FWIW I think LangChain has evolved a lot and is a nice time saver once you figure out the patterns it uses. The LangSmith observability is frankly fantastic to quickly get a sense of how your expected LLM flow engineering ends up working out in practice. So much FUD here, unwarranted IMO. Don’t forget, reading code is harder than writing it, doesn’t warrant throwing out the baby with the bath water. Don’t fall for NIH :) Haven’t had issues running in prod recently either since they’ve matured their packaging with core/community/partner etc. For agentic use cases look at LangGraph for a cleaner set of primitives that give you the amount of control needed there.
It makes no sense to estimate the total cost of the proprietary equivalent of _all_ that is currently OSS at $177M. It would be spread over at minimum thousands of companies and each company would try to get their margin, needs to be rewarded for the risk they’re taking, etc.
The HBS method to get to 3.5X isn’t sensible (as the author points out, not everyone would build) but the truth is somewhere in-between.
The COGS of software would be significantly higher if there was no OSS. But everyone knows that already. I don’t think any new information has been created here.
I agree, if you think of just a few big OSS project, like Linux, Postgres, Sqlite, nginx or apache web server, run as proprietary companies each of those would easily be worth way more then $177M (for reference, nginx was sold for $670M in 2019).
> It makes no sense to estimate the total cost of the proprietary equivalent of _all_ that is currently OSS at $177M
Right. I mean, I would guesstimate, say, sqlite alone to cost in the ballpark of that amount of money to develop from scratch in a proprietary way.
I mean, working from the initial hypothesis, if sqlite suddenly disappeared and someone starts a company aiming to develop and sell it, how much $$ would VCs throw at the project? How much at Rails? ext4/btrfs/zfs?
The latter gets interesting because Sun threw actual money at ZFS. Comparatively, how much money has, say, Apple spent on APFS? MS on NTFS? How much has been spent on Unix and its descendants?
Either I'm missing something, or that 177M for all of OSS just flat out doesn't add up.
I really enjoy tinkering with LLM outputs that generate code that can be executed directly. Especially the faster models like GPT-3.5 Turbo are a joy to play with.
Am I the only one surprised that the author of einops is looking for work? In an era of an AI arms race between many big labs? If you’re rolling your own networks, I’d definitely reach out to this guy!
Just signed up this seems like it will replace some docker containers I have running on a free tier of fly.io dumping into a supabase free tier. Very cool thank you for sharing!
The owner, tod sacerdoti, is using it to scrape top stories from lobste.rs and submit them to HN as a karma arbitrage pump. Search todsacerdoti on https://gerikson.com/hnlo/ to see what I’m talking about. Judging by the amount of HN karma he’s accumulated it seems to work very well.
Consider setting a delay of a few days before reposting, sometimes people post their own stuff on lobste.rs, want to also post on HN and you've already done so. It can be perceived negatively.
Great analysis on the value of collecting and curating knowledge, even without synthesizing it into "best practices." As an AI engineer I collect a lot of resources here, hoping it helps someone https://codingwithintelligence.com/
