alt Hacker NewsPerfect example of a base rate fallacy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
What percentage of GitHub activity goes to GitHub repos with less than 2 stars? I would guess it's close to the same number.
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The actual number is that 98% have less than 2 stars (0 or 1). About 90.25% has zero stars.
Yeah. Most of my public repos have 0 stars. Most of what I write sucks.
Off topic, but it reminds me of another principle: every geographic heatmap is just a population map. https://xkcd.com/1138/
Exactly, just pick one subset and make out as if a base rate is because of this one specific set. Backwards logic...
Activity isn't a good measurement for this, because AI can vibeslop thousands of lines per day of code that isn't necessarily useful for anything but increasing activity.
There is still a sampling bias if you compare blanket human written repos. I would guess people are far more likely to share their homework assignments, experiments, hackathon results, weekend toys, etc. as a public repo if they put some amount of work into it. I would guess minority of those would get any stars at all. If the whole thing was generated by AI in less then 20 minutes, I would guess they are more likely to simply throw it away when they are done with it.
Personally I think comparing github stars is always going to be a fraught metric.
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When I first got a job, I asked the company okay, how many people are going to use the code i write?
If the answer wasn't in hundreds of request per seconds, i wasn't interested in job.
I found job at ad tech companies, pay wasn't any good but the challenges were immense.
Most people write code, which will hardly be run by other people or even receive any customers.
My reaction as well -- I have a few dozen public repos of 100% human-written code, most are 0 stars!