I've intentionally changed my writing style to be less AI-like due to people thinking I'm just pasting my emails from ChatGPT.
Perhaps it's an artifact of LLMs being trained on terabytes of autistic internet commenters like me. Maybe being detected as AI by Turnitin even has some diagnostic value.
I personally quite enjoy the Gossip Goblin cyberpunk cycle of humanity videos (can find them on reddit/tiktok/yt/elsewhere).
Most of the creativity is clearly from the human driving the AI, but I suspect it would have been borderline impossible to make something like that as an individual without AI.
Individuals have been doing this exact thing without AI for years, only better, with actual comedic timing, by just playing both parts. Sometimes they don’t even change clothes and it’s perfectly understandable. It’s a whole meme at this point that a towel on the head of a man signifies a female character, for example. You can find plenty of this on tiktok or instagram.
At least for my enjoyment of the Gossip Goblin videos, the world and aesthetics are pretty critical to it. I wouldn't find it at all compelling if it was just someone in their kitchen playing it themselves. I do like those videos with people playing both parts in other contexts (comedy particularly), but for other types of work, the AI generated videos are doing something that can't really be done yourself unless you become a Blender virtuoso.
Blender "virtuoso" is pushing things a bit far. I can teach someone to keyframe a rigged model in 10 minutes, and record voice acting in another 15. All-in-all, it might actually be faster to make these skits in Blender if you exclude modelling and render time.
Not a surprise when the tech is improving so quickly still.
Why would I pay a significant fraction of the original price for a 2020 EV if a same tier 2025 EV has better batteries and drivetrain that'll probably have a longer lifetime, almost double the range, heat pump and faster charging? That doesn't mean the 2020 is bad, but it's only worth it if you can get it at an enormous discount over the current model.
Meanwhile, a 2020 ICE is pretty much the same as a 2025 ICE aside from the wear and tear.
Once the tech stabilises, so will the resale market.
Is this born out by real life examples? Is a 2025 Model 3, for example, significantly different technologically from a 2020? Definitely does not have double the range, and the technology has evolved only slightly in that time. The heat pump was introduced in late 2020. (and to be honest, heat pumps have turned out to be less of a slam-dunk than we hoped, they have a minor effect on range for most people)
Not double the range. But you could get one with an LFP battery now that probably has about double the life time in terms of cycles. Closer to 3K cycles rather than 1200-1500 cycles for the NMC batteries common in 2020.
Fun fact, the 2020 model 3 would still have its battery under warranty. That's true for most model 3s with the exception of those that did more than 100K miles or the ones that were sold in 2017. Those would have just started coming out of the eight year warranty. But most of the second hand model 3s are still covered by warranty for their drive trains.
Mostly, second hand buyers can get some decent deals on their cars now and don't have to worry that much about their cars depreciating massively when they sell them on five years later. With EVs most of the depreciation happens in the first few years.
I will say, when you get far enough to worry about only having 1200-1500 cycles, you have extracted a lot of life from the car. It's a good problem to have.
The resale market isn't shaped by technology but market demand which you frame it narrowly to what you place value on.
Otherwise there is no reason for old Porsches and 90s Japanese cars to demand the sticker price they do now.
The people who are willing to pay more for a used car down the road aren't interested in EVs or mass produced ICE cars, if unique enough will continue to be in demand over EVs
"Meanwhile, a 2020 ICE is pretty much the same as a 2025 ICE aside from the wear and tear."
One would think and hope so, however numerous ICE manufacturers, even long-term reliability experts like Honda, have been adopting "wet belt" timing belts.
These run submerged/immersed in engine oil, which tends to degrade the belt, often resulting in clogged oil pickups, galleys, etc.
2025 EVs aren’t double the range of 2020 EVs. The batteries and power electronics are on a learning curve but it’s 2-3% per year, not 10-15% like microprocessors.
Doing stuff on-prem or in a data centre _is_ hard though.
It's easy to look at a one-off deployment of a single server and remark on how much cheaper it is than RDS, and that's fine if that's all you need. But it completely skips past the reality of a real life resilient database server deployment: handling upgrades, disk failures, backups, hot standbys, encryption key management, keeping deployment scripts up to date, hardware support contracts and vendor management, the disaster recovery testing for the multi-site SAN fabric with fibre channel switches and redundant dedicated fibre, etc. Before the cloud, we actually had a staff member who was entirely dedicated to managing the database servers.
