3 ms·

This makes sense. Apart from the original thing, I no longer upstream anything. It just takes comparatively more effort than maintaining a private fork with my

by arjie 2mo ago

This makes sense. Apart from the original thing, I no longer upstream anything. It just takes comparatively more effort than maintaining a private fork with my own idiosyncratic fix. This must mean that even small fixes that non-contributors would make in the past are just happening off the books, so to speak. e.g. I upstreamed a tiny fix to Thrift codegen because some function could be much faster. These days I wouldn't bother. I'd just fork and leave upstream to be upstream. I suspect many people are like me since it feels like a very normie position to take. That means that contributors are even more likely to be useful because both the drive-by genuine contributors have chosen otherwise and these contributors have increased. It must be quite painful to be an open source maintainer right now. One wonders what to make of such projects in a future where a feature-list is a sufficient prompt.

zamadatix 2mo ago
I ran through exactly this thought process & LLM based resolution just 8 hours ago with a segfault compiling a project which likely doesn't care about the given platform combo much.
- arjie 2mo ago
  Classic problem. I recall spending a long time trying to get Freespace 2 SCP working on the Via Unichrome onboard GPU I had decades ago. Who could possibly have cared for that? The intersection of the two sets was probably precisely one person. By the way, interesting person to have 512 IPv4s (and two /44s? Aren't those enormous?). Root-level http intentionally user/pass gated on your site? I was curious to see.
  - zamadatix 2mo ago
    :D. Tl;dr: it's actually near minimal to dual stack and do BGP between 2 sites of redundant services with advertisement failover to the internet. /48 is the smallest accepted IPv6 advertisement and /24 the smallest allowed IPv4 advertisement (on the net at least). IPv6 assignments are done on the nibble (/48, /44, /40, ...). Since I only have two sites I could have gotten away with a /23 and something like a /44 but then the RIR pointed out it'd probably be cleaner to manage to get a /40 and give each site a /44 at the same renewal cost. As to why, I've just always worked in or near the networking field and so it seemed cheaper/easier to run it all myself in the long run. Through another very long story, the Org ID + ASN + IPv4 space + IPv6 space ended up costing something like ~$1k the first year and then ~$500 in yearly renewals. I'm not legally able to resell these for the massive market rate prices of /24s because of them being leased for $0 specifically to dual stack my core hosted services like DNS with my own public IP, but that's fine as I got them to use :). The largest assignment I've ever had the pleasure of getting and deploying was a /32 (... of IPv6!) for an extremely large healthcare system. Certainly no great record smasher, but I thought it was cool to work on an IPv6 subnet so big it could have been an IPv4 route nonetheless! That one was still also very sparse of course, but similar kinds of reasoning ended up getting to that being much easier/better to work with than a dense assignment. I also have a small MAC address range (a classical "OUI" sized range is 24 bits of addresses, I have 12 bits of addresses) for a small run of some hardware I was making for a particular customer use case. With the leftovers I put my laptop on it and get the occasional "how the hell?" when they see Wireshark decode my laptop MAC as "Dan_Smith_xx_xx" while packet capturing to troubleshoot.
    - arjie 2mo ago
      Haha, that’s incredible. I saw the MAC listing afterwards too and definitely piqued my curiosity. Terrific stuff :)
jspdown 2mo ago
How could it take less effort to maintain a fork? You have to merge the upstream in every week and fight endlessly on conflicts with your patches.
- byzantinegene 2mo ago
  [dead]
- nevon 2mo ago
  Having seen this happening in the past, pre-AI, the answer is usually that they don't. They just stay on that version forever. Or it's maintained until the original author moves on, after which it's someone else's problem to figure out how to move back to the upstream, which has now had years of changes.
- arjie 2mo ago
  Originally, yes. Nowadays, it's trivial. Agents can handle this flawlessly.
  - oblio 2mo ago
    There can be a point of divergence when even humans can't merge things anymore, so I highly doubt that experience is universal.
    - Ampersander 2mo ago
      No you can't say that! It's the superintelligence. You will be left behind.
      - oblio 2mo ago
        If it's super intelligent... Won't I be left behind anyway?!?
geraneum 2mo ago
Discussing the issues, achieving consensus, making sure the fix fits the existing patterns and actually warrants the change, etc. These are and have always been a challenging part of contributing to open source. Typing code in your private fork that satisfies your “idiosyncratic fix” has always existed and been always the easier aspect of such changes. Chances are many of these changes would never be accepted into the repository anyway in the past.
- arjie 2mo ago
  Certainly, but there was motivation to do that in the past. My patch would probably line up with the rest of the code in the direction that they desired and the cost of fork maintenance would have pushed me to upstream in a way acceptable to maintainers.
  - geraneum 2mo ago
    I find it hard to believe that this is the main motivation for most who contributors to OSS. Do you have a reference, research or poll that corroborate this? You’re vastly overestimating the value of these “fixes” that now go to private forks, because maintainers also have access to LLMs and can prompt, probably better than a drive by fix since they have better understanding and context of the codebase. Therefore I believe, in most cases, keeping those fixes to private forks is not a noticeable loss for the OSS projects.
utopiah 2mo ago
Fair enough not to want to get involved but seems problematic for 2 reasons : - code gets re-regenerated over and over again, so waste of resources - no signal back upstream that it is indeed a genuine need that is in fact so important some users did dedicate resources for it, maybe more users would benefit from it
- arjie 2mo ago
  All this is true but I prefer writing AI assisted code and I doubt any maintainer can distinguish me from full spectrum bot. It’s just not productive to either of us.

