What is the point of converting this software?

@samir I had a guest and I played the above without reading the details. I insist, this field is deranged

@gpcureton @samir Right on the money.

Their website uses AI-generated images for post thumbnails and promotes AI, their open position for an Editor explicitly says that you should be comfortable working with LLMs, it reminded me of the accelerationist movement, but since you've also mentioned effective altruism, it turns out there's a subset named "effective accelerationism" which is used in the corporate world.

IFP partially matches e/acc, they push for accelerated technological progress through US-centric reforms, they're also pro-AI and pro-innovation but they're not (or haven't revealed to be AI maximalists), so it's not explicitly e/acc, just smells a bit like it.

To further that, three of the foundations funding IFP - Astera Foundation, Coefficient Giving and Heising-Simmons Foundation are EA donors or EA-aligned, and IFP may have received funding in the past from none other than one of the poster boys of EA, Sam Bankman-Fried, at least according to an EA forum page on IFP.

@gpcureton @samir But wait, it gets better (or worse?).

I checked IFP on ProPublica, in the 2022 and 2021 Form 990 filings (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/872449729/202300699349300540/full), the org name is "INSTITUTE FOR PROGRESS AND ALTRUISM".

Part III 4a mentions "[...]. As a non-profit research and advocacy organization, IFP brings the best ideas from the progress studies and effective altruism communities to policymakers in Washington, DC."

In their 'preparing for launch' page they mention they borrow ideas from defensive accelerationism (https://ifp.org/preparing-for-launch/).

So yeah, IFP is that type of woo-woo techbro policy-wonk.

@samir "rust rewrite" is rapidly becoming a nebulously security-flavored term that people lacquer onto something indiscriminately, like "encryption" or "vpn". all things that are real and work and are good, but lacking any of the context of when or why they are good

@samir Ah, but the AI will maintain it.

That way, we can bring more FOSS under oligarch control!

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194

What is the point of converting this software?

Who’s gonna maintain it?

Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.

I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.

Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194

What is the point of converting this software?

Who’s gonna maintain it?

Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.

I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.

Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.

@mkoek Yes, it’s true, but you could also generate a Cmake file which automatically downloads a malicious dependency from GitHub.

The problem is the “hallucination”, not the choice of programming language.

@samir agree that that would be equally bad, but have not seen people be that silly… that’s probably me though

@samir Goodness, I am behind the times. Some searching tells me that this is the way people handle dependencies now - just pull in some github repo from your makefile. We are not getting better at this security thing, are we.

@mkoek Nope. It’s the same everywhere. And I can’t fault it; it can take between “months” and “never” for a dependency to arrive as a Debian package. (And sometimes you do need an exact version.)

I personally like nixpkgs as a solution to this, but it’s a big change for most people.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194

What is the point of converting this software?

Who’s gonna maintain it?

Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.

I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.

Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.

@samir There is also the possibility that Rust as a language will evolve, fragment or move on from where it is now, leaving a large codebase marooned. Surely it needs a formalised ISO standard, and a group with a will to support that, before embarking on mass codebase conversions.

@kbm0 There already is at least one such a language. And it's been proving (literally) its reliability for decades. @samir

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194

What is the point of converting this software?

Who’s gonna maintain it?

Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.

I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.

Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194

What is the point of converting this software?

Who’s gonna maintain it?

Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.

I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.

Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194

What is the point of converting this software?

Who’s gonna maintain it?

Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.

I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.

Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.

@samir I think I read an article in the 1980s about how people can write FORTRAN in every language. They meant in the style of FORTRAN, not the language itself.

And you can write C in Rust.

I'm not sure if this is automagically free of bugs.

@samir Yes! I think it is better to verify that existing software is memory safe, ideally automatically, but with the help of some type-like annotations if needed. There are still some rough edges, but Codex (the static analysis library) is close to provide that!

@samir It took a while but IEEE seems to be going all in on GenAI and in the process becoming less relevant to me almost daily.