Adam Stacoviak: That makes sense, because if they can knock down all that red tape, all that minutiae in the process, the bureaucracy of that buying process, PO numbers and accounts payable - it can be a nightmare if you have no patience, or you don’t wanna spend your time there, which I would imagine you would much rather just write code, or handle non-existent pull requests, or hang in discussions, or whatever… I’m just kidding, but - that would be a better use of your time. And if GitHub could level the playing field globally, at a corporation level, and remove that red tape, and make it as easy as just a relationship thing, rather than saying “Let me ask my Accounts Payable department, let me talk to my boss…” GitHub’s already sort of leveled the playing field and made corporations who do wanna pour back into or buy these guys of would-be products from open source developers like yourself - that would be pretty cool.

Chris Benson: I’m curious, as we talk about the applicability of this, for for instance large corporations, and… I work for one of those large corporations which built its own interface some time back; and others will have well. But going forward, that takes a lot of maintenance, a lot of concern. If you were in front of like a chief digital and AI officer or a CTO for a large corporation, and it may have already created its own, what would be your pitch for saying “Come over to LibreChat because of x”? How would you convince the Fortune 500 companies that are out there that this is the way to go, rather than investing on their own, compared to whatever investment they’ve already made that sunk costs?

Jerod Santo: Because if it’s AGPL, for instance, some companies are just like “Well, we can’t use that.” Or if it’s GPL, they say “We can’t use that.” If it’s MIT, BSD, blah, blah… And so to a certain extent, I feel like even as – I was an indie dev, so I was just making decisions based on what was best for my customers, not what my boss at a corporation said… But I still didn’t want to back them into a corner unnecessarily. So I had to care a little bit, and I guess get into the weeds… But you think this is a different distinction than that.

Danese Cooper: [16:13] You know that those licenses, even today, all but the AGPL, are still trigger on distribution of the code. People don’t really distribute code so much anymore, because now we have software as a service, so as the pendulum swings back and forth between client server and peer-to-peer - we’re kind of in a peer-to-peer place now… And there isn’t distribution happening, there’s no separation, so most of the requirements that you give back are gone now, except in rare cases, and they’re in places where the software is going to meatspace like the automotive industry. There’s still lots of GPL violations going on in places like that, because the code is distributed physically in a product; it’s not a server-oriented thing.

Back in the day, the free software people really genuinely felt that they had to compel anyone who touched the code to give back changes. When we were explaining licensing to corporations, we used to say “For a free software person, the worst thing that could happen is a piece of code gets used in a non-free way, and for the permissive people, the worst thing that can happen is a piece of code doesn’t get used.” [laughter] It was really that simple.

The Apache people were like “Look, we would much rather have gifts of code that people wanna give us - they’re gonna be higher quality than gifts of code that people have to give us, and they’re gonna do the least they must in order to fulfill that obligation”, right?

Chad Whitacre: You know - gosh, 10 years ago now, around this. In 2017 I did this exercise where – we’re talking about like there’s this whole like feeling of fairness, that’s sort of like if it’s not explicit, it’s like right below the surface, of like “Hey, I’m doing all this work in open source, and I’m giving away this work, and I’m kind of motivated by generosity and giving away all this code, and at some point maybe I start to feel a little resentful that giant corporations are using my work, and not contributing anything back.”

So there’s this like this whole dynamic of fairness and what’s fair. Yeah, so that was an exercise in trying to pause and say, “Okay, so what is fair? What would be fair?” And I tried to kind of reason from first principles, to be like, “Well –” I’m trying to get the post up here to remind myself, but it was basically like trying to come up with some estimates about what does the open source community contribute to the global economy? What’s the total value that the open source community contributes to the global economy, and then divide that by the number of software developers in the world. I think I came up with some number - there’s like 20 million software developers in the world, and open source contributes like a trillion dollars, or whatever. Does that math come out right? So it came out to like, long story short, $2,000 per engineer at a company. That’s kind of like the value that the company gets out of having this open source smorgasbord that they can pick from.

Preethi Kasireddy: Yeah, that’s a good observation and I totally agree. Don’t you feel it’s the same way with a giant corporation like Facebook, where they have database stuff going back ten years, and they have two billion users or something now? I don’t know how it’s any different, and they’re actually processing way more data than the blockchain is today.

Jerod Santo: So what’s the process inside of Google? I know you’re formalizing things now, and again, I feel like a lot of these things - especially when you’re native open source… It goes way back as the things tend to grow organically or as corporations get larger and larger; as you said, you started to have more and more access controls and things like these that must come into place. What’s the process of being an engineer with some source code here on a local Git repo, and I want to take that out and open it up to the world - how do I go about it? Is there a license forced upon me? What are you guys’ process for going about open source?

