It's quite unfortunate that this has to be controversial.

The underlying tech in a signed public ledger, using chaining methods and merkle trees to record things with non-repudiation, thats useful. I went to a meeting which included people from the Reserve Bank of Australia or the financial regulator, and they said that between nation states, settlement was about mutuality, and absent a regulator to tell you what to do, federated processes around things like this were entirely rational choices. Nothing whatsoever about Bitcoin, Ethereum, the hype machine, rug pulls, just the underlying tech using normal PKI and some data structures and HSM backed processes. The regulator said informally, in a regulated monopoly agreeing to use mutual (dis)trust methods like a chain would be acceptable as an audit method to the regulator. Nothing about you or me, nothing about hype. Mechanistic settlement methods amongst competitors in a reasonably transparent manner.

Some payment chains are painful. An awful lot of middlemen take a cut. Some payment chains impose burdens on the endpoint like 90 day settlement debts which could be avoided with some use of tech. Nothing about the hype, just modification to financial transactions, but they could be done other ways as well (as could the settlement ideas above)

NFT are the same logic as bearer bonds. They're useful to very specific situations of value transfer, and almost nothing else. The use isn't about the artwork on the front, its the posession of a statement of value. Like bonds, they get discounted. The value is therefore a function of the yield and the trust in the chain of sigs asserting its a debt to that value. Not identical, but the concept stripped of the ego element isn't that far off.

Please note I think bored ape and coins are stupid. I am not attempting to promote the hype.

AI is the same. LLMs are useful. There are functional tools in this. The sheer amount of capital being sunk into venture plays is however, disconnected from that utility.

You should check out HN /new and /show the last couple of weeks.

It's just like all the ICO, NFT, and other crypto launches, but for all the little things that you can do with Ai. Everybody or their bot has some new game changing Ai project. It's a tiring mess right now, which I do hope will similarly die down in time

For clarity, I was a big fan of blockchain before it got bad, still am for things like ZKP and proof-of-authority, and I am similarly very excited for what Ai enables, but (imo) one cannot easily argue there is not a spam problem that feels similar.

The tech isn’t going away, but its usability is probably going to be recalibrated once we factor in the long term danger ( effects on learning and acquiring/maintaining skills, maintenance costs of ai made code, etc).

We’ll still have the “best code tooling ever invented” stuff, but if the market is assuming “intellectual workers all replaced”, there’s still a bubble pop waiting for us.

I don't like the weasel word "democratize" because there is nothing democratic about being forced to use a tool on condition of keeping your job. Democratization goes both ways, if you can't destroy something you cannot truly control it; I'm sure if you put it to an actual vote, many people would be surprised at the results.

It doesn't have to go away, it just needs to be better regulated. I could also increase my productivity by taking Adderall, if that was my end goal. But most people don't, since there are other factors to take into consideration, like becoming unable to function without it, or long-term cognitive decline...

>> Other than by corrupt criminals and mafia types who have a need to covertly hide cash.

I’ve got an Argentinian friend who sends crypto to his mother because he pays less than 0.5 % in fees and exchange rates instead of close to 5% using the traditional way. From now on I’ll call him a corrupt criminal.

And anyone who is under sanction or lives in a nation under economic sanction, and wants access to a means of sending payments across borders that would otherwise be closed to them.

And anyone who lives in a polity whose local currency may be undergoing rapid devaluation/inflation.

And anyone who needs a form of wealth that no local authority is technically capable of alienating them from - ie: if you need to pack everything in a steamer trunk to escape being herded into cattle cars, you can memorize a seed phrase and no one can stop you from taking your wealth with you.

And any polity who may no longer wish to use dollars as the international lingua franca of trade, as the global foreign exchange reserve currency, to reduce the degree to which their forex reserves prop up American empire.

Sadly, all of these use cases appear increasingly relevant as time goes on.

> corrupt criminals and mafia types who have a need to covertly hide cash

You're describing the people that use actual cash to launder and hide, well, cash, and that have done so for centuries, long before crypto had even been invented.

A few web searches on <big bank name> + "money laundering scandal" (e.g. "HSBC money laundering scandal") can offer valuable insights.

I'm going to take issue with AI destroying the internet. Our short attention span profit driven culture was already well on it's way to trashing everything that was good. AI is only accelerating the inevitable.

So what's the alternative? Should we go back to reading encyclopedias from the 2010s? I ask this because the need for information hasn't decreased for human beings, just because the capability to produce slop has suddenly increased.

The Economics of content platforms already started destroying the internet. A lot of the reason the internet was so good for a long time was faith by creators that good content would win, that turned out to be false.

> Unfortunately, all of these issues come from humans.

I've been thinking about this recently. As annoying as all the bots on Twitter and Reddit are, it's not bots spinning up bots (yet!), it's other humans doing this to us.

