It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the world. I mean, look at … everything. Massive ongoing wars everywhere, Fascism on the rise, exploding inequality. Shit is fucked up and more fucked up on a global scale than it ever was in my life time (I was born in 1979). And with the media landscape and notifications and 24 hour news it’s hard to not feel overwhelmed. Every morning when waking up is basically:

And it is important to be informed. To at least try to see what is going on in order to decide where one can make a difference or maybe at least help? Someone? Anyone?

But this is also no way to live. For a bunch of different reasons. I think given the state of the world it’s fair to let certain crises go into the background (without going full ignorance): You just mentally cannot dive into every crisis all the time. Not just because you don’t have the hours in the day but also because it will destroy your mind.

I have this tendency to believe that if I just dig for more information and understand, that if I can make sense of something, I will feel better and it will create some form of path towards resolution. That it would allow me to send a letter to a politician or support an organization or write or do something that can help turn things around. I believe that knowledge and understanding creates agency. Which isn’t 100% false but in the way I apply it is basically delusional.

And I do that because I am scared. I am scared by the consequences of the chaos. I’ve learned enough about history to understand that when shit hits the fan it’s rarely the powerful and wealthy who suffer the most. That it starts hurting at the bottom and then quickly moves up. And that scares me. Not in the abstract but in my bones. Even more now that I have a son who I just want to be able to live a life full of joy and love.

But being scared is not all I feel (even though it is a big part of it). I am grieving.

I realized that a few days ago when I took some time off of the news and all that. I was exhausted and burned out and took a walk. And understood that I was literally grieving. I was sad for the structure of the world that I see crashing down.

And don’t get me wrong. The structure wasn’t perfect. Or even great. We built a world order based on exploitation of the planet and each other. With some good things bolted to it here or there, some remnants of socialist and human rights thinking. Certain safety nets, certain conventions. It wasn’t much, but it was something. And now that they are being dismantled in record time I am grieving for those tiny things.

Because while that system was in place it did – at least to me, and maybe that was naive – feel as if we could use it as a platform to build something better on. Drive back the inequality and exploitation through collective action. The road to “fully automated luxury space communism” was still very long but it felt like there might be a floor to it all. And that floor was still too low and did not include everyone, probably a minority even. But from my privileged position as someone living in Germany it felt like a foundation to build on. A consensus.

And I miss it. It hurts to see it being killed. To see that in fact there is no consensus that includes any commitment – even a surface level one – to human rights and the will to build something better than “billionaires can get even richer while the world is burning”.

This is not a feeling I am planning to dwell on for too long. But I think it’s important that during the storm of news and notifications and whatever we sometimes take the time to understand how that makes us feel and why?

I am grieving because I had felt like there was sort of a “emergency break” kind of thing that would ensure things would be going too bad. And coming from a family where I inherited my parents’ fear of the threat of downwards social mobility that gave me a lot of emotional support. It was about more about a feeling than it was about facts.

It’s important to understand how the world makes you feel. And share it. Otherwise your emotions are gonna catch up with you at some point.

Now is the time to get back to it. Even if the rules-based order that I grew up in and relied on all my life is crumbling, maybe we can redirect that momentum towards something better. Or at least stop some fascists. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” and all that.

According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted. 

Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don't fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades. 

Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.

Vibe coders, according to these researchers, don’t give back.

The study Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, takes an economic view of the problem and asks the question: is vibe coding economically sustainable? Can OSS survive when so many of its users are takers and not givers? According to the study, no. 

“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS, raises the quality threshold for sharing, and reduces the mass of shared packages…the decline can be rapid because the same magnification mechanism that amplifies positive shocks to software demand also amplifies negative shocks to monetizable engagement. In other words, feedback loops that once accelerated growth now accelerate contraction.”

This is already happening. Last month, Tailwind Labs—the company behind an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwind Labs is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.

Tailwind Labss head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can't prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I'm nervous to offer them without solving that problem first.”

Miklós Koren, a professor of economics at Central European University in Vienna and one of the authors of the vibe coding study, told 404 Media that he and his colleagues had just finished the first draft of the study the day before Wathan posted his frustration. “Our results suggest that Tailwind's case will be the rule, not the exception,” he said.