Adam Stacoviak: [01:15:59.16] On that note, I see this happening, too; I see Microsoft commercials, and there was a time when I was like “I just want them to come back in a good way”, and this was like 4-5 years ago. And I think they have been coming back. There’s a side of Microsoft that is like this corporation, and then there’s this product side, and there’s the side that you’re on, which is supporting and loving developers, and rethinking the way they think as a corporation about technology and the people that make it. And I’ve been – I love Microsoft; I think they’re doing great, and I love what you’re saying here about how they’re supporting the community.

I think - listeners out there, I don’t have a ton of knowledge about it, but I’m just for Microsoft. I think it’s great what they’re doing, and I’m excited about that, because we need more people like that, more things like that happening.

Jerod Santo: Sure. And I’m not saying baseline browser features. I’m saying it would need – I know you chose the differentiating factors. But also, I think speed, performance, battery use, these are things that are also very important, alongside privacy and security. So there’s a lot of things that go into making a compelling browser. If we might just hop that conversation back over to Tauri, one thing that you said - it was probably 15 minutes ago now - that I was like “This is interesting. This is a change in perspective for you”, when you were talking about Electron and competition and cooperation, and VCs, and Tauri, you said that you set out to make a better Electron; you didn’t make that, you made something different, and it’s better than Electron in some ways, and it’s worse than Electron in some ways. And I would love if you’d just take a few moments to draw that out for people… Because a lot of us, Daniel, are still in a point where we’re thinking about Tauri and we’re just – we’re not as far down the line as you are in your thinking. We’re thinking “Should I use this, or should I use Electron?” We’re thinking about tooling. And so that’s a very interesting thing, is like just that comparison of the two, coming from your mouth, about what is Electron better at than Tauri, and vice versa.

Beau Perschall: For me, one, there’s almost nothing to not be excited about, including generative AI. But for me, when it comes to Sim Ready and kind of my focus is really the sophistication of what we’re trying to achieve with AI. It’s starting to kind of understand what the value is today and how you start to extend it forward, so that we can start to extrapolate out much further forward. Building that bi-directional communication between the simulated world and the real world - wow. I cannot wait to see how that starts to really kind of manifest, where you have data cleanly flowing both ways, and things start to synchronize, so that you’re not just simulating at this point, you’re now kind of replicating things that way. I think that’s huge.

I was lucky enough to be around when 3D first kind of went mainstream, where you could have computer PCs, consumer PCs, instead of $50,000 workstations that could do 3D. And with AI, I feel like we’re kind of in that similar early phase of creation and understanding, so that there is just this enormous green field in front of us to kind of explore. And it’s going to take all of us, too. It’s not just NVIDIA. I want to make that clear. We’re focusing on things that we feel we have distinct advantages on, but we need collaborators. Again, it’s back to the adage of “How do you build the internet?” With a lot of people and a lot of cooperation. There’s so much opportunity for across the board that we’ve all got to kind of pull together and do it.

Robert Griesemer: I can try. Maybe not a real stab, but maybe a little explanation. So this cooperation, I should say, happened because Rob Pike actually reached out to Phil Wadler. They knew each other from way back, and Phil Wadler was interested, and then we started talking with Phil Wadler and with Rob Pike… He didn’t really have time to produce a beta in this, but then Phil Wadler, Ian Taylor and I started talking about what we wanna do… And they have, of course, a strong background in type theory. Phil Wadler has done this – not the same work, of course, but similar work, many years ago, for Java, so he’s really an expert.

[07:56] So now we have a whole team - it’s not just him - that have been working on this Featherweight Generic Go… Which is based on Go, but very much slimmed down. So we now have a language that really only has type declarations and methods. And those type declarations are only interfaces and only structures (structs), and the only thing you can have is methods and interfaces, of course, and methods associated with structs… And inside those methods you can only have basically single functional expressions. So it’s a very, very simplified language, but what you can do is you can invoke a method.

In this paper, he explores two situations this Featherweight Go, which is like the basic Go, simplified Go, without any generics [unintelligible 00:08:45.28] which is that basic, simplified Go, extended with generic features. And those generic features are very much modeled along the draft design, with the exception of type lists. So those type parameters, as in the draft design - the type parameters have what in the paper is called type bounds (we call them now constraints), and there are interfaces, there are also interfaces in the paper, and they basically model in a very simplified fashion what the design draft is trying to do with real Go.

The goal of this paper is to prove, first of all, that this is a sensible design, in the sense that the type system that we’re creating here is sound; you cannot create situations where you could write a program that would be unsound in terms of the type system. And then also, they tried to prove and have proven that it is possible to translate such a simplified generic Go program into a regular Go program, through a process which is called monomorphization, basically expanding everything for every possible instantiation of these generic functions and types… And then they prove that these programs are basically [unintelligible 00:10:06.22]

That’s the gist of this paper, and this gives us very strong confidence that they’re a) not designing somewhere into the blue, and b) that what we’re designing actually makes sense from a type system point of view. We’re not gonna hopefully find problems down the road, where we have some internal inconsistency. So I think that’s really the benefit…

I think it really helped us also understand a little bit better what it means to have interfaces as constraints, and how we need to type-check this. So I think there is a real synergy here.