Plus as a bonus, not ever having to get up at 2AM and drive down to a data centre because there was a power failure due to a generator not kicking in, and it turns out the data centre hadn't adequately planned for the amount of remote hands techs they'd need in that scenario...
RDS is expensive on paper, but to get the same level of guarantees either yourself or through another provider always seems to end up costing about the same as RDS.
I have done all of this also, today I outsource the DB server and do everything else myself, including a local read replica and pg_dump backups as a hail mary.
Essentially all that pain of yonder years was essentially storage it was a F**ing nightmare running HA network storage before the days of SSDs. It was slower than RAID, 5X more expensive than RAID and generally involved an extreme amount of pain and/or expense (usually both). But these days you only actually need SANs or as we call it today block storage when you have data you care about, again you only have to care about backups when you have data you care about.
For absolutely all of us the side effect of moving away from monolithic 'pets' is that we have made the app layer not require any long term state itself. So today all you need is N X any random thing that might lose data or fail at any moment as your app servers and an external DB service (neon, planetscale, RDS), plus perhaps S3 for objects.
Database is one of those places where it's justified, I think. Application containers do not need the same level of care hence are easy to run yourself.
The aim is net zero by 2050, lifespan of a fridge-freezer is about 10 years. Even assuming designing a system and putting it in place took 5 years, that's still enough time to have most appliances on it by 2040.
Given the current energy prices, it probably even makes sense to replace appliances sooner than their normal lifetime. My fridge-freezer is only 5 years old, but if it broke today and cost more than ~£150 to repair, I'd end up saving money by replacing it.
Also each of those layers have a bunch of sub-layers. Look at any large planning application and you'll find hundreds of pages of consultations with various stakeholders who have no incentive to support it.
The NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything because, obviously, any development makes their jobs more difficult. It serves little purpose besides fodder for the NIMBYs.
"NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything"
I've never seen any of those organisations raising objections - I don't think they are even consulted on the planning applications I have seen? Planning applications for housing developments usually have a huge number of objections from nearby residents but the few organisations consulted seem to usually say that they've reviewed the plans and they look sensible.
Edit: I was looking at a local residential planning application hoping it would pass as it would replace some disused farm buildings that are currently a bit of an eyesore.
I live in inner London so maybe it's a regional thing, but developments here usually include consultations from more organisations than I knew existed. Here's a recent one from near me: https://anewcentreforlewisham.com/planning/
I forget which of the various huge documents contains the local organisational consultations, but one of them does. The planning application itself (DC/24/137871) contains 340 documents. News quotes, for example, Greenwich council:
> While the scheme would appear as part of a tall building cluster, it risks harming the open character of Blackheath and the setting of heritage assets. The report requests additional winter views to fully assess visibility and potential harm.
(bit of an odd objection considering you can see Canary Wharf from there and there's a heavy traffic road running through the middle of it...)
I'm not suggesting that, for example, things like NHS concerns that there aren't enough local hospital beds or whatever aren't important, but I guess my view is that they shouldn't really be part of an individual planning decision.
I've definitely seen an NHS comment on a planning application near here along the lines of 'for this number of new houses we need this amount of money to increase GP provision'. I guess it feeds into Section 106 stuff?
There are a huge number of statutory consultees who are asked - they don't have to respond. It is an enormous list. Just as an example any and all of these can be statutory consultees depending on site location:
Environment Agency, Natural England, Forestry Commission, Canal and River Trust, Historic England, The Gardens Trust, Health and Safety Executive, Office for Nuclear Regulation, Highways Authority, Parish Councils, Rail Infrastructure Managers, Coal Authority, Sport England, Theatres Trust, Water and sewerage undertakers, Local Planning Authorities, National Parks Authorities, Greater London Authority
A recent battery planning application got objections from the fire service on the grounds that its location might be difficult to reach (narrow lane) if it catches fire. Which is actually a reasonable objection? Fire codes are a thing for a reason.
Not heard of NHS objections and the police can get stuffed as they have very weird ideas about public order and whose responsibility it is.
One of the other comments noted that a lot of organisations may be asked - but they don't have to respond. I was looking at the actual submitted documents for planning applications...
Mind you - the responses I did see seemed pretty sensible - water & sewers, drainage, roads etc.
The comments I've seen from police are normally specific suggestions that designs be amended to follow the Secured by Design [1] guidelines, rather than blanket objections to building something.
Around Heathrow at least, there seem to be a few paths where Airbus and Boeing both fly, but seem to be reporting slightly different offsets within that path.