According to Koren, vibe-coders simply don’t give back to the OSS communities they’re taking from. “The convenience of delegating your work to the AI agent is too strong. There are some superstar projects like Openclaw that generate a lot of community interest but I suspect the majority of vibe coders do not keep OSS developers in their minds,” he said. “I am guilty of this myself. Initially I limited my vibe coding to languages I can read if not write, like TypeScript. But for my personal projects I also vibe code in Go, and I don't even know what its package manager is called, let alone be familiar with its libraries.”

The study said that vibe coding is reducing the cost of software development, but that there are other costs people aren’t considering. “The interaction with human users is collapsing faster than development costs are falling,” Koren told 404 Media. “The key insight is that vibe coding is very easy to adopt. Even for a small increase in capability, a lot of people would switch. And recent coding models are very capable. AI companies have also begun targeting business users and other knowledge workers, which further eats into the potential ‘deep-pocket’ user base of OSS.”

This won’t end well. “Vibe coding is not sustainable without open source,” Koren said. “You cannot just freeze the current state of OSS and live off of that. Projects need to be maintained, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities patched. If OSS collapses, vibe coding will go down with it. I think we have to speak up and act now to stop that from happening.”

He said that major AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI can’t continue to free ride on OSS or the whole system will collapse. “We propose a revenue sharing model based on actual usage data,” he said. “The details would have to be worked out, but the technology is there to make such a business model feasible for OSS.”

AI is the ultimate rent seeker, a middle-man that inserts itself between a creator and a user and it often consumes the very thing that’s giving it life. The OSS/vibe-coding dynamic is playing out in other places. In October, Wikipedia said it had seen an explosion in traffic but that most of it was from AI scraping the site. Users who experience Wikipedia through an AI intermediary don’t update the site and don’t donate during its frequent fund-raising drives.

The same thing is happening with OSS. Vibe coding agents don’t read the advertisements in documentation about paid products, they don’t contribute to the knowledge base of the software, and they don’t donate to the people who maintain the software. 

“Popular libraries will keep finding sponsors,” Koren said. “Smaller, niche projects are more likely to suffer. But many currently successful projects, like Linux, git, TeX, or grep, started out with one person trying to scratch their own itch. If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?”

The Steam Machine was supposed to be out pretty soon, along with the Steam Controller and Steam Frame, but Valve announced today that not only has all this hardware's release been delayed, but that it'll probably be more expensive whenever it comes out, too.

The announcement reads:

When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then.  The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).

Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change. We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible.

Those "memory and storage shortages", if you haven't heard about them, are a result of AI data centre usage--or, not even usage, but planned usage--fucking with global production and supply chains so much that the cost of everything from SSDs to RAM has shot through the roof.

Here’s why RAM prices are skyrocketing and SSDs and GPUs could soon follow suit

The answer: AI of course.

PC GamerJacob Fox

This news has moved me from "maybe computer use should be regulated" to "Butlerian Jihad Now" on the radicalisation scale.

Diverse deutsche NGOs und Unternehmen haben im Dezember den “Digital Independence Day” ausgerufen. Am DI.Day, wie es gerne abgekürzt wird, sollen Menschen nicht nur motiviert werden, die digitalen Aspekte ihrer Existenz von vor allem US-basierten Plattformen und Anbietern hin zu anderen Plattformen (z.B. in der EU) zu verschieben sondern es werden auch konkrete Hinweise und Howtos bereitgestellt, wie genau man sich von bestimmten Plattformen befreien kann.

Die Stoßrichtung kann ich absolut verstehen, ich habe vor einigen Tagen ja hier selbst beschrieben, welche Migrationen ich im vergangenen Jahr vorgenommen habe. Mehr solche konkreten Anleitungen sind in jedem Falle hilfreich, um Menschen und Gruppen die Möglichkeit zu geben, ihre digitale Lebenswelt besser zu gestalten. Überhaupt wieder zu gestalten. Sich nicht mehr nur als “user” sondern als gestaltend zu begreifen. Denn das Digitale ist ja an sich fast beliebig formbar, eine Eigenschaft, die zunehmend in Vergessenheit zu geraten scheint.