Julian Duque: And we have a centralized place where we have the most active members of those communities, their leaders, organizers, and it’s a good way to start seeing how not only the cooperation and collaboration between JavaScript communities all around one nation, but all their differing technologies can learn from each other. We collaborate and contribute with the Python, the Ruby community, Java functional programming… Different tech communities that are spawning all around the region.

[32:28] We are working on helping to sponsor them, showing how they can be better organizers, they are knowing each other, they come to maybe one of the conferences we organize in Colombia, which is like a centralized place where all of these people meet… And from those events, more communities and more efforts are always being born in the country. It’s a beautiful effect.

Another thing we also want to show is that it is a cycle. This started from one small event that I was part of as an attendee, Juan Pablo was organizing, and then we met and started working together, then Juan Pablo was in JSConf US [33:15] back in…

David Chase: Well, so when you run SSA, it tends to break up variable lifetimes into smaller chunks; so they’ll go in and out of registers… Right now they’re still homed to the same stack slot, but over this basic block it might be in a register, and then a little while later it might be in a different register, so we have to emit the debugging information that describes that value movement in and out of registers. That’s something that we really want to get done at 1.10.

We have been getting more and more trouble with loop. So I’ve mentioned that the cooperative scheduling in Go is enforced by the compiler, and right now it’s kind of lightly enforced. It enforces it when you enter a function or method. But if you are running in a tight loop that has no function calls within it, it does not enforce any cooperation there. This is a particular problem - Rhys Hiltner mentioned this in his tutorial or his talk also at GopherCon - where the garbage collector needs to interrupt all the threads right at the beginning of a GC, just for a few microseconds, but it does need to interrupt all of them. It does this by asking them to reschedule themselves; they all reschedule, they discover that a garbage collection is in process and they go stand in a corner and wait till the GC does its thing and then says “Yeah, back in the pool. Go!”

[16:21] Then there’s this one guy running a tight loop, and the GC tries to tap him on the shoulder and he does not respond… And does not respond, and does not respond, and does not respond, so everything hangs up, and it can be an appreciable fraction of your pause time for GC. In some rare cases, it can be long.

We need to fix that and we need to change the compiler to add a preemption check on every loop package. The problem with that is it slows down your loops a little bit, and some loops it slows down a lot. So there’s follow-up work to try to figure out if we can mitigate this cost using a clever implementation. We have already tried loop unrolling, and for whatever reason it was not helpful. Either we did it wrong… We probably did it wrong, because we did it kind of in a very bloody-minded way. Just take the loop, don’t get smart about the indexing or anything, just do the check over and over – I wanna say make two copies of the body, but check after every execution of the body, so twice per loop, whereas in many counted loops you could say “Well, I’m gonna unroll by two, increment by two, and then I’ll worry about the odd case at the end.” We didn’t do anything that clever… So that’s also for 1.10, dealing with that and the knock-on problems there.

The garbage collector guys are looking into whether they can make generational collection work, and that will add a write barrier that’s gonna be on all the time, which will then motivate – it’s still like a lot harder to write barrier optimizations. I don’t know who’s gonna be doing that. It might be me, it might be somebody else, but we’re certainly motivated to look at it.

Stefano Maffulli: Yeah, they’re self-serving, they try to be self-serving, and they’re trying to destroy the comments that way, quite visibly. I think that users see through them. And it’s not even in their interests, but you know how it works - sometimes corporations, their greed goes up to… They care only about the next quarter, and who cares about what happens next? Maybe the next CEO will have to take care meanwhile, and they’re just going to laugh all the way to the bank. And that is the approach that I’ve seen many of these people who complain, or who try to redefine open source because it doesn’t serve the purpose - what we maintain, it doesn’t fully serve their purpose. So instead of respecting the comments and share the ideas, they act like bullies and find all sorts of excuses to redefine. I’ve seen it happening. I’ve been in free software and open source most of my career, since I was in my 20s, and I’ve seen what was happening with the early days, with the proprietary Unix guys that were going around telling us that “This Linux thing is never going to work. You’re joking.” Then they started to be scared and started saying “Hey, you’re giving away your jewels. Why are you doing this, depriving us of our life support? Our families - we’re gonna be begging on the street.” I remember having this conversation with a sales guy from [unintelligible 00:21:49.20] And Microsoft coming up with a program in the 90s, early 2000s, The Shared Source Program, because they just could not wrap their head around the fact that you could make money sharing your source code. But they were forced by the market to show at least a little bit of what was happening behind the scenes. They were losing deals.

