A.) I understand this completely. I'm sure it's impossible for reviewers to keep up with the onslaught of AI-generated code.
B.) I worry what this entails for QGIS, and for the future of such community-built platforms as a whole.
Let's say I need some functionality which QGIS doesn't have. My options are to:
1. Learn to program QGIS, add the functionality, and commit it back to the community. From where I currently sit -- I've never developed for QGIS, I don't know its language -- that's an investment of several months, at a minimum.
2. Vibe-code the extension I need -- or just make a bespoke GIS application which has the small subset of GIS capabilities that I need, optimized for my particular use-case. Depending on the complexity, that's an investment of either days or hours.
By that math, (1) is never going to win, and now (2) is never going to be able to make a contribution back to QGIS. Moreover, the pool of people for whom (1) is a real option will be shrinking every day, particularly as those people have to compete economically with the people who embrace (2).
So it's hard for me to see how community projects survive in the face of these dynamics. And it would be a shame to lose them -- they create a lot of value that a bespoke vibecoded thingamajig never will. But for better or worse, I just don't see humans-only coding having much of a future.
> 1. Learn to program QGIS, add the functionality, and commit it back to the community. From where I currently sit -- I've never developed for QGIS, I don't know its language -- that's an investment of several months, at a minimum.
If you do this, then at the very least there will be one more member of the community who knows how to do it and is willing to accept the liability for their contributions, if any actually make it in. It's an intrinsically valuable asset, as long as your time is available and deemed useful.
> 2. Vibe-code the extension I need -- or just make a bespoke GIS application which has the small subset of GIS capabilities that I need, optimized for my particular use-case. Depending on the complexity, that's an investment of either days or hours.
If you do this, then it solves your immediate problem, and the scope of liability is limited to your own results or those of people you make it available to. QGIS or similar projects, imo, only gain anything when people are contributing something that lends to the long-term stability and quality of the project, anything else is basically high-risk and noisey. A lot of that comes from nuanced technical discussions between people with a depth of domain and codebase specific knowledge about how to approach a problem and decide whether it's even a problem.
The project survives by people and companies investing in it's long-term survival. If it's not worth a potential contributor's time to understand why they've submitted what they've submitted and why it's correct, then it's not the place for them.
It's my view that worthwhile software products are artifacts of good, durable, and stable processes that are intended outlive them, in the same way that stable economies and governments are artifacts of suitable long-term policymaking that's resilient to rapid fluctuations and malicious actors. One-off rebuilds and fly-by-night features are neat party-tricks, but that's not what I'd encourage a professional to rely on as a tool, because it's unclear what skin the maintainer has in the game.
Maybe your extension/app is compelling enough that the core team finds a way to recreate it, or make an exception?
Maybe it becomes normal to fork a project and vibe-code the extra thing you want and everybody does that and it's fine?
Doesn't seem like a loss for the project, just a win for you. If I understood the announcement correctly, they're doing this more for logistical reasons than to outright ban all AI-assisted code, so if something turns out to be super awesome then it's not like they have to do a clean-room reimplementation.
I suspect they're more intelligent than that. By, like, a lot.
When I was a teenager, I took a rowboat out onto what was then called Scammon's Lagoon, in Baja California, where the Grey whales raise their young. A mother whale -- several times the size of our boat -- and her calf approached. The calf was curious but cautious, so the mother nudged it into approaching the boat, close enough that we could reach over and rub its nose, which everyone on the boat did in turns.
What did the whales get out of this? Certainly nothing tangible -- nobody was feeding them or anything like that. But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.
I'm certain the mother whale knew what she was doing. She was recruiting us to her side. MUCH more effective, in the long term, than merely running away.
How does a whale read a group of humans in a boat? A normal-shaped body underneath and a wild mess of heads and flappy things above? We are the shoggoths...
I know the story of a farmer whose wife trained one of their pigs to be living inside the house like a dog. part of everyday activity.
But the farmer still killed the pig at the end of the season, because it was the thing to do.
So i think the japanese might not have the same cultural appreciation for the emotional connection with "food"
its a wall many vegan and animal activists are struggling often
Idealistically, I really wish I could disagree with you.
Living in this reality, unfortunately I cannot.
So I should restate the whale story: that's the effect it had on me, and I still strongly suspect that this was intentional on the whale's part. But YMMV.
> But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.
Comment you're replying to is saying that this is optimistic; most people are capable of doublethink, and will quite happily "love" one individual of a species while being completely indifferent to the death and suffering of the rest of that species. I've observed the same phenomenon.
In that comment it was the farmers wife who trained the pig to live in the house like a dog, and then the farmer himself who killed the pig.
