> “I've spent the last several months talking to people all over Casa Grande, and one thing keeps coming up: Safety. So, today I'm excited to announce a new company called Shepherd Safety,” he said. “Our mission is simple. Keep government officials and their families safe.” It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said; he planned to launch satellites that would use AI to monitor “where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home.”
> Preparing for AI agents means expanding auditability and reversibility in software
While I think that makes sense, I also think more controls are a good solution. That is, prevent access to the sales data without escalation, probably to a human, but possibly to another AI. The issue there is twofold:
- if you start with least privilege, the agents become less useful
- need to balance escalation with frequency otherwise it's just another version of MFA fatigue
Agree that auditability is important because otherwise you don't know what you don't know.
I'd broaden the question about sustainability. I haven't worked deeply on OSS, but have worked with a number of other volunteer organizations or efforts, some on my own and some with a community.
In all cases, there needs to be some payback to the folks putting in time. And it can't just be money, because volunteer organizations never have enough money to compensate appropriately. Otherwise they'd be businesses :) .
Other forms of compensation:
* fun, as you outline
* recognition from others
* impact on the world
* legacy/connecting to the past
* satisfaction of helping others
* increased leverage toward other goals
* learning new skills
* connection and community
I'm sure there are a dozen others. But recognizing and fostering these benefits is critical to OSS surviving.
Well, there's doing both in terms of focus and effort, basically treating them as peer products. And then there is doing both in terms of "keeping the lights on for one, and focusing on the other".
Without any special insight into fly.io, I'd bet the situation is the latter. You keep the lights and fix security issues for the existing infra (which incidentally gives you money out of cashflow to invest in new efforts).
Yeah, I was just commenting on a LinkedIn post[0] (don't hate the player, hate the game :) ). In it, someone talked about the difference between creating software and owning it.
Creating software with AI is super easy--plan, prompt, test, go, go, go!
Owning software means you're responsible for maintaining it over time, fixing edge cases, operating it well, and more.
If you're building a one-off custom webapp to meet your needs, create away. If you're writing software for a business to run on, you're owning it. My fav article on this topic is this post[1] on durable vs disposable software.
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