I guess it works for companies which are not part of the union?

"The union" should be "a union", of which, companies are rarely a part of ie zero. Their workforce may be a member of a union, some equals in grade may belong to different unions.

Thank you for your generous correction but you could rather address the point I was trying to make.

It's definitely not a hype.

It’s definitely hype and a bubble, combined with real advances. Two true at once.

Public grants are nice but they have couple of shortcomings and which is why they can get you only that far. They are normally low in capital, the execution is really slow (couple of months to one year), and larger grants too involve politics. The process is too formal (inflexible and too time-consuming) and also quite discriminating to individuals/small-groups who do have the big ideas but are not running the business already (I mean how can they). Proposal evaluation also has its own shortcomings - there's very little incentive for the actual experts to join the evaluation process (it's paid pennies) and generally speaking this leads to another chicken&egg problem - you're presenting something novel to the pool of people who might not have the capacity to understand the idea - neither the vision nor execution.

That said, I am not attracted to the VC culture but their process delivers the value which creates successful companies.

NLNET is always coming up at FOSDEM. Since they have a decent track record of issuing grants, the EU delegates them some money to use in their own less bureaucratic granting process. They call this "cascade funding". NLNET has funded a lot of random individual projects you can find on their website. Nominally, your proposal must have something to do with their goals.

This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.

> This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.

That's the step in the right direction however there's what I believe is a major issue with the NLNET scheme - there is no fastrack possibility for really great ideas with very potent market impact - you have to spend (lose) ~year to prove your idea is worthy by applying to Zero Commons or similar grant instead of just getting the 200-500k to really get the project hitting the ground.

One year is exceptionally long period in tech, and if the idea is right, you need to have all the resources to execute it - working solely on the project for the whole year for 50,000 EUR is simply not the strategy that can work out in a highly competitive (world) space.

How should they know your project is worth investing 500k? I heard they've got 3x8M, per year I presume, so 500k is a huge chunk of that. Everyone thinks their project is worth 500k, what makes yours different from the rest?

> How should they know your project is worth investing 500k? I heard they've got 3x8M, per year I presume, so 500k is a huge chunk of that. Everyone thinks their project is worth 500k, what makes yours different from the rest?

Well that's the job of VCs, that's what they're expert at.

There's also another model where established industrial communities set up research centers to fund projects that might help their common problems.

Yes, many might believe that their project is worth more than it really is but in my proposition authors of the idea are not the ones who get to decide that but people from NLNET or whatever grant. What I am saying is that currently there is no such process at all and this is a foundational problem with the way how these grants are working.

Another question is what you need 500k for, for an unproven project?

Did you not understand any of the words I wrote?

I guess not. Can you specify it in more concrete terms? They're not just buying your project for an arbitrary price, or VC-investing, they're paying your living costs and hosting costs while you create a donation to the public good, that's how grants work.

They give you 500k if you have a really good reason why you need that... and why the result is worth it... and why your project is more worth it than all the other several projects, combined, they could spend the same 500k on. Most of them are one or two people's living cost for 6 months to a year or so.

I genuinely hope you're a bot. If you're not then please consider being respectful in your conversations and address the question being asked rather than moving goalposts - it is extremely annoying. If you're out of your arguments, learn to say "I don't know".

And I also do hope, if you're a human, that you're not sitting anywhere close to decision making committee be it in NLNET or any other grant program because if you do, it fits into the (terrible) narrative of software market in the EU.

You have repeatedly resorted to ad hominem to avoid answering questions.

Ad hominem does not apply to bots or trolls and you're one of those two. And I'm not sure what was ad hominem about my response. You're the one being ignorant here

The whole article a bit watery which is why I read it as a PR rather than technical presentation

Yeah, I don't doubt you, it's really effective at knocking out "simple" projects, I've had success vibe-coding for days, but eventually unless you have some reins on the architecture/design, it falls down over it's own slop, and it's very noticeable as the agent spends more and more time trying to work in the changes, but it's unable to.