Allerdings ist das Framing problematisch: “Independence Day”. Man will sich also unabhängig machen. Aber von wem eigentlich?

Auf den ersten Blick gibt es hier einen leicht nationalistischen Spin: Man will sich nicht mehr auf ausländische/außereuropäische Anbieter verlassen müssen. Aber das wäre für den DI.day meiner Meinung nach eine unfaire Lesart. Es geht ja auch viel um Open Source und all das, also generell darum irgendwie unabhängig zu sein. Aber mal ne ketzerische Frage: Geht das überhaupt? Will man das überhaupt wirklich?

Als Mensch zu existieren bedeutet abhängig zu sein. Wir sind als Kinder abhängig von unseren Eltern und Erziehenden, später von unserem sozialen Umfeld, unserem Job, der Arbeit, die viele unbekannte um uns herum erledigen, damit der Laden überhaupt laufen kann: Wir sind niemals unabhängig.

Ich würde sogar weitergehen. Die Art, wie wir in Abhängigkeiten leben, macht uns stark. Bestimmte Arten von gegenseitiger Abhängigkeit sind die Basis von Solidarität und sozialem Zusammenhalt. Zu begreifen, das wir alle einander brauchen ist der erste Schritt um zu verstehen, wie sehr wir uns alle gegenseitig ein gutes Leben schulden.

Das heißt nicht, dass alle Abhängigkeiten gleich sind: Ich bin ein Fan davon, bewußter über Abhängigkeiten nachzudenken und bestimmte davon loszuwerden, falls irgendwie möglich. Aber das darf nicht dazu führen der liberalen Chimäre des komplett unabhängigen Individuums, das rational am Markt oder so operiert, nachzurennen.

Ein besseres Framing wäre meiner Meinung nach das der Einbettung. Mensch sein heißt eingebettet sein in Beziehungen und Abhängigkeiten. Und diese gilt es möglichst gut zu gestalten, spezielle Abhängigkeiten zu reduzieren und durch andere zu ersetzen, die fairer, menschlicher, repektvoller sind.

Wir sind niemals unabhängig. Aber das heißt nicht, dass wir bestimmte Abhängigkeiten akzeptieren sollten. Ein gutes Leben ist ein Leben in guten sozialen Verbindungen. Guten Abhängigkeiten halt.

This cartoon is drawn by new guest artist Jamie Sale, who did a terrific job.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. Each of the panels shows a businessman in a suit grinning as he speaks to us.

PANEL 1

A close up of a businessman grinning. In the background, a bright blue sky with fluffy clouds.

MAN: A.I. Is the defining tech of our time! Microsoft and amazon and facebook and google have spent almost a trillion dollars on A.I.!

PANEL 2

The camera has pulled back a little. We can see the man is holding a bubble blower, bubbles streaming from it.

MAN: Has A.I. made a profit? Not yet, but… Someday we’ll figure out something A.I. can do that actually makes money! It definitely might could happen!

PANEL 3

The man continues grinning, pumping his fist, as the air around him turns gray and forbidding and the bubbles stream out.

MAN: In the meantime, We have to prepare! By spending more billions building more A.I. data centers so we can spend trillions more so that someday A.I. can do… Um…

PANEL 4

We can now see that the man is talking to a huge bubble floating in the air. The bubble has been packed fill with ordinary looking people, shoved in like sardines in a can. They looked panicked and unhappy.

MAN: Anyway, A.I. is certainly possibly maybe not going to pop and take down the whole economy! You’ve got nothing to worry about!

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

“Chicken fat” is old-fashioned cartoonist lingo for little extras in the art.

Panel 2 – In a tiny window in a cloud is a tiny, teeny silhouette of a spy with binoculars.

Panel 3 – One of the bubbles has a mouse in it.

Panel 4 – One of the bubbles has a “for rent” sign.

The A.I. Bubble | Patreon