So we’ve seen it already… They’re gonna keep on going like this, but there is plenty of interest in maintaining – plenty more forces on the other side to maintain, to keep the bar straight, to keep going where we’re going… Because that clarity is – it’s such a powerful instrument to be able to say “I’m open source, therefore I know what I can do, I know what I cannot do”, and have that collaboration straightened up. The legal departments, the compliance departments, the public tenders, they all tend to have a very clear and speedy review of processes… That instead if everyone has a different understanding of what open source means… You know, “Do we go back to the brand”, right? And I’m in Italy now, and I’m surprised to see a lot of Starbucks stores opening. And I’m absolutely baffled. Like “Why is this happening? This country has plenty of bars.” At every quarter there’s a cafe with a decent coffee. Why do you need a brand? It’s because people have been going around, traveling the world, they see the brand, they recognize it, they know what they can do, they know what they’re gonna get, and they go there. And it’s the same with open source.

Break: [00:23:37.14]

Pia Mancini: I think that the way we think about collectives - we see them as new human and economic unions; we see the collective as the new economic unit that exists in the world and the community. And the community doesn’t fit the assumptions that the financial system has of how organizations operate. Our system thinks of organizations as corporations. Whether they are for-profit or non-profit, it doesn’t matter… But corporations are hierarchical organizations, they have a president, they have a command and control structure of sorts, they are anchored in a territory you have to be incorporated somewhere… And the associations of the internet generation are not incorporated anywhere in the world.

We really set out to serve that community, we really set out to serve associations of the internet generation, and we define how open collectives are and should operate. Open collectives are very fluid structures, they are bottom-up, they have core contributors, end contributors, they’re transparent by design, they operate in the open, and they need a way to get funding without necessarily having their own legal entity or their bank account, because they don’t want to have a president, they don’t want to have equity. That’s not how they operate.

I think that we really hit a very difficult problem, and the need for Open Collective became very clear for us. We keep seeing different examples and different collectives from different spaces joining, that are not only open source. We discovered the most acute challenges that they face, we’re trying to solve them, and the challenges that we face as a company, as an organization, and we set out to solve them, as well.

I think we’re in a really good place at the moment, where we’ve figured out what we’re doing, we’ve figured out who we’re doing it for, we’ve figured out the problems that we face or the challenges that we face, and what we need to focus on now is how do we scale and how do we grow.

So that’s where we are at, and we are facing – I don’t wanna say a decision, because we already made it, because it’s who we are, but we decided that we wanna grow in a horizontal way or a decentralized way. We do not wanna grow as a classical company that just grows a lot of engineers, or is growing in hiring and staffing. What we want to do is to build Open Collective in a way that anyone can contribute to it, and that different services can be built on Open Collective for the collectives, and that collectives can sell projects, products or services to each other.

We just wanna be the infrastructure on top of which this whole economy for collectives takes place and develops, but we don’t necessarily wanna develop all of it ourselves. On the contrary, we really wanna be the foundation, the plumbing, and enable anyone to start building on top of it…

[28:03] So we think of ourselves a little bit as a browser, that essentially abstracts that operating system, and you operate just on that level. And we want Open Collective to be the browser for all of the collectives, the interactions, and their growth and how they thrive, and to take place without worrying about the government, the operating system, the fiscal sponsorship, the money etc.

Mike McQuaid: It’s one of those things for open source that you don’t really understand until you run a big project for a while. When your project has no possession effectively, then there’s not really a need as much for a thing like Software Freedom Conservancy. The problem is when you have – we had a Kickstarter a few years ago which was really great, that let us buy some Mac Minis which we used for our CI. As I get older - thankfully not that old, and I’m a bit of a paranoid person anyway - part of me is like, “Okay, well these CI’s are in a data center that a friend of mine runs on OSP in the UK, and we have a bunch of money in a bank account, which again, I have access to, but other people have credentials too, and stuff like that. What happens to those servers if I get hit by a car? What happens when they go down? What happens to the money in that bank account?”

That stuff gets a little bit more worrying and it becomes one of these things where you think, “Well, it’s actually not very responsible of me just assuming that this project will survive my health”, and it also means that if I ever did want to or have to step away from the project, then the unwrangling of me from the project could be a lot more difficult.

[01:12:06.03] What the Software Freedom Conservancy provides is a legal entity to own these things, and a legal entity to… If Homebrew ever got sued for whatever reason, then the Software Freedom Conservancy would defend us. On top of that as well, they’re a 501(c)(3) for non-Americans and a nonprofit in the U.S., which makes it a lot easier to accept donations, which are tax-deductible for individuals and corporations to provide. We’ve not managed to do a mass amount of fundraising yet; that’s probably my next big project, to try and lean in on that a bit more, because our recurring monthly revenue is zero, but basically just all those things that kind of help provide some more infrastructure and architecture around the governance and running of the project.

Anthony Eden: I’m pretty sure they’re at least over a thousand people. So they run – not only they run the organization around the oversight of names, but it’s also numbers. It’s in their name, right? The Internet Corporation for Assignment of Names and Numbers. They also manage essentially IANA, and all of these IP address assignments. And what they do is it’s multi-stakeholder, so they really deal a lot with lots of different groups, from government agencies, from organizations, from corporations, from registries, registrars, from security groups… All these different parties, and they have to constantly get them together, both virtually and in-person, and try to negotiate the operation of the internet.

