And even if a contribution is helpful (like a feature you hadn’t thought of or a bug you hadn’t encountered) you’re better off writing the change yourself.
This is something that has been a problem for quite some time within the modded-Minecraft community that I'm a part of: it's highly generational, as in, upstreaming is exceptionally rare. Each server is a fork, or a fork of a fork, etc, resulting in lineages of servers like a family tree. It's very typical for multiple servers to encounter the same (or similar) problem(s) and create their own solutions, like convergent evolution.
There was an attempt to start upstreaming changes to a more centralised, ancestor repo, but this failed almost immediately. Why? Well, whoever owns that upstream will naturally want a say in, and thus will exert control over, what gets merged in. The best case scenario is that you create a whole bunch of work for yourself to conform your code whatever arbitrary requirements upstream demands, or; the worst case scenario is that you effectively cede control over what gets run on your server. But this begs the question: why doesn't upstream just pull from downstream? It's all open source, after all, and yet it almost never happens.
It's been a couple years since then and things have only gotten worse: servers are no longer accepting many (if any) community contributions anymore, instead relying on in-house developers. In a sense, these mods are no longer open source, but rather source available: the vast majority of updates come whenever the sole dev-admin has one of their code-binge days.
Anyway, I think something similar is happening here, with open source more generally, particularly with the advent of AI: any outside contribution is just creating work for you; it's probably going to have its idiosyncrasies from its author; features that you wont want to support or spend time tearing out or waiting for them to tear it out; etc. So if you want a feature, you might as well do it yourself, or get an LLM to do it since it'll probably generate something good enough, without complaint, and without much delay.
Thanks for that perspective! I think that dynamic is present in quite a lot of other communities too, especially the ones who have not traditionally embraced open source. You also see it a lot around creative / artsy work where it almost seems to be a faux pas to share anything but the final product. People do recreate things or just are inspired by other work. Coming from open source software it always seemed like wasted potential to me, but that's probably just my bias.
> In a sense, these mods are no longer open source, but rather source available
I understand what sense you mean, but the terms "open source" and "source available" have very clear definitions, and it has nothing to do with accepting contributions or not, only with the license the code is published under. So in a sense only about downstream effects; upstream effects are still a courtesy also with open source.
Would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever board room in the world has somebody saying “yes, we could increase profits by doing X, but that would be unethical so of course we won’t”
This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).
You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).
> This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
No something clearly different happens in regulated markets. There's a massive difference between "This would make us more money, but we won't do that because it's unethical" and "I wish we could get away with doing this unethical thing to make more money, but sadly current regulations make this one unprofitable for now. Lets increase our lobbying spend to try to fix that."
What usually happens is they talk about statistics rather than demographics. Eg “when doing x we’ve seen a 5% rise in engagement but a 50% rise in spend from those engaged”
Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.
arguably, this is what sales cares about and the half-measures taken to tackle what must be the Mt. Everest of tech debt at Salesforce is what leads to large, systemically degraded customer trust in products that keep shipping bugs
Exactly. Jack Welsh’s management philosophy just further incentivizes doing what you can to bring everyone else (ie the company) down to make yourself look better.
They’re just doing what they’re told to do by the shareholders. They’re the largest cogs sure, but cogs nonetheless, and they’re replaced just as quickly when they fail to make choices that maximize profit above all else.
Should we appreciate art we were manipulated into liking, or pretending to appreciate?
Modern art has been the butt of many jokes over the years. A canvas painted white, a banana duck taped to a wall, literal piles of trash… the bar for what we call art is basically on the floor. A literal bar on the floor, given a good story, could itself be called art.
Art generally implies some level of skill. While some modern art can still fall into that category, other stuff requires no real skill, just the right connections and for enough people to buy into the grift.
I love art. Contemporary art is a bunch of ugly wankery by pretentious people who are bored of actual beauty and can only amuse themselves by creating ugly stuff, then claiming "you just don't get it". The world would be a significantly better place without contemporary art in it.
If there is any change I could make to the human personality at large it would be the reflexive opinion that anything you don't understand, or even dislike, is automatically morally wrong.
This might shock you, but most art is made by artists. Artists also tend to spend lots of their time consuming other art. This informs the type of art they create.
Here's an anecdote: Pablo Picasso learned to paint realistic scenes, including humans, the equivalent of Da Vinci or Michelangelo, around the age of 17 or 18.
Where do you go from there? In his case, he went towards cubism and other such "modern art". Why do you suppose that is?
