In this week's episode we are back in LLM land, and in honor of Halloween week, let's make it a little dystopian. Those of you who know me well know that I am a regular listener of the famous Lex Fridman podcast. If you haven't yet had the joy of episode 503, you are in for a treat. Here is a rough breakdown without spoilers.

EPISODE 503

Lex Fridman sits down with three mathematicians, Steven Brunton, Ankur Moitra and Alex Kontorovich, right after a wave of AI-generated results shook the math world. They explain the big problems involved (the Riemann hypothesis, Navier-Stokes, complexity theory) in accessible terms. They also debate what the AI breakthroughs mean for creativity, for students' careers and for the purpose of doing math at all.

WHY A CLI COWBOY CARES ABOUT MATH

So why is a CLI Cowboy who is in no way into theoretical math interested in that? Well, programming is essentially math. You could even say programming is the hotter and more popular sibling of math. When LLMs start cracking problems the whole field of theoretical math has been stuck on, to me that is also a compass heading for where programming is going. If you are sitting on a proprietary software cash cow that you sell to users today, and especially if your ICP is fairly tech savvy, then you need to worry. Worry a lot. Take Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or Autodesk Fusion, cash cows that have owned practically the entire market. Recently, open source copycats have popped up for free: PhotoCraft for Photoshop and SolidCraft for Fusion. I won't really endorse them. They are quite guerrilla, and while they call themselves clean-room rebuilds, I wouldn't bet my house on it. Still, PhotoCraft is gathering GitHub stars like crazy.

A "TRUST ME BRO" EXAMPLE

Where is this yap going? I had been contemplating sharing a wow moment I had recently with an LLM, but I decided it would get fairly technical and not very interesting to read. Instead I'll give you a "trust me bro" example. Over the last 3 years I have spent a lot of my evenings and weekends building and tuning a website health monitor called notiduck.com.

It has some original ideas and solutions that come from my own dislike of what the competitors were offering, like warning you when a server starts to sweat, which I added after the crypto mining accident from last week's episode. Again, I'll spare you the details, I'm not trying to sell here. I'm sure a prompt to Opus 5.5 like "visit notiduck.com, make the 80% version of the tool for my personal use, good night, talk to you tomorrow" would give something pretty close to what took me thousands of hours to make. What can I do about it? Obfuscate the features, cry in the corner, eat a big ice cream? I have decided to make it open source instead. My users are too technical for me to stop their Opus clones, so why not have them join me and help me maintain it? I will keep selling the current version as is, where I host and run it from multiple servers, for people who don't have a handful of spare servers around the world. But honestly, a single 10 EUR per month VPS (more than the Duckling plan on notiduck costs) would give you enough power to run the ~80% version just fine for your own use.

And to loop back to last week's security yap, self-hosting comes with another perk. Privacy. When you run the open source version on your own box, your data stays on your box. Which sites you watch, when they go down and who gets the alerts never passes through my servers or anyone else's. The flip side is that patching is now your job, and as we learned last week, that part is not optional.

BLOOD RED OCEANS

So yes, I predict a blood red ocean around every existing cash cow, and software prices will have to go down (unless LLM costs are about to explode). I think we will see a shift where we no longer pay for the man-hours spent, the expertise, and the design department's MacBooks and caffè lattes. As we have seen lately, it is quite ignorant to think you are sitting on a tool, method or algorithm that LLMs can't crack without asking you. I think we will see a growing trend where we pay for the hardware, like with my notiduck. I will give away a free version for anyone to run, and if you don't want to rely on your own hardware, you can use my paid version, where the same free code simply runs on hardware I maintain. Will the LLM vendors start doing this too soon? Yeah, most likely. So far they have been kind enough not to let us pay the actual hardware cost. Enjoy the discount while it lasts.

THE DARK SIDE

Clean-room rebuilds are one thing. Shady reverse engineering paired with unfiltered open models is a whole other ball game. It is happening, it is highly illegal, and that is all I will say about it. Some doors are better left shut, even on Halloween.