And so yeah, I think that was an example of something that I nerded out on, just these policy things. I don’t know, it’s just a nerd – I can go to any one of these events, whether it’s an event like that where it’s policy, or go to an event where it’s more technical, and I just feel at home there. And so going back to the original questions, “After 15 years, how can I still do this?”, it’s because after 15 years it hasn’t stopped being interesting, as technology, and as just a foundational part of the internet. I think that’s really cool.

Jerod Santo: Yeah. Alright, next up, Rusty Nail.

[01:11:43.11]

Hello there, listeners. My favorite moments of the year are, number one - big thanks for remastering “10,000 hours of deliberate programming.” That was my overall favorite episode for the two plus years that I’ve listened to the podcast.

And I’ve been meaning to come back to that episode. However, I don’t have to do that, now that I relistened to it again in the main feed. Number two, in Go Time 332, the discussion of the founder mode led me to a conclusion that I’ve always had it in myself, but I didn’t know how it was called… And during this summer, on one of the interviews I was asked what made me an outlier among my peers and co-workers. And now I know what should have been the answer, which at the moment I did not. Now I am prepared for the next one.

In the episode 611 of Changelog I was really excited to hear the voices of the core Python developer team. I’ve programmed in Python all my career, and I have never interacted with these people in any way. Hearing the voices, I was genuinely excited about it.

In Practical AI 257 it was mentioned how the role of corporate culture and non-tech people impacts the AI adoption in big corporations and organizations. And that was an eye-opening moment for me. So I was really excited to hear that.

Number five - my absolute favorite episode of the year is when the secret service or police was knocking on the door… I think it was episode 609, for not even hacking, but vulnerability reporting. And with a few of the jokes that went along with the story.

Next, we share a fun fact in our morning stand-ups, and the day I learned about the bus factor from the Changelog & Friends number 70, I had to share the fun fact. I shared with the team what the bus factor was, but it was actually called morbid by our CEO.

And finally, I think we’re missing an insane hiring market episode this year… And this was the year that I shifted my job. First time over the last five years. And if you are going to do it, I do have a question to ask… It’s more like a paradox. If everyone complains about not having enough talent and people to hire, when you apply for a job at some company, you never hear anything back if you don’t have any connections there. How does this paradox happen?

Chris Benson: You had a few some months back the actors going on strike… But I just think that it’s one of those things we have a long way to go; not just in entertainment, but in most industries, where it’s going to – you’re going to see corporate videos that are AI-generated. I’ve already seen that. I may not have seen the Coke one, but I’ve seen corporations that are doing it. It’s the way it is now.

Autumn Nash: It’s like, you know when your friend always posts the best food pictures on Instagram, and then you ask them for a taco place recommendation, but you feel like you can trust them? It’s people in those communities making starter packs. So it’s not a corporation pushing it on you, or pushing the people that they hired to be in this community, but it’s like you’re – the other community member’s showcasing who they are interested in following, and I really like that aspect.

I think like Blue Sky is being very – the growth is from the community. It’s from people, and it’s getting back to the part that we really enjoyed about Twitter. Like, the people in the community that was there; that was the cool part of Twitter. It wasn’t Twitter, you know? So I think if we can get everybody in one place, this is what we’ve been looking for for so long.

Quincy Larson: Absolutely. And I’ve been pretty – like, we don’t really care one way or the other. We’re thinking over longer time horizons, and I think it’ll correct over time. The number of developer openings is back to where it was around 2020, pre-pandemic. During the pandemic, and everything, there was tons of money, and interest rates were really low, and there was stimulus and all this stuff… And interests spiked. freeCodeCamp, there were days where we were getting more than one million – like two million visits a day, or something like that. We had like a single article that was just blowing up and getting, I don’t know, 10+ million views, or something like that. It was just a collection of free online university courses.

But that had its moment, and we were going viral, so to speak, as the pandemic was going viral and trapping everybody in their homes, and stuff. And so yeah, absolutely, that was a huge year for us, and now we’re kind of having this regression to a mean.

But the difference now is the attitude. The vibe is different now in 2024 than it was in 2022. And I think a lot of that is because employers - they overhired, because they just wanted to grab a whole bunch of talent and hoard it. And that was like “We’ve got all this talent. If we need it, we can use it. We have plenty of cash.” Apple, Google, all these giant corporations have tons of cash, they don’t know what to spend it on, so they were spending it on talent, bringing a bunch of people on, that they didn’t necessarily need, and just doing lots of speculative projects.

But what happened was when the going got a little bit tougher, they’re like “Hey, let’s cut some of these people loose”, and so the market was flooded with mid-level engineers, and it became extremely difficult as an entry level engineer to find really anything.

