Yes, this could end up either turning into a Linux or like when Microsoft released Tay and Twitter users taught it to be a Nazi. Or anywhere in between, really.

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jibal 18 hours ago | parent [-]

It really can't for numerous reasons, one of them being that PRs have to be fairly low effort, and this will be even more so if the popular "merge daily" PR is voted in. People talk about this "evolving", but it's nothing like biological evolution or genetic algorithms. It's just a linear sequence of small changes, and without either planning and central authority or some stable fitness function (the ecological environment in biological evolution) the changes are directionless.

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fc417fc802 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> some stable fitness function

The participants could always vote to add a test harness and CI/CD to vet pull requests against.

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jibal 11 hours ago | parent [-]

That has nothing to do with a stable fitness function ... an external set of factors that determine which changes allow offspring to survive. This thing doesn't have offspring (or always has exactly one offspring and then the parent dies) and it survives until the whole thing collapses.

And I think they already have what you describe or something like it ... PRs have to build and survive CI.

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fc417fc802 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It should have been abundantly clear that wasn't the way the word "evolution" was being used here to being with. (Actually the comment you replied to used the word "metamorphosis" so what are you even going on about?)

Nonetheless, if you're going to quibble that it isn't ahckchtually evolution because it's missing a fitness function then I'm going to counter that you can form a loose analogy so long as you have some fitness apparatus that's conceptually and operationally separable from the implementation itself. I think some unit tests and a CI pipeline is sufficient.

	▲	jibal 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It should have been abundantly clear that wasn't the way the word "evolution" was being used here to being with. My whole point was that the sort of evolution that this will undergo isn't like biological evolution so it won't be effective the way biological evolution is. That should have been abundantly clear. > Actually the comment you replied to used the word "metamorphosis" so what are you even going on about? Did you ever bother to look upthread? I wrote "People talk about this "evolving"", and that comment was not a response to the one mentioning metamorphosis. See the title: "Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project" I'm not quibbling and that's an offensive accusation as is your "ahckchtually" mocking as well as the rude tone of your clueless whooshes above so I will only respond you this once. Biological evolution has powerful mechanisms that this lacks ... in fact the biggest lack is that there's just one "organism" here, not a population, and just one change at a time. And your fitness function only determines whether something compiles and runs; it gives no direction to the "evolution" ... it's not being fit to anything that drives its progress (the choices come from the PRs, not from the fitness function, and they are independent of each other or at best loosely coupled--thus they aren't stable) which I explicitly pointed out previously when I mentioned the fitness function. So your "loose analogy" fails miserably and this thing is going to be directionless, as I said, and so it won't build up something like a Linux kernel or AGI (both of these have been mentioned, but hey, not in the comment that used the word "metamorphosis" -- apparently I have to say this).