That's because Software as a job has become a joyless death march to poop out casino flavored adware for 99% of the industry? Go launch the Temu app and imagine being on the team that builds it.
I could imagine a desperate person with a family writing that app. I can't imagine anyone else with light behind their eyes doing it.
This has even been the startup world (even downstream of LLMs!) for some time.
The people in deep morning tend to be the people who have managed to avoid this outcome, or deceive themselves about its inevitability.
Funny thing about diffusion systems: they can't paint.
You're not talking about the joy of painting, because no machine is here to take that away. That still exists, it is still joyful. Likewise, exploring mathematics for oneself will still exist. It will still be joyful and surprising.
What you are discounting is what the article actually admitted with all the job talk. What you're saying here as well: "if we structure society around compensated labor and machines are better at the labor than my high status job is about to be farmed out to a machine."
Firstly, yes. Welcome to the proletariat? Secondly, maybe this isn't a reasonable principle to organize society around. Maybe if the only jobs left are "one of the 95 ultra wealthy tastemakeres" or "spiritually destitute model babysitter" then we should consider an alternative organizational strategy.
This is not to say I'm yearning for neo-Stalin to unmake the data center. I'm yearning for a world closer to one where labor for survival is a historical lesson.
As I read it the op said, "I don't like how they changed this license, this is a bad direction and I didn't think there was adequate transparency."
And your rebuttal is, "Well you can always recover the code from the git history?"
I mean, this is true, but do you think this really addresses the spirit of the post's complaint? Does mentioning they're a non-profit change anything about the complaint?
The leadership and future of a software project is an important component in its use professionally. If someone believes that the project's leadership is acting in an unfair or unpredictable way then it's rational and prudent for them to first express displeasure, then disassociate with the project if they continue this course. But you've decided to write a post that suggests the poster is being irrational, unfair, and that they want the project to fail when clearly they don't.
If you'd like to critique the post's points, I suggest you do so rather than straw manning and well-poisoning. This post may look good to friends of the project, but to me as someone with only a passing familiarity with what's going on? It looks awful.
Oh I did. I got rid of it. Inspiring both constant censure and the kind of response you're giving drove me to despair.
I don't write things for public consumption now.
But we're not talking about me or the post. We're talking about your refusal to engage with the implications of what the project did.
I don't care what Datastar does. I'd never use Datastar. Looks like exactly what I don't need. They can certainly govern their product as they see fit.
But I've disassociated from projects for less egregious unannounced terms changes. And I've never had that decision come out for the worst, only neutral or better.
I wish that more people understood that if they're very wrong/openly lying about the history of scientific achievement, they're probably in the wrong about their conclusions regarding the future of science as well.
And that's Eru (and perhaps you) here. Pubic science continues to make fantastic moves forward, with one notable example being nearly ALL the meaningful research and engineering moving us towards nuclear fusion being based on public research. Historically, major contributors to research almost universally had significant government funding.
It's true that we can gesture to AI research recently as a fruitful place for private research, but even orgs like Deepmind took government grants. Deepmind's publicly called for governments to fund AI research, as have many other (private) researchers.
In any event, taking tax money and giving it back to the betterment of society as a whole is one of the most uniformly good things that could be done with tax dollars. Science consistently betters society as a whole, and it's almost impossible to identify in advance what theoretical or practical breakthroughs in any given field are about to become significant.
> In any event, taking tax money and giving it back to the betterment of society as a whole is one of the most uniformly good things that could be done with tax dollars.
Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
> Deepmind's publicly called for governments to fund AI research, as have many other (private) researchers.
Company in sector X calling for more government spending on sector X seems hardly like news?
> Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
You really think that if the government axed the NSF/NIH, and cut taxes but corresponding amount, the private sector would somehow take all those tax cuts and invest in scientific research?
And the other factor is that private research is going to be geared towards that which is 1) less risky and 2) has some eventual commercial application. Many areas of scientific research are not like this. e.g. basically all of astronomy, and a good chunk of particle physics. The commercial applications have been pretty much zero.
AI is getting a ton of investment by the private sector now, because it is expected to have commercial application.
> basically all of astronomy, and a good chunk of particle physics. The commercial applications have been pretty much zero.
So far
We must point this out because it's critical to the argument of funding science, basic research, and mathematics. It's easy to lose sight of the time frame or where inspiration was drawn from but it's easier to see with silly examples.