And so that sentiment spread, and I think it’s definitely harder to get a job now than it was in 2022 as a developer, and people, I think, are blaming AI and the jobs being automated. But what’s really at fault, the real cause - and AI may be a contributor, at least in deluded managers’ minds; they may think [unintelligible 00:29:05.00] A lot of people just looked at Elon Musk and said “Oh, he fired everybody, and Twitter’s still up.” Yeah, Twitter’s still up. But I can tell you as a frequent user of Twitter that it is a shadow of its former self, and that I see a lot of nastiness on Twitter that I didn’t see before… And the features have not been super – I don’t think it’s a [unintelligible 00:29:22.08] company, frankly. Bot that it was ever a [unintelligible 00:29:26.17] company. Mark Zuckerberg used to joke that Twitter was like a clown car that accidentally crashed into a goldmine. And if you read the book Hatching Twitter, it’s like what not to do as a leader. basically.

But my point is, a lot of people look to people like Elon Musk, who’s just like “Fire everybody.” And so you see this hurting. You see all these managers laying people off… And even Apple, which historically never laid people off… Not since the 1990s had they done a layoff… And they laid people off. You know something’s bad when Apple, which has, I don’t know, more than $100 billion in cash that it’s just holding, and it’s choosing to lay people off. And it’s not because it’s – it’s because they overhired, in my opinion, and because now the cost of capital is much higher, and interest rates have changed… And there’s a lot more uncertainty with AI.

[00:30:16.00] I think the uncertainty is much more significant than the actual net improvement in productivity as an individual developer. So you have managers who think “Oh, I can just have one developer do the job of 10 developers if they’re using AI.” I don’t believe that to be the case. I use AI all the time. I probably talk to LLMs more than I talk to any single human being other than my wife and my kids.

Justin Garrison: [00:49:19.27] I mean, the last 10 years have had a lot of influx in various ways… I just watched the Node.js documentary on YouTube. I’m not a Node developer, but fascinating politics on how they weren’t adapting Node to solve some use cases that many large corporations needed… And so they literally forked Node.js, and they’re like “If you’re not going to put this in a neutral foundation, we’re not coming back, basically.” And they did the open source thing. The thing that open source should be able to do under an actual open source license, and all that stuff. They can fork it, they can own it. But then as soon as it had to come back, it’s just like “Oh, now we have a foundation that owns it neutrally, and there’s multiple people that–” But also, a lot of it is pay to play. And that makes me – a lot of it is just like “Oh, CNCF, if you’re on the board, you paid to get there.” You’re paying millions of dollars into this foundation, supporting this as a “We need this open source to exist.” But as a startup, I can’t do that. I can’t get the same voice, I can’t get the same access to that stuff.

Chris Benson: I think there is. And I love – the reason we put this first is because as huge supporters of open source and people being able to kind of control their own destiny with data science, and machine learning, and AI technologies, I love having these companies that are out there, supporting open source… And it gives us options. And so if you just want to do the open source yourself, and maybe you’re just a data scientist working on your own side project or something, you can do it. Or if you’re a corporation and you’re looking to have dependable partners to work with around open source, you’ve got that, too. So in its own funny way, it makes it more accessible to a wider audience, and gives us those choices, and I just love it when companies are doing that.

Just as a two second aside, it’s one of the things that surprised me with Facebook and their models as they’re open-sourcing it, which the other big companies we’ve historically talked about aren’t. But back to Probable - what are some of the things you see in this announcement that really get you going, Daniel?

Chris Benson: Alrighty. So as we change gears just a little bit, I had noticed a couple of interesting things. So I spend a lot of time talking to different folks kind of in the Fortune 500, Fortune 100 world. I work at a big company, but I have a lot of friends and former colleagues at other companies, and we chit-chat about these things… So something has really come up in a whole bunch of conversations lately for me. And I thought “Wow, if I’m talking about it this much with different friends of mine, it probably is a good topic to talk about on the show.” It’s an interesting observation, and that is, for those of you who are familiar with the organization Gartner - and that organization does a lot of prediction, and kind of identifying different technologies and things where businesses can use them effectively… And famously, they put out the Gartner Hype Cycle. And what that is, is it is a lifecycle for technologies. And they basically, across all technologies that they track - which is many - they put them on this hype cycle and track where they are in their lifecycle. And the short version of what that is - it has a steep upward curve that looks like an ocean wave sort of, that plunges down into a trough behind it, and then it kind of comes up without so much steepness, midways, to kind of a sustainable plateau.

And so what they would argue is that, for any given technology, there is an innovation trigger, which is this rocketing up on amount of hype associated with the technology. And then it gets to a peak, which they refer to as the peak of inflated expectations, where it’s really high, everyone’s talking about it, but maybe not a lot of productive work has happened yet. Super-cool. You can probably already recognize how AI might fit into this, with all the things we’ve talked about over time. But then those expectations have not been met, and people getting kind of frustrated with the technology, and it plunges down into what they call the trough of disillusionment. And that’s where they kind of go “Wow, I thought that thing was so great, but boy, it really didn’t pan out, and we wasted a lot of money on it. It’s just not really worked out well for us.”