I do agree that doublethink is widespread (just look at how we treat other humans, no need to go across species) but I think these are choices that happen on a personal level and can hardly be generalized. I know people who stopped eating octopus after seeing My Octopus Teacher, and I've seen Chinese restaurants serving dog meat. We live in a world full of contraddictions.
The farmer still lived together with the pig, engaged with it etc.
I dont know the exactl level of engagement, but i doubt that he simply never saw the pig as a pet.
It was just so engrained that its a agricultural product at the end of the season, and that it was in its nature to be slaughtered that he didnt even question it.
I was not saying it isnt possible to be changed by such an experience, just that other drivers might override that.
There is Vegan Hunters that kill deer for the stability of the ecosystem as an exotic example.
>> and will quite happily "love" one individual of a species while being completely indifferent to the death and suffering of the rest of that species.
Similar to how a significant subset of the human population responds to other humans.
I don't have a whale moment, but my manatee moment gave me feelings that are probably similar to yours re: being incapable of feeling anything but respect and awe for the aquatic mammals we share the planet with.
In the late 80s my father took me snorkeling at the Crystal River Manatee Sanctuary[0]. We rowed our boat out into the river and anchored. I jumped in and immediately spotted an adult manatee and a calf. I've always assumed it was a mother and her calf.
Judging distance under water is difficult, but I'd put them at least 40 feet away in water that might have been 12 feet deep.
The mother put herself between me and the calf surprisingly quickly. Knowing the rules I didn't approach them. I just floated there watching.
After a few moments the calf poked its head around its mother and looked at me. It felt just like a curious child peeking from behind a parent's legs. I stayed still and just watched them (thankful my father made me wear the yellow Navy surplus horseshoe collar BC that had just enough air in it to keep me afloat without the need to tread water).
My father was still getting his SCUBA gear together and hadn't jumped in yet. I think I stuck my head up and told him they were there-- I can't remember for sure-- but I know he stayed in the boat for awhile leaving me alone with the two manatees.
As I watched over the next couple of minutes both mother and calf went up for air and moved closer to me. It seemed like they were grazing along the bottom in the plants. I didn't see them eat any of the plants, but it seemed like they were nosing around in them. I definitely got the "sea cow" comparison.
The mother got close enough for me to see ugly gashes in her back from being stuck by boat motors. They weren't bloody or raw-looking, but they did look deep and painful to have acquired. Her calf's back was smooth and a lighter color.
As they proceeded past me the calf turned, swam over its mother, and approached me. I was shocked at how fast it could reorient itself and move. Again, having been told the rules, I kept my hands close to my body and didn't move. The calf bumped into my legs and rubbed against my back as it swam past. It descended and circled back around under me and rejoined its mother. They continued swimming away from me, into the murkier deeper water and down into the sanctuary where we weren't permitted to follow.
The whole thing might have lasted 5 minutes, but it really stuck with me. The memory is surely tarnished and altered, having been recalled so many times, but I definitely got bumped by a curious manatee calf whose mother was wary but didn't flee.
I couldn't visit the monument-- I hadn't learned to SCUBA dive yet. My father, who was an underwater photography enthusiast, took photos of it. The next year we transferred the photos and 8mm movie footage he shot onto VHS for me to show to my 6th grade class. I can remember him reading the inscription for the tape in a very somber voice.
> "Life must become more than the wants and needs of humans. We are not on this earth alone. If the manatee goes into extinction because the needs of humans became more important then we will have taken another step backward toward our own demise. Extinction is forever and for all." - Dr. Harvey Barnett
I'd love to find that VHS. His picture is somewhere in the mess of slides I need to eventually scan.
I'd also love to back and swim with the manatees again. Apparently their populations are doing better, though they're still at risk.
I was working with a company trying to run a render farm. They were based in an old concrete warehouse with high ceilings, but as the company expanded, they ran out of floor space and decided to create a mezzanine floor. So now you had two very low-ceilinged floors instead. And you know what held up the mezzanine floor? Batteries. Huge banks of chained-together automotive batteries. Of course there were conventional Uninterruptible Power Supplies attached to every computer, but those wouldn't survive the entire blackout, so the car batteries and inverters and whatnot were upstream from those.
Looking back at it, it's hard to believe that nobody died...
Agreed that there should be real consequences, but I'm less convinced that "open the company - open weights, open training, per its original 'open' ethos" would be the right answer. That gets us into the kind of libertarian utopia where everyone is allegedly safer because everybody is well-armed... which usually doesn't work out so well in practice.
The alternative to "open weights" at this point is "American controlled."
And Dario and Sam have already made it clear that it's America First.