I've got a few open source projects out there, and I've almost never received any PRs for them until AI, simply because they were things I did for myself and never really promoted to anyone else. But now I'm getting obviously-AI PRs on a regular basis. Somehow people are using AI to find my unpromoted stuff and submit PRs to it.

My canned response now is to respond, "Can you link me to the documentation you're using for this?" It works like a charm, the clanker doesn't ever respond.

> Unfortunately, all of these issues come from humans.

They are. They’ve always been there.

The problem is that LLMs are a MASSIVE force multiplier. That’s why they’re a problem all over the place.

We had something of a mechanism to gate the amount of trash on the internet: human availability. That no longer applies. SPAM, in the non-commercial sense of just noise that drowns out everything else, can now be generated thousands of times faster than real content ever could be. By a single individual.

It’s the same problem with open source. There was a limit to the number of people who knew how to program enough to make a PR, even if it was a terrible one. It took time to learn.

AI automated that. Now everyone can make massive piles of complicated plausible looking PRs as fast as they want.

To whatever degree AI has helped maintainers, it is not nearly as an effective a tool at helping them as it is helping others generate things to waste their time. Intentionally or otherwise.

You can’t just argue that AI can be a benefit therefore everything is fine. The externalities of it, in the digital world, are destroying things. And even if we develop mechanisms to handle the incredible volume will we have much of value left by the time we get there?

This is the reason I get so angry at every pro AI post I see. They never seem to discuss the possible downsides of what they’re doing. How it affects the whole instead of just the individual.

There are a lot of people dealing with those consequences today. This video/article is an example of it.

Search feels like fishing in an ocean of floating plastic.

Social media feels like parks smothered with smog.

It makes you stupid like leaded gas.

We'll probably be stuck with it forever, like PFAS

Why would people/companies donate more money to open source in the future that they don’t already donate today?

It’s a tragedy of the commons problem. Most of the money available is not tied up to decision makers who are ideologically aligned with open source, so I don’t see why they’d donate any more in the future.

They usually do so because they are critically reliant on a library that’s going to die, think it’s good PR, makes engineers happy(don’t think they care about that anymore), or they think they can gain control of some aspect of industry(looking at you futurewei and the corporate workers of the Rust project)

Funding for open source projects has been a problem for about as long as open source projects have existed. I'm not sure I follow why you think specifying donations will go towards LLM tokens will suddenly open the floodgates.

But locally, dollars are a zero-sum game. Your dollars came from someone else. If you make a project better for yourself without making it better for others you can possibly one-up others and make more dollars with it. If you make it better for everyone that's not necessarily the case. You're just diluting your money and soon enough you won't have money and you're eliminated from the race.

While I'd like to believe in the decency and generosity of humans, I don't get the economic case of donating money to the agent behind an OS project, when the person could spend the money on the tokens locally themselves and reap the exclusive reward. If it really is just about money that only makes sense.

Obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but I don't think you can ignore the rational economics of this, since in capitalism your dollars are earned through competition.

> AI agents mean that dollars can be directly translated into open-source code contributions, and dollars are much less scarce than capable OSS programmer hours.

I think this is true, but misses the point: quantity of code contributions is absolutely useless without quality. You're correct that OSS programmer hours are the most scarce asset OSS has, but AI absolutely makes this scarce resource even more scarce by wasting OSS programmers' time sifting through clanker slop.

There literally isn't an upside. The code produced by AI simply isn't good enough consistently enough.

That's setting aside the ethical issues of stealing other people's work and spewing even more carbon into the atmosphere.

Great.

Give money to maintainers? No.

Give money to bury maintainers in AI Slop? Yes.

There are a few valid arguments that I see to support the pessimism:

1. When people use LLMs to code, they never read the docs (why would they), so they miss the fact that the open source library may have a paid version or extension. This means that open source maintainers will receive less revenue and may not be able to sustain their open source libraries as a result. This is essentially what the Tailwind devs mentioned.

2. Bug bounties have encouraged people to submit crap, which wastes maintainers time and may lead them to close pull requests. If they do the latter, then they won't get any outside help (or at least, they will get less). Even if they don't do that, they now have a higher burden than previously.

Open source will ban AI, I'd bet $100 that AI will get banned more and more often entirely from large OSS

Llms are already better then most people at coding for typical tasks imo.

I finally got around to Claude code and the code it generates and the debugging it does is pretty good.

Inb4 some random accuses me of being an idiot or shit engineer lol

It is hard to test LLM legal/medical advice without risk of harm, but it is often exceedingly easy to test LLM generated code. The most aggravating thing to me is that people just don't. I think the best thing we can do is to encourage everyone who uses/trusts LLMs to test and verify more often.

Well that’s the problem. AI is really good at making things that bypass people’s heuristics for spam.

Someone can spam me with more AI slop than I can vet and it can pass any automated filter I can setup.

The solution is probably closed contributions because figuring out good contributors at scale sounds like figuring out how to hire at scale, which we are horrible at as an industry.