But then calmer minds come along, and they say “Well, wait a minute, this technology has some really good uses. We just need to be a little bit more practical, pragmatic about it, and not lose our heads over the hype.” And that’s called the slope of enlightenment. And that reaches a point that’s called the plateau of productivity, where basically for the long-term a technology lives out the rest of its lifecycle being a productive technology, but without all the craziness in the early hype days.

So now that I’ve introduced everyone to that lifecycle, going back to the conversation that I’ve been having repeatedly with multiple people, that I had noticed that so many organizations, especially large organizations, are just plowing money into generative AI, with mixed results. Some are getting some decent results within the context of it being early days in the corporate sense… But I noticed that after peaking and holding a peak on the hype cycle for quite a long time, generative AI is now beginning to plunge down into the trough of disillusionment. And what that would imply according to Gartner is that people are beginning to get a bit frustrated. And I would say that’s panning out, because I’ve noticed many articles and social media posts over the last few weeks that people have been kind of going “This isn’t gonna lead to generative AI. This isn’t quite as good as we thought. It’s not magic.” It’s all the things that you see with people being a bit frustrated with it. And those are increasing in the number that I’ve seen.

So it got us talking about “What does that mean in a corporate sense, especially when you have a technology plunging down into the trough of disillusionment?” And not only that, but it’s a technology that has received a lion’s share of funding relative to other technologies that go through the hypecycle. It’s the coolest of the AI, over the last couple of years the coolest of the AI tools in the toolbox, and with corporations always lagging… They’re now plowing money into it, and yet expectations are falling.

And so not getting to the point of – we’ll obviously find that slope of enlightenment and that plateau of productivity eventually… But what does it mean over the next few months, as we’re looking at organizations that are still plowing money into generative AI, but maybe not in the most productive sense, or not as productive as they could given the dollar value that they’re putting in. So I’ve asked a lot of people what they think of this… Daniel, what are your impressions of that? It’s an interesting place to be if you’re in corporate America or corporate anywhere these days.

Jerod Santo: I’m funding Ladybird because I can’t fund Firefox

Jack Kelly, in light of last week’s announcement of the Ladybird Browser Initiative:

Chrome is eating the web. I have wanted to help fund a serious alternative browser for quite some time, and while Firefox remains the largest potential alternative, Mozilla has never let me. Since I can’t fund Firefox, I’m going to show there’s money in user-funded web browsers by funding Ladybird instead. You should too.

If you’re curious why Jack can’t fund Firefox, TIL they won’t let you?!

Despite desperately trying to find more revenue sources, Mozilla Corporation stubbornly refuses to just let users fund Firefox. Mozilla Foundation even has a specific donation form for Thunderbird (Mozilla’s mail client), but not Firefox. I’m sure they could have found some way of making it work with their corporate structure, and it baffles me that they haven’t.

Adam & I discussed the Ladybird news on last week’s Friends and we’re hoping to get Andreas back on the show for an even deeper-dive…

Jacob DePriest: Yeah, I agree. I think there’s a productivity gain here too that shouldn’t be overlooked, which is like - there are a lot of things that technical people sometimes just don’t go do, because they’re like “Well, that’s gonna take me forever.” And I’m a good example of this. So I grew up as a developer, I’ve been a developer most of my career, but I don’t develop every day anymore. And so the idea of getting a dev environment spun up and going and doing something productive is usually not worth the effort, and not really what I’m paid to do. But a few months ago there was like a Jupyter notebook that helped analyze statistics and heuristics for the workforce, and it was something I wanted to use as a people manager running an organization to get insight into my workforce… And it wasn’t doing what I needed to do, and I was like “Ah, I haven’t done a Jupyter notebook in like eight years. This is gonna take me forever.” And then I was like “I wonder if Copilot can help.” And so I literally pulled it up and started asking Copilot some questions and started doing some autocomplete stuff, and I had it sorted out in like 20 minutes, had it done what I needed it to do, got my answer, was able to get back to what I really needed to be doing, versus - that probably would have taken me six, seven hours without an AI system being able to do those things. I just think of that times 10, times 1000, times 100,000 for corporations and organizations… And I think that’s gonna just get more powerful as we go with things like GitHub Copilot, and they’ll get better and better.

Break: [00:59:16.07]

Autumn Nash: They contribute a lot to upstream, and I think that is super-rad, when corporations actually make the effort to be good stewards of open source, and actually make real contributions back. That’s really cool.

Jerod Santo: No, it was a large minority. Like, I would put it in the 20%, maybe 15% to 20% of worldwide usage. This is off the top of my head about history. And now it’s back down to like 3% to 5%, I think. But it got enough of a hold that it needed to be taken seriously, and supported by websites writ-large. And so that really broke the stranglehold of Internet Explorer, or as we used to call it, Internet Exploder. So it was significant, and it’s definitely lost a lot of market share since then… But it never got to a majority.