I wonder if that's a systemic difference in how they report their GPS position to ADS-B, or an actual real difference caused by slightly different autopilot systems, or something else?
It's pretty common for traditional organised volunteer services to have "on call" aspects.
Think of like volunteer firefighters, The Samaritans, St John Ambulance, the UK lifeguards and lifeboats (RNLI). Such organisations do usually have full time paid staff too, but the bulk of the front line work is part time volunteer.
The problem is the rug-pull itself, not that the rug isn't there.
I don't have an opinion on Datastar, as I'd never heard of it until this article, but over the past year or two there have been a _lot_ of open source projects that have been converted to proprietary licenses, very often after being invested by VCs or PEs. It's happened to me a number of times now where the license for the features we were using went from open source to proprietary with 5-6 figure cost.
Developers gotta eat, I get that. But often the reason I'm using one of these components is it's a hobby or low value project where it simply doesn't bring in the income to justify paying for a license. If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project. But now you're in an awkward position where the choice is either pay-up or re-do a bunch of work.
There was no rug pull! (And the term isn't even being used correctly) They talked in their community decided the set of features caused a support burden and for versions later on they would put them behind a pro tier to help pay for the extra costs for supporting them.
You can keep using your current version! You can even fork at that version. Calling it a rug pull is so entitled.
Like I said, I haven't heard of this project until now, so I don't know the wider context, but it may be that some of the people who are reacting negatively to it have been burnt in the past by the many other projects that have gone down this route: project starts as open source, then it goes open-core, then over time more of the dev effort naturally moves into the proprietary part, then sometimes eventually they change the license for the open part too.
Forking is often impractical in reality as a solo dev or small team rarely has the resources to keep up with security fixes.
I'm entirely happy to pay for things, do pay for many things, as well as donate to the authors of projects I use, and whatever this library is seems reasonably priced. Nevertheless, I'm pretty reluctant now to use open source libraries unless they're backed by a foundation, given how many times I've been badly burnt.
> There was no rug pull! [...] You can keep using your current version! You can even fork at that version. Calling it a rug pull is so entitled.
This is a dishonest perversion of the commonly accepted definition of a "rug pull".
I'll copy what I said in a previous thread:
When Redis changed licenses to SSPL/RSAL, users were also free to continue using the BSD-licensed version. Was that not a rug pull? Same with MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp, etc. These are quintessential examples of the "OSS rug pull".
The idea is that users were relying on a functionality to be maintained (the "rug"), and the Datastar developers decided to continue maintaining it behind a paywall (the "pull").
Nobody is claiming that developers physically took the feature away from users, as that would be ridiculous. But users of these features are now forced to either maintain it themselves, wait for someone else from the community to fork and continue maintenance (which has its own set of issues), or pay up.
You can argue how it's "only" a few hundred lines of code; criticize "incapable" developers who can't check out a Git commit or do maintenance work they previously didn't have to; that the features don't require maintenance at all; and come up with other defensive arguments. But none of it matters. The size of the "rug" doesn't matter. It's the principle and precedent it sets for any users who were potentially interested in the project.
To say nothing about putting essential features like a bundler and debugging tool behind a paywall. These are not "Pro" features.
Nope, at least following a common definition of "rug pull" outside of FOSS. A "rug pull" refers to a specific type of scam where the rug-puller absconds with funds. Wikipedia even redirects "rug pull" to "exit scam": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rug_pull
If you're standing on a rug that you didn't pay for in any way, and you're nonetheless surprised and angry when the rug-owner eventually decides it is no longer practical for them to continue maintaining the rug for free, that's just entitlement.
Nothing in FOSS licenses says anything about future maintenance expectations, and in fact nearly all of them contain all-caps clauses shouting at you that the software is delivered as-is.
> These are not "Pro" features.
If you didn't create a piece of software, or pay for it, or directly contribute to it, then you certainly don't get to decide which features are "Pro" features. Instead, you can vote with your feet and your wallet and decide not to use it, that's fine; that's the model with all other products in life. Why should software be any different?
Simply using a piece of free software doesn't entitle to you have any control over the future activities of the software's creators!
> Nope, at least following a common definition of "rug pull" outside of FOSS.
The current context is within FOSS, however. And it has a widely known definition[1].
> If you're standing on a rug that you didn't pay for in any way, and you're nonetheless surprised and angry when the rug-owner eventually decides it is no longer practical for them to continue maintaining the rug for free, that's just entitlement.