Like who would think studying origami would have ever been useful. The people originally studying it had no direct applications in mind. Yet it is now one of the most powerful tools in engineering. Not just used in satellites but also plays a role in additive manufacturing, robotics, and more.
Or look at Markov. Dude had no interest in applications whatsoever. He invented Markov Chains and revolutionized science purely to spite a rival. It took time for people to see the utility but we wouldn't have our modern AI system without it or even search or even the internet.
Private research is great, don't get me wrong. But they're too focused on right now. You don't get revolutions that way. You get revolutions by thinking outside the box. You get revolutions by straying away from the path that everyone else is doing, which is much more risky. You get revolutions because you do things just for fun. Just for curiosity's sake.
Since Leibniz basically the only funding for this kind of work has come through governments. It's also been declining as we are demanding more and more for people to show the value of their research, which just makes government funds like private ones. I'd warn against taking that path. It's a reasonable one, it makes perfect sense, and it is well intentioned, but it is also ignorant of history.
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that famous mathematical discoveries have not been financed by governments historically.
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that this is, at scale, lottery ticket mentality. The modern scientific apparatus has flaws, but despite those it's a marvel of modern distributed resource allocation and cooperation rarely rivaled in human culture.
> Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
Sure, but this wouldn't obviously lead to outcomes for the public good. Even if we handwaved away IP and secrecy expectations in your scenario (is the abolishment of IP in your calculus? If not your task is even harder), there are obvious challenges you'd need to overcome:
1. How will non-experts vet the meaning or potential of research to select allocation? How will they even learn the option space to choose from? This is an incredible knowledge burden on the market that has profound implications on what can be researched. I see very little evidence that the public at large can do this, and I ask for an existence proof.
2. Even if you can get past #1, what then keeps outcomes aligned with the public interest? This is the same general objection most people have to Hayek's "the noble purpose of the rich is to have their tastes direct society" idea: the outcomes are mostly around consolidating power.
More broadly, everyone accepts this pooled resource methodology is superior. Even many anarchists[1] don't oppose collectivist resource pooling and management so long as it's voluntary and done in ways tha minimizes hierarchical extent and implications
What you're suggesting is that wealth redistribution is somehow morally wrong for the wealthy, but many of the wealthiest people are wealthy in appreciable part because of the way their endeavors have interacted with redistributive endeavors. Musk and Thiel, as living examples, both have benefitted enormously from redistribution. So why was it good for them, but now it's bad? Why isn't having an explicit force to counter economic attraction bad, given that we can provide and measure its existence?
American science supremacy is not a thing I'm interested in defending. However, it's undeniable that America's redistributive methodology has lead it to be the science capital of the world for generations, and Americans have definitely benefitted from this status more than the infinitesimal sum of money committed relative to their budget. What value are you offering in return? It seems like a "trust me" story at a time when we see not just an attack on science funding but an attack on the idea of a consensus reality contradicting corporate profit motives (e.g., Climate change, RFKs attack on medicine).
I don't know how you get around these objections. I don't even know where you go to find an example of all this working in a purely private methodology that's not counterfactual. It seems like a lot of moral grandstanding and "trust me bro" from out here. You should make these arguments somewhere we can find them if you want us to believe the conclusions.
> Company in sector X calling for more government spending on sector X seems hardly like news?
Indeed! You're the one trying to paint it as bad, misguided, incorrect, or immoral? Even private companies benefit from public research grants. Whatever the pejorative you want to attach, the burden is on you to suggest something better.
[1] Please note we're using the historical definition here in the tradition of Goldman, Bakunin, Malatesta, Chomsky and Carson, etc.
In the interest of historical accuracy, Newton's work was directly and indirectly subsidized by his government as was the university he attended (that later gave him partial scholarship). He invented Calculus while isolated due to the plague, but had already graduated by then with those scholarship bucks from a university chartered by the British government.
A lot of his work occurred while he was what we'd now call a tenured professor of mathematics, again at a universe with an impressive amount of money being donated directly by the British government.
In general, the history of higher learning is the history of governments (or the wealthy people who constitute them) funding research and facilities. You may not like it, but you shouldn't misrepresent history just to make your preferences sound more normal.
There's also that the Royal Society [0] sponsored some of Newton's work (and Newton was even President of it for a time). That was a group also chartered by the British government (and some centuries financed by it more than other centuries).
(Leibniz had a more complex web of patrons over the course of the decades, including parts of German and French governments and even briefly being a Royal Society fellow. Some of Leibniz's patrons did include private [rich] donors, but it is said that Leibniz was the last scientist/mathematician to find patronage in that way/the last time in history that private donors had shown much interest in direct science/math patronage.)
