8MB (DOS), or 16 RAM (WIN95).
> Anthropic claiming that its total revenue since January 2025 as $5 billion contradict that its expected run-rate revenue for the year 2026 is $19 billion?
Isn’t the “exceeding $5BN” comment a lifetime revenue? … on $30BN (edit: previously said spent) raised (or something ridiculous.)
A lot of the commentary on the frontier model companies is based on how much money they’ve spent to the relatively small amount they’ve made in return, and the skepticism, especially given almost continuous reporting, that deploying AI in a variety of situations doesn’t seem to yield favorable business outcomes. OpenAI shifting to enterprise / coding type stuff this week seems, also, potentially informative. Is Gen AI actually useful for anything but code? Signs keep pointing to no… and even then, we’re in the early stages of figuring out how to build without destroying everything… something Amazon just recognized as possible with their recent shopping outage.
> There’s probably more I built that I have already forgotten about.
This is a big gripe of mine at the moment. I rarely have any confidence that I know how the thing works, or what additional things it does / does not do but which I expect.
Recent example: all API endpoints should require a bearer token. Imagine my surprise when half of them didn’t enforce this effectively, 3 days later. A bearer token would work, but also providing no bearer token would also work. Over the course of time, tests were removed / things were modified to get to the goal and say “done, boss!”
I’ll note that for this project, “don’t look at the source code” was a requirement. Things have been corrected before release, but the amount of potential foot guns is so damn high.
> with their demands that the government already knows exactly where they live, where they hang out…
You’d think this, and then you hear about how long it took the FBI to locate aaronsw (rip), who lived life online, and left lots of clues to his general location, but somehow the only place the FBI ever looked was 1,000 miles away? I guess you could say that was 15 years ago, but we had domestic spy programs 15 years ago, too.
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