The rest of the world isn't going to accept a regulatory regime which imposes American hegemony. Maybe when Silicon Valley was playing all utopian like they used to. Not now.
Open weights is the most reasonable counter-power we have.
When I moved from the US to the UK, the use of quotation marks in news headlines was something that confused me. In the US, these would be "scare quote", with the quotation marks basically standing in for the words "so-called". In the UK, that is NOT their meaning. The quotation marks mean "we are not ourselves in a position to verify this, but it is the words that a source has told us". Very different meaning -- and once I got used to it, I think the UK use of language in this case is more honest and useful.
tl;dr: two countries, divided by a common language.
This is like this in most of Europe: when in "quotes", it is not the journalist, but the person who said something. For example, Obama said "Yes we can". He did not say yes we can, he said "Yes we can".
It is not about the quotes being verified or unverified. It is about something said by somebody, that you are reporting.
It’s not so much ‘we are not in a position to verify’ as the fact that the person who said the thing, and what they said, is itself newsworthy.
If you’re reporting that “Government sources say Houthis have ‘taken control’ of an island” then the fact that government sources used the words ‘taken control’ is itself interesting.
The headlines “Russia ‘will be defeated’ in Ukraine says Zelensky”, “Russia ‘will be defeated’ in Ukraine says Putin”, and “Russia ‘will be defeated’ in Ukraine says Taylor Swift” all tell of vastly different news events.
I understand that ostensibly it is a statement of who is making the claim. But doesn't the media organization have an expectation to research and validate such claims? And so if they didn't, then that must mean that they weren't able to?
Fun fact: French Guiana is a part of France -- and very much part of the EU -- despite not actually being in Europe. In roughly the same way that Hawaii is a part of the United States of America, despite not actually being in America.
Now: please make it rapidly reusable and at least 10x larger. Europe desperately needs sovereign launch capabilities in that class. Today, you were the first to cross the starting line. AWESOME. Have a drink, get some rest, and get back to work. Everyone will be rooting for you!
I also don't have time to watch the video, but am somewhat familiar with the topic. One of the primary themes of the dreamtime stories is about the origins of various landforms: how this hill got here, how this valley got there, etc. They're often quite detailed, because explaining the unique quirks of the landscape is part of the appeal. So, not just a generic "why the valley is here" stories, but specific "why the valley has seven sharp zig-zag kinks in it" kind of stories.
There are a number of such stories which tell about landforms which have been under the ocean for 11,000 years, since the great meltwater pulses raised the ocean at the end of the ice age. Long after the stories were documented by anthropologists -- who thought it was unusual that so much mythology would be concerned with the topography of the seafloor -- sonar was invented, which confirmed that the landforms existed more or less exactly as the stories said.
So personally I think that's pretty hard proof of at least 11,000 years of accurate oral tradition.
I'm in a borough of London, and did a bit of a double-take when they told me that Dolly Parton would be sending my daughter a book every month. But indeed she did, and it had exactly that effect, and now she's an absolutely avid reader.
Thank you, Dolly. That meant a lot to us, and millions upon millions of other people too.
Perhaps then, rather than flying flags at half-mast, it'd be better to send that-many books to children around the world. Sadly it seems people calling the shots, the strong of the day, are more interested in delivering threats and ultimatums, rather than what shiny Dolly did.
What an apparent demonstration that not everyone is gifted the same amount of generosity.
My kid's nursery gave out books from Dolly. It was a little ceremony, my kid loved it. We still have them.
But I was really surprised, I thought it was joke, why would Dolly care about my Kid's reading? but she really did. She really did care about a bunch of kids in inner city london.
Obviously I am not blessed with millions, but Dolly does lead by example. I need to do better.
B.) I worry what this entails for QGIS, and for the future of such community-built platforms as a whole.
Let's say I need some functionality which QGIS doesn't have. My options are to:
1. Learn to program QGIS, add the functionality, and commit it back to the community. From where I currently sit -- I've never developed for QGIS, I don't know its language -- that's an investment of several months, at a minimum.
2. Vibe-code the extension I need -- or just make a bespoke GIS application which has the small subset of GIS capabilities that I need, optimized for my particular use-case. Depending on the complexity, that's an investment of either days or hours.
By that math, (1) is never going to win, and now (2) is never going to be able to make a contribution back to QGIS. Moreover, the pool of people for whom (1) is a real option will be shrinking every day, particularly as those people have to compete economically with the people who embrace (2).
So it's hard for me to see how community projects survive in the face of these dynamics. And it would be a shame to lose them -- they create a lot of value that a bespoke vibecoded thingamajig never will. But for better or worse, I just don't see humans-only coding having much of a future.
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