If you like these kinds of games but find SPD to be a little too mechanically simple and lacking in build diversity, you may also enjoy DCSS (dungeon crawl stone soup) and my personal favorite: Frogcomposband.
You can play the later at angband.live, and it's an exceptional game with incredible depth and variety.
And BTW, if I can figure out how to do Eclipse CDT and get the source code running in an IDE, so that I can do LOTS of fun things with class skills, you can to! Because the last time I did C/C++ was 1998.
Also, Remnants of the Precursors (java) you can do some fun things. I got "doomstars" half-implemented, a race skill that marks planets with resources or artifacts (archaeology bonus), and lots of other fun things.
I really like open source games, half the fun is hacking them.
I have yet to download nethack from the net and hack it though.
I agree about SPD. While it's great for a mobile game and looks gorgeous, I find the gameplay somewhat shallow for a roguelike.
If I have a monitor and keyboard at hand, I prefer to play the likes of ADOM (classic version, not Ultimate), Brogue, Legerdemain, Sil, DCSS, etc. which offer more depth, strategic complexity and meaningful choices, IMHO.
Haven't tried the frog one, will do at some point.
There was a Nintendo DS port of Stone Soup that I really loved. Had some great times provoking monsters into fighting each other while I hid in the shadows.
And look at how well it's going for Claude. Their primary claim to fame is being called "an annoying coworker" and that's it.
Why would anyone look to form a contract with Anthropic right now? I'd say they're in danger here, because their models and offerings don't have clear value propositions to customers.
Google's strategy for search ux is decidedly not "nimble and rapid" and I don't understand why anyone with first hand knowledge would ever suggest that.
It is gated on a lot of things, especially relative to early days of the company. It's just that browser compatibility isn't generally one of those things... They still handle that by the belief they can roll back quickly.
Relatively speaking, you can still undo the change to the front page faster than you can, say, roll out a new version of a desktop application, especially if the change fixes an active fire.
For one, that "deprioritize a competitor" is not clear at all. Why would that be so? Isn't it far more likely, given the rarity of these events, that a test regression occurred or some other subtle issue rather than assumed malfeasance?
For two, that "next update in 12 hours" is user comms. For me, at least, google.com works fine both on curl and my browser. That's a fairly normal cadence for big companies.
On the larger point about "nimble and deploying rapidly", the people who generally brag about "being nimble and deploying rapidly" almost never serve an even 1/100th the audience the size of Google.com does, and it's really questionable if, at that scale, you actually want to risk global regressions even on trivial bugs.
So I don't know what that user is talking about, and I agree with you that they are obviously not that.
That approach may be antithetical to the modern startup engineer frantic to prove their stock's hypothetical worth to their investors, unconcerned about trivial revenue loss from frontpage issues because of whatever latest node.js drama nuked their continuously deployed website. But the fact that "the landing search page is broken for 1% of users in a rare but public use case" is news at all is because Google's approach for search sets our expectations that this won't happen.
I think the parent comment's point is: if this were affecting a version of Google-branded Chrome with similar market share, do you think we would still be getting "next update in 12 hours"?
I remember an internal mantra in Google along the lines of "if you break something in production, roll back first, ask questions about how it happened later, even if you think it's a simple fix". It feels telling that this is not what is happening in this circumstance.
They're the only one (I can find) with "Mobile" inside the parens; bet you money the issue is a badly-formatted regex tripping over the paren / symbol combination and thinking that UA describes some deny-listed crawler somewhere (or falls off the end of recognizable UAs and trips a fallback to "Vend nothing").
Since they're always testing on Chrome Desktop, and Chrome Mobile emits an almost-identical UA string, my previous statement holds: issues with Chrome mobile are generally more likely to come up in testing on Chrome Desktop than issues in Firefox Mobile are likely to come up in testing on Chrome Desktop.
Hi. I helped write some of the internal postmortem and manage the data plane side of the team that responded to this.
Please allow me to reassure you: No. Absolutely not in this case. Not even slightly.
Any engineer can tell you customer configuration contents can cause bugs in configuration pipelines, but that's multiple layers away from this issue in our particular case.
I could imagine a desperate person with a family writing that app. I can't imagine anyone else with light behind their eyes doing it.
This has even been the startup world (even downstream of LLMs!) for some time.
The people in deep morning tend to be the people who have managed to avoid this outcome, or deceive themselves about its inevitability.