by arjie 2mo ago

zamadatix 2mo ago

I ran through exactly this thought process & LLM based resolution just 8 hours ago with a segfault compiling a project which likely doesn't care about the given platform combo much.

arjie 2mo ago
Classic problem. I recall spending a long time trying to get Freespace 2 SCP working on the Via Unichrome onboard GPU I had decades ago. Who could possibly have cared for that? The intersection of the two sets was probably precisely one person. By the way, interesting person to have 512 IPv4s (and two /44s? Aren't those enormous?). Root-level http intentionally user/pass gated on your site? I was curious to see.
- zamadatix 2mo ago
  :D. Tl;dr: it's actually near minimal to dual stack and do BGP between 2 sites of redundant services with advertisement failover to the internet. /48 is the smallest accepted IPv6 advertisement and /24 the smallest allowed IPv4 advertisement (on the net at least). IPv6 assignments are done on the nibble (/48, /44, /40, ...). Since I only have two sites I could have gotten away with a /23 and something like a /44 but then the RIR pointed out it'd probably be cleaner to manage to get a /40 and give each site a /44 at the same renewal cost. As to why, I've just always worked in or near the networking field and so it seemed cheaper/easier to run it all myself in the long run. Through another very long story, the Org ID + ASN + IPv4 space + IPv6 space ended up costing something like ~$1k the first year and then ~$500 in yearly renewals. I'm not legally able to resell these for the massive market rate prices of /24s because of them being leased for $0 specifically to dual stack my core hosted services like DNS with my own public IP, but that's fine as I got them to use :). The largest assignment I've ever had the pleasure of getting and deploying was a /32 (... of IPv6!) for an extremely large healthcare system. Certainly no great record smasher, but I thought it was cool to work on an IPv6 subnet so big it could have been an IPv4 route nonetheless! That one was still also very sparse of course, but similar kinds of reasoning ended up getting to that being much easier/better to work with than a dense assignment. I also have a small MAC address range (a classical "OUI" sized range is 24 bits of addresses, I have 12 bits of addresses) for a small run of some hardware I was making for a particular customer use case. With the leftovers I put my laptop on it and get the occasional "how the hell?" when they see Wireshark decode my laptop MAC as "Dan_Smith_xx_xx" while packet capturing to troubleshoot.
  - arjie 2mo ago
    Haha, that’s incredible. I saw the MAC listing afterwards too and definitely piqued my curiosity. Terrific stuff :)

jspdown 2mo ago

How could it take less effort to maintain a fork? You have to merge the upstream in every week and fight endlessly on conflicts with your patches.

byzantinegene 2mo ago
[dead]
nevon 2mo ago
Having seen this happening in the past, pre-AI, the answer is usually that they don't. They just stay on that version forever. Or it's maintained until the original author moves on, after which it's someone else's problem to figure out how to move back to the upstream, which has now had years of changes.
arjie 2mo ago
Originally, yes. Nowadays, it's trivial. Agents can handle this flawlessly.
- oblio 2mo ago
  There can be a point of divergence when even humans can't merge things anymore, so I highly doubt that experience is universal.
  - Ampersander 2mo ago
    No you can't say that! It's the superintelligence. You will be left behind.
    - oblio 2mo ago
      If it's super intelligent... Won't I be left behind anyway?!?

geraneum 2mo ago

Discussing the issues, achieving consensus, making sure the fix fits the existing patterns and actually warrants the change, etc. These are and have always been a challenging part of contributing to open source. Typing code in your private fork that satisfies your “idiosyncratic fix” has always existed and been always the easier aspect of such changes. Chances are many of these changes would never be accepted into the repository anyway in the past.

arjie 2mo ago
Certainly, but there was motivation to do that in the past. My patch would probably line up with the rest of the code in the direction that they desired and the cost of fork maintenance would have pushed me to upstream in a way acceptable to maintainers.
- geraneum 2mo ago
  I find it hard to believe that this is the main motivation for most who contributors to OSS. Do you have a reference, research or poll that corroborate this? You’re vastly overestimating the value of these “fixes” that now go to private forks, because maintainers also have access to LLMs and can prompt, probably better than a drive by fix since they have better understanding and context of the codebase. Therefore I believe, in most cases, keeping those fixes to private forks is not a noticeable loss for the OSS projects.

utopiah 2mo ago

Fair enough not to want to get involved but seems problematic for 2 reasons : - code gets re-regenerated over and over again, so waste of resources - no signal back upstream that it is indeed a genuine need that is in fact so important some users did dedicate resources for it, maybe more users would benefit from it

arjie 2mo ago
All this is true but I prefer writing AI assisted code and I doubt any maintainer can distinguish me from full spectrum bot. It’s just not productive to either of us.