So, let me get this straight. You're saying that because users didn't pay for the software, they're not allowed to be surprised and angry when they're forced to either continue using unmaintained versions, take over maintenance themselves or wait until someone from the community does, or pay up? And you're saying that paying for the software buys you these privileges?
So, essentially, if the author of cURL decided tomorrow that it's no longer "practical" for him to support ancient and obscure protocols like Gopher and Telnet for free, and he decided to put them up behind a paywall, that the people depending on these features don't have any right to be upset about it? And if they are, they're being entitled?
Or, from a social perspective, if the people making meals at a community kitchen decide that it's no longer "practical" for them to supply eating utensils for free, and start selling them at $10 a pop, that the people relying on those meals are being entitled if they're upset about this change, because they're not paying customers?
Don't you realize how hostile this is?
Forget about open source. This has nothing to do with licensing. The libre software philosophy is orthogonal to monetization practices, and every author can choose how they wish to make development sustainable, if at all. As I've said before[2], I'm in favor of F/LOSS projects having commercial tiers or subscriptions, as long as it's done fairly.
What I am arguing for is having basic decency to treat all users of your software with respect. The moment you decide that users not paying for your work are not worth listening to, that they're entitled, etc., and that your attention and respect can only be bought, you've corrupted the entire ideal of why we build freedom-respecting software in the first place.
The sad irony is that I'm 100% sure that most people arguing against this, including Datastar authors, rely on tools like `curl`, `grep`, and other libre software whose authors never have and never will pull these shenanigans. So they're quite happy to "leech off" other people's work, but not happy to let others do the same off theirs. This double standard is what's ruining open source, not entitled users.
I won't bother responding to the other comments, as they boil down to this same point. And I'm really repeating myself here, so feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
> You're saying that because users didn't pay for the software, they're not allowed to be surprised and angry when they're forced to either continue using unmaintained versions, take over maintenance themselves or wait until someone from the community does
Surprised maybe depending on how long the software has existed, but angry? 100% they are not allowed to be angry.
Anyone who thinks that a maintainer of open source software is required to maintain that software for free forever is an entitled brat.
Don't you realize how hostile it is to have a bunch of non contributors demand and entitle themselves to things and burn out OSS organizers at an increasing rate so much so it's been cited as an ongoing critical concern to the entire software supply chain?
Your attitude ignores the real financial and time constraints that OSS has been facing forever and people are rightly starting to get tired of this shit.
We're well past the stage where its little well meaning communities trading cool bits of code with one another OSS is a completely economy defining thing now and people shouldn't settle for being worked to the bone, they should be setting proper safeguards, like Datastar has done here, to ensure their project does not burn them out and they can continue to grow and direct it in a way that accords with their own interests and desires.
> The current context is within FOSS, however. And it has a widely known definition[1].
Yes, and my argument is that definition is wildly inappropriate. It takes the perfectly-legal actions of software authors and equates them with an illegal financial scam.
> You're saying that because users didn't pay for the software, they're not allowed to be surprised and angry when they're forced to either continue using unmaintained versions
Correct, except no one is "forced" to do anything. That includes the software authors, who are not forced to continue maintaining their software, for free or at all, if they so choose.
> And you're saying that paying for the software buys you these privileges?
Potentially, yes. But that depends entirely on the terms of the license, product offering, payment method, etc. Just like anything else you buy, if the product is deficient (potentially within a set timeframe), you may have some recourse available but it varies.
> if the author of cURL decided tomorrow that it's no longer "practical" for him to support ancient and obscure protocols like Gopher and Telnet for free, and he decided to put them up behind a paywall, that the people depending on these features don't have any right to be upset about it?
Correct. If you are not the employer of the author of cURL, and you are not a customer of the author of cURL, why do you think you have any right to tell him what he can or cannot do with his software or his free time?
> And if they are, they're being entitled?
Absolutely, 100% this is unquestionably extreme entitlement.
> if the people making meals at a community kitchen decide that it's no longer "practical" for them to supply [...]
Open source developers are not even remotely similar to soup kitchens, and open source software users are not impoverished starving people.
> Don't you realize how hostile this is?
After the previous analogy, perhaps you should ask yourself that.
> I'm in favor of F/LOSS projects having commercial tiers or subscriptions, as long as it's done fairly.
The issue here is that your definition of "fairly" is completely subjective, and seems to involve you having a say in what other people do with their time and intellectual property.
> The moment you decide that users not paying for your work are not worth listening to
That simply isn't what I said, nor what any of the sibling comments said.
