Help me understand. When you write a post about designing a system, do you not do some basic diligence about what existing systems you resemble?

Open source is not IP maximalist by any means. I am merely asking that the appropriate credit be provided.

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arjie an hour ago | parent | next [-]

No. I actually don’t do that and I don’t think that all human work should be O(n) deduplication gated.

Written about it here before: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-09-08/Intellectual...

It isn’t something I care very much about, except when it’s used as a certificate of achievement. I almost never do literature searches with an attempt to dedupe. I only ever do it to see if someone has explored something better than I have. That’s often the case but other times it is not.

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hyperpape 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If they knew it from working at Meta, it wouldn't be O(n), it would be O(1).

I agree that there will be cases where you implement tricks that others have had before you, without knowing. A few years ago, I had a delightful idea, experimented and wrote it up. One commenter directed me to a post that described it as "folk knowledge". There will be other cases where you encountered an idea before, but didn't remember it.

Still, crediting what you can easily know you cited is good. Even aside from credit, comparisons to existing systems are part of how we understand what a system does.

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sunshowers an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Okay, well, I actually do think it is part of the basic duty of an engineer to do that.

	▲	gavinray an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I do, solely on the basis of "there are a lot of smart(er) people in the world, and very few truly novel problems". The first step in approaching anything difficult is seeing whether someone else has already solved it.
	▲	arjie an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I see. Well, I suppose we differ on this matter of opinion. May the chips land where they may.

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zamalek 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What happened is that it wasn't a FAANG engineer replicating what they know, rather one asked Claude what to do and it told them to replicate what it knew.

That's how the knowledge that it was a facsimile was lost.

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kccqzy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Absolutely not. When I create projects I only credit other existing systems if they are a direct inspiration. If I independently come up with the same idea as someone else I see no reason for me to do the due diligence and credit them.

	▲	sunshowers an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Okay, well, in this case (even accepting your argument) I've been told there is direct overlap in contributors so there is no feasible way they couldn't have known.