I don't know enough about different industries to know if this is true in general. But I do know in tech it is all about networking (aka soft nepotism): spending your career making friends ("swiping right on every work relationship"), and the fraction of those who go on to massively succeed you can then call in favors. At least that's how I made three huge jumps in my 35+ year career, and how the majority of my peers got the big step-functions in pay.
Perhaps in my original post I'm just confusing academia with industry, since I know so few academics.
Lots of comments talking about how this is just some sort of ploy to feed the machine. I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you it changed my life and the lives of many others. Hope it can help you too!
I have no doubt your intentions were good and I am a fan of open-source myself.
Unfortunately, since this was written, it’s become more widely known and commonplace for large corporations to disproportionally benefit from open source.
And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched licenses, some have shifted closed-source, and others have simply abandoned their projects.
Just last week I began rethinking usage of MIT/Apache licenses for future work.
For the longest time I was hesitant about GPLv3 and almost scared to use in my personal projects, but it turns out my hesitations were fueled by...large corporations.
Unfortunately we have to play the game according to the rules on the field. You can decide to opt out entirely (which is fine) or you can play the game and try to win. Personally, I will play and try to win.
That means I will make things, talk about them, and accrue social and/or actual capital for me and my family. I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try. I CAN build cool things, talk about them, and get cool jobs or friends or a following or whatever. I understand not everyone is comfortable with this tradeoff.
> I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try.
I do not like this take and I do hope you reconsider repeating such.
This very much reads as accepting a lack of any claim to reasonable privacy and ownership, borderline on accepting what I would consider theft.
I understand. I am, however, impotent against OpenAI. If I publish code to GitHub, I understand it will be used for training. I'd rather get the win for my family than try to fight a megacorp. I'm sorry.
Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit?
I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.
> any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit
I would say that now, more than ever, this means you should be collecting and sharing what you create.
Not on large social media platforms either, on websites that you own and (ideally) host yourself.
Start a blog, host your own instance of Gitea, build a platform for your videos. Spread what you create and activity participate in the community but maintain ownership and an audit trail over what you've created.
People ripping off others works has always been a thing, of course it's much easier and pervasive now. It's still (IMO) beneficial to say "Look! I did this thing first!", with the added benefit of accruing the kind of "social capital" Aaron talked about.
How do you contend with the fact that AI summaries are now halving traffic to people's websites and redirecting it to Google properties? Publishing in 2025 feels like merely feeding two or three megacorps.
No easy answers, I'm afraid. But I would still say you can get lots of social capital from creating things and talking about it. And these days, that can get you past the LLM-inundated HR front door if you want a job. If you hang out on twitter long enough you'll see people go from "hey I made this cool thing" to "hey cloudflare/vercel/etc hired me to come work on cool-thing-adjacent thing!"
It's a pretty repeatable pipeline. And having proof that you can DO something makes you stand out. Maybe moreso than ever!
If you throw my nickname into a search engine, you will see that that is the case for me as well. Doesn't change anything about what I said though.
If anything, the fact that it worked for me, yet I found it necessary to add the full context, probably strengthens the statement even more.
But anyway.
Standard damage control statement that latches onto nothing because there is nothing to latch on to as I made sure to structure the comment that way.
I hate corporate so much man.
Just because you can predict what happens doesn't mean that the happening would be any less frustrating.
___
I understand that your role requires you to do this.
That is clear to anyone moving through these systems.
What I do not understand though is why you even tried to deflect this with such a low-quality "oh it worked for me it might not have worked for you. YMMV" thing, when you could've also just said nothing at all, not forcing my hand and making me call you out on that.
That is, above all else, strategically unwise.
Fortunately, however, this all doesn't matter. It's not like anyone cares about anything on this platform anyway. So even a strategically unwise move might as well not exist at all.
Yeah, sorry about that. I agree it indeed worked out for you and that is great.
The point that I'm getting at is that it is necessary for the system to occasionally produce a winner, because otherwise, people would stop trying.
Think for example about a casino with zero wins. No one would come to play.
If they however occasionally select a winner, that winner will then be the best marketing they can get, encouraging all his friends to also start gambling.
Please do not mistake this analogy as me questioning your merits.
I am confident in your abilities at your craft.
What I am however saying is that the system does not select its winners based on that merit. Instead, the criteria for selection are usually based on what benefits the system most.
This, in some situations, might line up with general merits to some degree, but it also might not, and that is one of the core deceptions, the corporate world runs on.
I do believe you that the idea of the article was to encourage people so that they can also have these great wins and experiences you had.
But, as said, that is just one side of the coin, and it would be unethical to not mention all the outcomes in which a person does not win.
> But the good news is that we can increase our chances of encountering good luck.
Every phrase in the article was carefully selected to make it clear that we're trying to increase the odds. Nothing is sure. But if you play the game right, the odds of winning go up
I think you're conflating the cost to consumers to use AI and the cost to run AI. Sure, it's a house of cards, but the cost to consumers still rounds to zero.
by...
publishing your work and making friends in your industry
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