> So they're quite happy to "leech off" other people's work, but not happy to let others do the same off theirs.
I believe this is a complete logical fallacy, as I don't see the Datastar authors (or anyone else in this thread) complaining about leeching anywhere. But please link me to this if I'm mistaken.
You don't get to decide what they want to maintain. They could have just deleted the features. This entire saga has made it so clear to me people that can only see what is in it for them versus being able to step into the shoes of a maintainer offering something for free.
There is literally no obligation to support you at all. Sucks if it puts you in a bad position that's not on the maintainer, there's no legal or social contract they broke in fact that's entirely in the spirit of what OSS is supposed to be. It's not so a bunch of mediocre free loaders can demand continued access to a library they never contribute to and only consume.
The correct way to look at this is you have the privilege of consuming the hard work of another person for free and you should be greatful they put in work to make your life easier in an open way when they did not have to ever and at all and understand when the burden on a small team makes it hard for them to continue to support a feature set. There isn't a sacred duty to people who consume something another group opened because they wanted it to exist.
That's what the licenses and all the legal bits say. They do it because they want to and if they stop wanting to you can all get bent. Instead they looked for a sustainable middle ground.
At least the controversy is making them even more popular.
> The idea is that users were relying on a functionality to be maintained (the "rug"), and the Datastar developers decided to continue maintaining it behind a paywall (the "pull").
Why were the users so entitled to free ongoing maintenance that its end is worth describing using a term from financial fraud?
> It's happened to me a number of times now where the license for the features we were using went from open source to proprietary with 5-6 figure cost.
In those cases, prior to the project going commercial, did you contribute nontrivial code to the project and/or financially sponsor the project?
I could see being upset in those situations, but in most cases I find the answer is no.
> If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project.
If you had used an alternative, the same scenario could have played out with the alternative.
Realistically, what are the "never have used it" / "never bothered" scenarios? Presumably you chose the project because you needed it for something; that implies the never-bothered alternative is essentially just writing something from scratch instead. Which you can still do now. And you can use the last FOSS version of the project as a starting point, which saves a tremendous amount of time. So how exactly were you burnt by a supposed "rug pull"?
If the rug isn’t there, how can it possibly be pulled?
All free licenses make each commit free - forever. If a library does what you need today, use it! If the terms become unacceptable in future, fork it and maintain it yourself, or hope someone else will. Note this can even happen with free software (GPL2 to 3, for example).
No one is entitled to the future work of someone else without paying though. You very definitely are the entitled one here.
I think it's totally normal and correct to have a license where a company like Amazon can't come in, steal the volunteer work of hundreds of developers, slap their logo on it and sell it.
I'm sure open source purists do not like this, but the world is the 1980 anymore. It's been 45 years. Things need to adapt. Open source needs to adapt.
Yeah we really need to normalize licenses that protect against that. Even GPL doesn’t because everything is SaaS now and companies will just isolate the GPL code to one micro service. AGPL might prevent this but there aren’t a lot of cases that have been litigated. And if they don’t modify the source then then it doesn’t do much IIRC.
But “open source” was in control of big business from the start. The open source consortium was a late 90s attempt to co-opt the free software movement and turn it into something business friendly.
Tim O’Reilly funded it to start and now it’s funded by big tech companies.
> I think it's totally normal and correct to have a license where a company like Amazon can't come in, steal the volunteer work of hundreds of developers, slap their logo on it and sell it.
Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project? I would argue that employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community, but I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.
Open source indeed needs to adapt, but I don't think the source-available or open-core models we are seeing these days is the right solution. If you really want to prevent third-party entities to profit off your work you'd need to go for something like the AGPL, but that is for obvious reasons not exactly a popular choice.
> Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project?
Because that's simply not how copyrights and trademarks work. The licensor doesn't need to abide by the terms of the license, by definition. The purpose of a license is to grant rights from the licensor to the licensee.
> employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community
Very few of these cases are 10% company / 90% community. If anything, it's usually the other way around. Not to mention the huge amount of time spent on code review and ongoing maintenance of third-party contributions.
> I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.
That wouldn't really make sense; a software license isn't going to remove rights from the licensor. More realistic solutions are things like intentionally not having a CLA (effectively preventing the project creator from relicensing) and/or reassigning copyright and trademarks to a foundation.
Perhaps it's an artifact of LLMs being trained on terabytes of autistic internet commenters like me. Maybe being detected as AI by Turnitin even has some diagnostic value.