On Thursday, July 4th, 2024 at 1:34 PM, Nevin Liber <nevin@eviloverlord.com> wrote:
There are something like 28 million public repositories on Github. How many of them are abandoned (no commitment)?
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Nevin ":-)" Liber <mailto:nevin@eviloverlord.com> +1-847-691-1404
I do appreciate that, while yes there are a lot of abandoned threads on various public source control providers, that those threads are indeed public and could be picked back up by the right person in certain circumstances. I've benefitted more than once from someone leaving something up, even if I had to pay a bit of technical debt myself to get use out of it. While entropy levies its tax over time, it's better than things disappearing into some black hole, never to be seen again.
As much as I don't like the LLM trend, one application of the modern trend of generative LLMs could be plundering the depths of all of this code (respective of licensing of course) to dredge up hidden nuggets just waiting to be discovered. Everything useful gets invented at some point, I have to wonder what's sitting in some abandoned repo somewhere just waiting to fit someone's use-case like hand in glove. After all, isn't that one of the many reasons we go digging around in decades-old UNIX code still :)
- Matt G.