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by cat_plus_plus 68 days ago
That's a dim view, people also contribute to make projects work for their own needs with hopes to share fixes with others. Like if I make a fix to vLLM to make a model load on particular hardware, I can verify functionality (LLM no longer strays off topic) and local plausibility (global scales are being applied to attention layers), but I can't pretend to understand full math of the overall process and will never have enough time to do so. So, I can be upfront about AI assist and then maintainer can choose to double check, or else if they don't have time, I guess I can just post a PR link on model's huggingface page and tell others with same hardware they can try to cherrypick it.

What's missed is that neither contributors nor maintainers are usually paid for their effort and nobody has standing to demand that they do anything they are not doing already. Don't like a messy vibe coded PR but need functionality? Then clean it up yourself and send improved version for review. Or let it be unmerged. But don't assign work to others you don't employ.

On the other hand, companies like NVIDIA should be publicly taken to task for changing their mind about instruction set for every new GPU and then not supporting them properly in popular inference engines, they certainly have enough money to hire people who will learn vLLM inside out and ensure high quality patches.

1 comments

    > What's missed is that neither contributors nor maintainers are usually paid for their effort
To be clear, the Linux kernel is mostly developed by well paid employees of various tech companies that need to steer the future of the Linux kernel, even if only to write drivers.