Codeberg isn't a viable infrastructure alternative. Its an opinionated community not a neutral host as they will delete repos based off subjective opinions on LLM usage and resource consumption. If continued hosting is dependent on moderators deciding if a project fits whatever the current philosophy is, and the whims of the moderation team, then I cannot consider it a serious choice for infrastructure.
Infrastructure should be neutral. Codeberg is a social club
Can you suggest a viable infrastructure alternative?
My wishlist: free for open source and paid for closed source, able to do simple projects that are handwritten and also complex projects including AI LLM code that needs CI/CD/auditing, and hosting in the UK or EU.
Aside, I donate money to Codeberg because I think Codeberg is a wonderful service with strong commitment to free open source, and because I host some larger projects and AI projects that are for public welfare social good.
https://tangled.org would love to have you :) We're hosted in the EU, and are free for open source, forever. Tangled is also designed to be federated from ground up, so you get to own your infra & data while still participating in an open network.
Tangled is a VC-funded Oy (Finnish limited liability corporation, €3.8M seed a few months ago). I searched and couldn't find a published donation route, which makes sense given it's VC-funded.
To Tangled -- it's great that the core code is MIT licensed and anyone could stand up a competing appview (the credible-exit property of atproto).
Do Tangled Labs Oy's articles include a purpose clause instead of the default profit-only purpose[0]? Or is something similar on the roadmap?
[0] OYL 1:5 reads The purpose of a company is to generate profits for the shareholders, unless otherwise provided in the Articles of Association.
You're deliberately avoiding a network effect lock-in by being federated, you make competition trivial by giving away not only the protocol but also making your code available, and you don't even restrict commercial competition by using the MIT license rather than, say, BSL.
To me that sounds like you are deliberately starting a race-to-the-bottom competition on price with, well, everyone capable of hosting a SaaS? Heck, if you don't end up with some solid competition the whole "federated code" USP doesn't play out. To me that doesn't exactly scream "good return on my €3,8M seed round". Am I missing a brilliant plan here, or should we expect a rug pull a few years down the line?
I feel like any service that is free for open source is going to struggle if it gets significant adoption and becomes a default target for hosting LLM generated code. If even MS/GitHub cannot scale to the current demand, what hope do smaller and less well-funded alternatives have?
Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation.
The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an overreliance on centralized services even though most such services are relatively easy to host yourself.
I run my own DevOps server based entirely on OSS. Is it github? No. Does it what I need it to do? Absolutely. Do I get 99.999% uptime? No, but when it's down or slow, I can fix it. When the corporate platform is down, I can only wait.
And "network effects" are not a good argument. Open Source was wildly successful long before centraliced DevOps platforms.
And in hindsight, the added friction of getting in touch with projects before being able to send them any code, was a benefit not a disadvantage. Because it acted as a barrier of entry that disincentivized alot of subpar code from hitting these projects in the first place.
The value these centralized services provide is the centralization itself - that makes things easy to find. Remember the web before Altavista? Finding anything was detective work, guessing domains, following links through multiple pages, digging in newsgroups, asking around, and so on.
Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
Now, if we could do something like GitHub on top of a network such as Mastodon, then we would have something that's centralized enough to be useful and distributed enough to be indestructible.
> Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.
None of that depends on a centralized provider. I have all the features you listed on my self-hosted platform as well.
Codeberg is one public flagship instance. They are not neutral and don't claim to be. Decisions on what to host are made via elections by e.V. members. Other platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Tangled etc.) will eventually run into this same thing as well, e.g. how GitHub responds to DMCA requests, the difference with Codeberg is that there are elections which decide on what gets hosted on the main instance. For hosting slop or running a ton of actions, the recommendation is to self-host Forgejo directly instead, meaning that you, not the e.V. pays for the consequences, and you'd use the future AP federation support for cross-instance support. Forgejo is particularly simple to self-host as well, and lots of people do it (ffmpeg, Fedora and more). That way, you get to set your own rules and e.V. election results have no effect on you.
I'm often surprised to find very questionable repos hosted on GitHub. Such as plug 'n play malware that has been public for years. Not against it, but surprised as most parts of the internet has gone in the kindergarten direction.
Infra should be immutable piece that is certainly not influenced by someone power tripping or being butt-hurt by conflicting alignment on worldview issues. These things should be completely detached from each other, and infra should be neutral with technical guarantees it cannot be cut off aside of warfare acts.
This gives the impression that there's a collective group of differing views that come together and make decisions. It's quite the opposite from my experience and they seem to actively chase out anyone who dissents from the collective hive mind's view.
while I don't know if your allegations are true, democracy means there is a group which decides on rules based on a majority vote. It doesn't mean that they have the same or different views at all, although some overlap is probably certain, because otherwise you probably wouldn't decide to join the same association.
Anyone who joins the association (small fee) can vote.
