OpenRouter does a lot of great work and I really enjoy being able to use different models so easily. I like when a provider is phasing out an older model that still works for my needs and the price is much lower. It seems like such a good win-win.

However, the problem is that many Qwen models have almost no capacity or is so flaky you literally have to just litter your code with a blacklist/whitelist of providers. OpenRouter has some attempts to solve this, but they don't work. In fact, OpenRouter has a lot of really cool stuff that is documented, but if you read the code it's not yet implemented or isn't actually there yet, which is a shame.

I tried to get in contact with them at OpenRouter about this and I was interested in working with them in the past, but it's difficult to get in touch with the right people and they are growing very fast. I expect being acquired by Stripe will accelerate those problems in some ways. I have no doubt they will resolve all of these issues eventually and scaling that much that quickly is really hard, so kudos to them, but the road has been pretty lame and taken some wind out of my sails.

This combined with many other comments about other projects and the massively increased access to vibe coding makes me really excited to see how things change in the next half a decade. I've been involved in FOSS for so many decades now I understand and (mostly) trust the systems in place enough to not get stuck worrying about patch quality and other woes that aren't really specific to LLMs.

What I find a lot more interesting is the copyleft and copyright implications of how this works and I've been thinking about it a lot more over the last year. I think we all have and I think it's normal and natural for everyone to conclude that software is going to become highly personalized, similar to how the web experience was changed by extensions and browser customization, but on a grand new scale.

What this really means, and what this thread confirms is happening, is that companies no longer have software as a lever for lock in and many other anti-patterns. In the past it would take a team of wizards to unfuck something enough so that other people could continue to use it without being abused. Think adblockers, DRM unlockers, things that enable features vendors disabled when they released a new product, things vendors gave up on because they're cheap or lazy, etc.

What would happen in the past is the wizards would dump a few hundreds of hours into doing some magic and then get cease and desist orders to stop doing something people wanted once it became a pain for a copyright, trademark, or patent troll, etc.

What will happen now and in the future is people are using their own "bespoke" software. Granny can have her version she likes, with big fonts and maybe it matches to an experience she is more familiar with like a traditional newspaper. Hackers can have their version of something where it's all matrix code flowing down the screen. Other users will fall into different areas of the spectrum and feature axis.

Similar to the web extensions we will see an ability to share and cultivate these things, meaning the Grannies, Hackers and other users might see something they like from one another and share it, etc.

We'll see how far we get down the road until people get confused at how software can be shared instead of "stolen" from each other. It will be interesting to see how that conversation goes this time around when everyone is using software to circumvent a different layer of software. Put simply, do the people vibe coding different workarounds or UX improvements to a social media site think another user doing the same thing with the same color palette is "stealing" from them? If so then they are doing the same from the social media provider.

I'm not a copyleft absolutist. I would say I am a critic of software patents and that the patent system as a whole is not accomplishing much of anything let alone it's original goals. Most of those are moot points now. Regardless of your opinions that genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in.

The problem is that large companies and government agencies are both misusing and NOT using the appropriate trust anchor - their fucking domain.

Its just attempting to work around incompetence, which always just shows up again somewhere else.

I do this at scale and it took me very little time to set up and almost no resistance. So anyone who thinks that this is difficult or you're preventing people from doing this at scale, you're wrong.

Anyone still expecting anything different is ignoring reality.

It's really not complicated. If you want to continue to be gate kept, use their products and keep giving them your money. If you don't want to be involved with their shady practices, stop giving them your money and using their products.

This crappy 7 port hub is one of the only ones that "works" to reprogram the chips over USB. Direct connections and other hubs cause it to always appear as a HID and never appear as a thing that can be reprogrammed.

None of this is new to AI. Top ten lists, spam, etc. have existed for a long time. If you want to disagree with someone on the Internet, you do have to actually articulate what your gripes are to some extent beyond just hand waving near LLMs, etc.

This article was about math functions, chrome, etc. If the author got something wrong, mention that, or if you don't like the pacing or how the content was divided into pieces, etc.

Why not criticize the content instead of the source or medium?