So the first day or two, each change takes 20-30 minutes. Next day it takes 30-40 minutes per change, next day up to an hour and so on, as the requirements start to interact with each other, together with the ball of spaghetti they've composed and are now trying to change without breaking other parts.

Contrast that with when you really own the code and design, then you can keep going for weeks, all changes take 20-30 minutes, as at day one. But also means I'm paying attention to what's going on, so no vibe-coding, but pair programming with LLMs, and also requires you to understand both the domain, what you're actually aiming for and the basics of design/architecture.

The point was not in simplicity but rather in if AI is replacing some people's jobs. I say that it certainly is, as given by the example, but I also acknowledge that the technology is still not at the point where human engineers are no more required in the loop.

I built other things too which would not be considered trivial or "simple", or as you say they're architecturally complex, and they involve very domain specific knowledge about programming languages, compilers, ASTs, databases, high-performance optimizations, etc. And for a long time, or shall I say never, have I felt this productive tbh. If I were to setup a company around this, which I believe I could, in pre-LLM era I'd quite literally have to hire 3-5 experienced engineers with sufficient domain expertise to build this together with me - and I mean not in every possible potential but the concrete work I've done in ~2 weeks.

> The point was not in simplicity but rather in if AI is replacing some people's jobs. I say that it certainly is, as given by the example, but I also acknowledge that the technology is still not at the point where human engineers are no more required in the loop.

I feel like you have missed emsh's point which is that AI agents significantly become muddled up if your project's complex.

I feel the same way personally. If I don't know how the AI code interacts with each other, I feel a frustration as long as the project continues precisely because of the fact that they mention about first taking less time and then taking longer and longer time having errors which it missed etc.

I personally vibe code projects too but I will admit that there is this error.

I have this feeling that anything really complex will fall heels first if complexity really grows a lot or you don't unclog the slop.

This is also why we are seeing "AI slop janitors" humans whose task is to unsloppify the slop.

Personally I have this intution that AI will create really good small products, there is no denying in that, but those were already un-monetizable or if they were, then even in the past, they were really easy to replicate, this probably just lowered the friction

Now if your project is osmething commercial and large, I don't know how much AI slop can people trust. At some point if people depend on your project which is having these issues because people can understand if the project's AI generated or not, then that would have it issues too.

And I am speaking this from experience after building something like whmcs in golang in AI. At first, I am surprised and I feel as if its good enough for my own personal use case (gvisor) and maybe some really small providers. But when I want it to say hook to proxmox, have the tmate server be connected with an api to allow re-opening easier, have the idea of live migration from one box to another etc., create drivers for the custom firecrackers-ssh idea that I implemented once again using AI.

One can realize how quickly complexity adds in projects and how as emsh's points out that it becomes exponentially harder to use AI.

Nobody ever needed a full stack dev to build a website

WDYM? Website is a frontend, server handling is a backend. How is that not a fullstack?

Purely server rendered HTML can be a website. Static HTML pages with a server doing no more than S3 does can be a website. Websites existed long before SPAs were a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

They are optimizing their organization for throughput by cutting off the fat so they do expect to grow, it's just that they want to be ready for it, and having a loath of managers doesn't help with it. I figure this move must have something to do with the China labs potentially coming out with their own litography system.

WhatsApp was not developed by Meta. They just bought it. That said, I don't think Meta/FB is a net-negative, far from it. They contributed back to the community with high quality infra-level software.

Sometimes we in the tech community need to poke our heads out of our tech silos.

Once you do, you will see how much societal damage Meta has caused under Zuck's leadership.

In that regard I fully agree. My view was merely from a technical perspective.

And I agree with you. There are many great tech folks at Meta who released some great open source projects.

It's the leadership that's the problem.

I was thinking about the same paragraph because write-amplification is exactly the problem solved by LSM trees _and_ they already have a solution for that in-house - one of the first acquisitions that OpenAI made is Rockset - a company that actually built the RocksDb at scale.

So, this is the part that actually made me left wondering why.

Why do you need an X account for it? Seems like a ridiculous requirement

The comment was not wrong though so I am not sure I understand if flagging it for the sole "it was most likely written by the use of AI" reason is completely valid.