[00:44:04.00] And I disagree about their support for burgeoning web standards. I feel like Firefox has always been right there with people in the game, writing the specs, implementing the features… Of course, different browsers have different priorities. Safari - there are certain things that the Safari team just doesn’t want to build for business reasons. There are other places where Safari has been the first one to implement things, especially if they’re things that Apple likes, like font loading, and performance things, and security things… So that’s a tough one for me to really make strong claims about.

I think Firefox, Mozilla as a corporation, in the last 10 years has gotten distracted from Firefox, and hasn’t funded its development, even though it’s the cash cow of the organization, by pulling in that Google money for search. And so they’ve gotten distracted with like the mobile OS (Firefox OS, was it?), VPNs… Other things, other products that haven’t got the usage that Firefox has. And so for that reason, I feel like Firefox has definitely got to where it wasn’t. It used to be like nimble, fast, private, with extensions, and tabs. And that’s what got it to where it was. And it still has tabs, and it still has extensions, and it still has privacy as far as I can tell… But it got kind of memory-hungry, kind of slow… It’s always been, at least on MacOS, in my opinion, an ugly-looking piece of software. No offense to the people that work on it. I have much respect for you all. It just hasn’t spoken to my sensibilities. And I don’t know. But it definitely stands for a lot of the things that I believe in, and yet I don’t use it.

Adam Stacoviak: [00:08:19.24] Yeah, it’s funny, that does happen to get back into policy. You would think, I suppose left to their own devices, companies are going to try to protect themselves. I can understand that psyche, for lack of better terms, when it comes to a company. Because a company is not a person, it’s a persons, but very much masquerades as a person based upon just simply how corporate law works. The formation of an LLC is a limited liability company, a corporation, etc. it has its own DNA, but it’s not a person, it’s persons, but it’s ran by people, and they have their own way of thinking… And in some case, they’re very psychopathic when measured against typical psychology and human behavior… But it’s really a shame that it has to go to the policy level to sort of make these folks not be planned obsolescence-focused.

And then recently - this is just days ago, and you’re aware of this, so fill in the gaps for me, but… The State House passed Oregon’s Right to Repair act, SB 1596, by a margin of 42 to 13. That’s a significant margin.

Mike McQuaid: I think some of this stuff it depends almost like how close you fly to the Sun. So in some ways, I see it as like three options. You describe two of them already, where say option one is you make some shiny [unintelligible 00:50:53.28] JavaScript, but whatever the JavaScript frontend framework is du jour… And your site looks amazing, and you click around, and it’s animations, and cats fly at you from everywhere, and wow, it’s incredible… That’s like option one. And then option two is what you’ve described before, about you just set up a site on Squarespace, or WordPress, or whatever it may be… And then someone else just like maintains that for you, but you have a lot less control. And like option three, [unintelligible 00:51:21.23] when they pop up on sites like Hacker News, like someone who just has a website where there’s no CSS, there’s just HTML and body, and they’re more or less like “Right, either I don’t care at all about like how this looks, or you can just use reader modes, or an RSS app or whatever it may be to consume my content that way. I care about the words, I don’t care about how it looks.”

And I guess for each of those three, it’s like – for option three, that site will probably be viewable more or less the same as it is today, in literally 20 years’ time. It’ll probably look exactly the same. Option two, as you said, you’re probably paying someone, or there’s some big multinational corporation, and you’ve ceded some control in exchange for that maintenance. And it’s option one, I think, that is the most painful to deal with… Because the more new, shiny, exciting frameworks you use, then yeah, you pay a much heavier cost on doing that. And particularly if you don’t want to do that kind of day to day maintenance, or whatever.

[52:23] It’s interesting, because I’ve been building this kind of new Rails app for Workbrew stuff, and it’s amazing to be compared to last time I started a Rails project from scratch how much stuff I’ve written - whatever, a little five-line method, and then I read some more of the Rails docs, and I’m like “Oh, this is a one-liner now. I don’t need to write this method. I can throw it away.” And that to me is what - again, we’re in kind of private beta right now and stuff, and the customers we have, I definitely lean into that… I think it was Reed Hoffman, or whoever; it was like, your first MVP, you should be like embarrassed. The way it looks, and all the wording, and the way Rails will auto-capitalize things for you, and sometimes it looks right and sometimes it looks a bit weird… It’s kind of embarrassing, the state of the app we got in front of people. And no one has complained about any of that. No one has complained about how it looks ugly and janky, how essentially no love is going into design, how there’s no dynamic JavaScript doing anything other than Rails’es built-in stuff… Like, the only thing our customers so far wanted to know is more features. They care about essentially more like backend business logic. And I guess, to go to your point from earlier, Jerod, that is probably the stuff, again, that back in business logic - it’s the easiest to test, it’s the easiest to change, it’s the easiest to upgrade, it’s the least dependent on like third-party libraries, and stuff like that… And it’s all the really shiny frontend whiz-bang magic, great design, relying on the latest web standards, that will have trouble in two years… And my three-line Ruby backend function that powers some new feature will probably be perfectly happy in 20 years, right? And not be reliant on the Rails version, or the JavaScript version, or whatever it may be.