I know what the technical definition of democracy is. However, a lot of people throw it around as if it insinuates a free and open system where every idea can be voiced. That's certainly not the case at Codeberg, and they make that fairly clear. They heavily moderate content and view points that challenge the hive mind are generally moderated out of existence (or the topic/thread is simply closed).
So, yes, it's technically a democracy, but it deserves extra nuance in my mind because it might not be what everyone immediately thinks a democracy should feel like.
That's a fairly good starting place. Might seem innocuous, but don't forget that "far right" has no agreed upon boundary. You might as well replace it with "wrong think" at this point.
Which, again, good for them. I could care less. I left a little over a month ago once I figured out what was going on. They are perfectly allowed their fiefdom on the internet, but I would never recommend the platform to anyone as a useful Git forge unless they happen to sit in that little thought bubble.
Judging by your response, you wouldn't be persuaded by anything. But, I suppose to provide an opportunity for education, people do not like to be thrown into an ever growing identity group with an ever growing list of negative associations tied to it. It's not shocking to me that the people running Codeberg are oblivious to the hypocrisy and double standard they seem to be blatantly putting out. It doesn't foster "inclusivity" and tends to drive out reasonable people.
But that's the game, I suppose. Everyone knows what's going on and they just don't care. And so I don't care about Codeberg :)
Until recently I thought I hated sites that messed with the scroll out of principle, but then I found a handful of them that do a good job of it. This is one of them.
This is a good job? It takes me a half dozen scroll actions to get each sentence of text. I'm not risking a carpal tunnel flare-up just to get through effectively one paragraph of content.
The article is doing a lot more casual work than the headline than the article suggests. Yes, fuel-reduction projects are intended to slow fire spread, not prevent lighting. It proves only that work was delayed, not how much would have been completed, whether the fire crossed the planned treatment area, or whether it would have materially changed the fire's outcome. Even the source admits that is unknown.
I am not defending DOGE. I am rejecting the casual claim that has not been demonstrated merely because it aligns with a political opinion. It also relies on a former ranger who is running for office in the affected district. This reads like a political ad
No it isn't, to quote another article by the Washington post: "We were shovel-ready".
Meaning they cut forest fire prevention measures that would have been deployed before the dry season.
These measures are typically aimed to stopping spreads more than they are aimed at preventing causes (lightning is a tad bit hard to prevent, unless you want to build a gigantic grids of extremely high lightning rod towers). E.g. you cut corridors of trees through the woods and keep them clear of any flammable materials, this way the fire can hopefully be compartmentalized or at least slowed down.
I am not sure why you feel the need to defend this, when it is very clear that Doge didn't exactly deploy what anybody would call "care" in selecting what to cut.
so, if you use encryption on ubuntu you get a vendor controlled delivery path that has all the practical properties of a backdoor, without the transparency to easily prove its not being used as one
Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy. Perverse incentives exist in every domain, and you cannot discount the human factor. The experts can be wrong.
And in this case, Van der Meer's experiment showing more "elaborate" brain activity during handwriting was correlational. The conclusion that this leads to better learning outcomes does not follow.
More to your point: calling "appeal to authority" does not license argument from ignorance. Furthermore, appeal to authority only refers to an authority who is not authoritative in the domain in question.
I don't think this is appeal to authority (or the reverse, I guess). Neuroscience is complex, being a scientist/doctor is one signal that the observations here would be based on/reflective of a large body of knowledge. Probably GP's unstated point is that the author isn't a scientist/doctor and they also haven't studied/read up on their own either.
The experts in the sciences usually back their claims up using citations, and can be disproven through the normal methods of disproving citations. not through "vibes"
And now people such as myself have access to open weight models with that information.
I wasn't lucky enough to have parents put me through school, and LLMs have absolutely helped me further educate myself and play "catch up" on opportunities others have been given. So, the net effect has been (and is continuing to be) a democratization of information.
You could have gained that stuff prior to LLMs. The leg up you're describing is free information on the internet, not AI. AI just makes it a little easier to find, while also crushing the original sources in the process. (Even if it had a broken culture, is stack overflow even going to exist in a year? Where are they going to train on going forward?)
Agreed, i wish that it would have done more than change who gets rich off rent-seeking behavior surrounding the knowledge that others created, instead it just consolidated that from many gatekeepers to a few.
I can at least take some measure of pleasure in the fact that it has generally lessened the roadblocks in gathering information. I am still displeased that there are any gatekeepers of humanity's combined knowledge
Businesses like these used to public at reasonable valuations. You could ride with them to trillion dollar valuations and grow your own fortune too. Everyone has a story of buying Apple or Google or Amazon stock and making millions
Now they’re going live at trillion dollar valuations and by the time you get in, all the upside has already gone (see Spacex IPO)
Not only did they steal all human data, they also made sure that the upside was only limited to themselves and their cronies
