KirinDave

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.

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.

Good luck with your future endeavors, I guess.

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.

> Where have I lied about anything here?

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? 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 it 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Well, part of this is on us. Let's think on the reasons Gmail is so popular:

1. It's very easy to get to.

2. It has incredibly fast search that has 0 setup.

We have never really even tried to address problem 1 as an open source community. Networks, name lookup, and VPNs remain incredibly complex topics that beginners cannot hope to wrestle with. The best we have is .mdns which either works magically or perversely refuses to work.

Similarly for free text search, the software world simply hasn't delivered a lego-like solution for email search. You CAN rig up any number of open source projects but it is neither easy nor instant. And even other professional products like Apple Mail struggle with a mere gigabyte of email.

Despite the fact that it's 2021 and every successful email provider aggressively solves these problems, the open source world still debates about the utility of ubiquitous search or pretends that local networking isn't a pressing problem.

I wonder if many folks who only joined the world of software development after DVCSs (and indeed, just VCSs) became popularized can understand why Fetchmail was not trivial to fork and fix.

The issue here is that:

1. It's very clear that his office has no qualms with filing cases that include untrue statements.

2. It's also the case that this group of claimants is strongly associated with a government official who is very angry at companies and has been trying to attack a communications law from every angle he has. One cannot help but wonder at the timing of all this.

It may very well be true. Sadly, we have to be skeptical now.

Really, so this quote by ewmiller that I responded to:

> I wonder how long my employment would last if I just stopped doing a good job and then said that as a response to any effort by my manager or teammates to criticize my output.

was not a direct attack on the notion that professional conduct should include some degree of psychological safety?

Or perhaps this post [0] that says:

> In regular companies, employees who are bad at their jobs shouldn't feel safe, as they are likely to be fired.

I'm a Google SRE. I'm not actually a big fan of the Gmail interface either (and it'd be better if they actually followed material design, imo).

But this spirit is fundamentally opposed to people in corporate environments doing good work. Blameless portmortems exist for a reason. Because otherwise, every systemic or personal failure devolves into a scapegoating competition designed to find and remove the most vulnerable member of the team. My criticism is directed specifically at folks suggesting that internally peers at my workplace should harass designers.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25422855

We're not talking about 3rd party opinions here, we're talking about colleagues at the same institution being aggressive and destructive with professional designers.

It would be great if it was brought up constructively. However, this thread appears to be about mocking the concept of psychological safety in the workplace.

Obviously I do, and I note several replies here that strongly suggest that's how other people took it as well.

And yet that's almost certainly what people were describing by mocking the notion of psychological safety in the workplace.

The notion of being passionate without being derisive just isn't an option, I guess?

It's amazing to me that something as innocuous as, "Professional conduct includes at least an attempt at constructive criticism as opposed to venting" is now a heretical concept on this website.

Cool design, but is this novel? Canakit has been doing this for the whole year.

I think that at this point, folks have realized this is not in fact true. If anything, lax parsers made the evolution of the web more difficult and more subject to corporate cooption.

You should read Alexis King's articles on how this is achieved. One of the most imporant aspects of modern parser combinator libraries is that a very small composable core can be exhaustively tested (importantly: with both hand written and random cases) to provide a reliable kernel for parser combinators.

Given that those cited parsers were built from the ground up to mesh with an effective and expressive type system like Haskell's, this problem was significantly reduced. The downside, of course, is that it became quite opinionated.

There is no magic want to wave, but certainly it's easier to work on a common minimal core of components than work on custom ad hoc validators. Lax parsers are not an inevitable outcome; they're a decision propagated by decades of bad opinions being taken as gospel.

Does LambdaSchool think the thing holding back their developers is that companies cannot onboard new developers?

While many small companies do not pay much attention to onboarding, I'm not sure that this is the actual stumbling block.

I think the bigger problem LambaSchool graduates who've talked to me say is that LambdaSchool's poor reputation and haphazard leadership have left the value of their schooling in question, and that puts them at a material disadvantage compared to people with a traditional college degree. This is a variant of the problem that Udacity and co face: companies recruiting have reservations about that type of education and view it as a risky hire.

AFAIK (it predates my time with Udacity substantially) Udacity discontinued their active placement programs, and generally when they do that (again, I have no special knowledge) it happens because it was neither working nor cost effective.

I think LambdaSchool would be better served using its resources to improve the reputation of its graduates by actually highlighting their work and functioning like a more traditional university; sponsoring open source work and research and showing their graduates and produce such work. Universities get famous and reputable off the back of work like this.

They might also consider not being such shady actors, with a long history of tax disputes and illegal operation. It doesn't matter if state and federal rules are unjust; what matters here is that companies (especially smaller ones) need to maintain the appearance of managing risk. An association with LambdaSchool damages that.

Full disclosure: I don't like the leadership of LS at all. But I have a lot of compassion and respect for the individuals that have taken their destiny into their own hands and learned the trade through any means necessary. I think folks that emerge from these processes are often better members of the workforce than traditionally educated people; because of the tight selection filter (only very talented and motivated people can pass through these processes and succeed, therefore you're selecting from an inherently more dedicated and energetic candidate pool).

> Talk is talk. Actions should have consequences, which is why we have rules and agreements in the real world.

But threats are talk, and threats often motivate action without undertaking it. So talk is, in a real sense, action. Many forms of speech can have profound effects.

For example, I say, "Pay me $400 more a month or I will evict you." If you believe I can evict you (even if I probably can't) then my talk has changed behavior. Can I then say, "I took no action?"

I think everyone would agree that's not so.

So if I'm reading this right, the author feels that the reason these companies are so valuable is because it destroys the free market one customer at a time, selling lock ins that would crush a normal business to escape, and that will deliver long term value as a result of said destruction.

I guess that makes sense.

Transmission on a local level is a MUCH easier problem to solve. Storage on a local level is plummetting in price and rising in efficiency; while also reducing its reliance in rare minerals.

PG&E's failures should show that running one big statewide grid is so difficult and expensive it shouldn't be done. We should reclaim to copper and use the savings to make communities self sufficient, which for many small communities is entirely possible