dcss_gardener
But is the outcome good? Is the game fun?
But if you have the budget and connections to hire a department of people with these skills and experience, and a problem interesting enough to keep them engaged in the day to day building, and a leader capable and charismatic enough to align them all into the business's goals... you should do that.
Having the maintenance/ops requirements directly feed back into the design and engineering of the product is genuinely powerful. Especially for certain kinds of products, if executed with discipline you can get really good engineering reaction time with no degradation of quality, and often with much cheaper infra costs.
The problem is what you said though. People with both skillsets are rare, and combining them is legitimately a third skill on its own. And even "both" skillsets is a simplification once you start accounting for data, security, compliance, large scaling DB work etc.
It was mostly a dead end for these reasons but it was worth exploring for its potential. And some genuinely good engineering techniques went mainstream out of it, not a total waste.
The other is that people with an eye for design like fonts the way mushrooms like decaying wood. If you leave a designer unattended for too long fonts appear as if from nowhere.
It really is ultimately a labor relations problem. A lot of people thought they were guaranteed to not face penury and now they're realizing they may have been wrong about that. The issue is that it's ultimately not under your control whether you can sell your labor, and there's no universal fallback if you can't. Solidarity and concrete power for workers are the answer to this and I don't think there's another one.
For the rest, yes, certainly. The vast majority of people do not enjoy their work, are not valued or rewarded for the skills they apply to it. Again, if you thought your job was writing code this sucks. But you're merely one of the billions now. I understand the grief for what people are losing but very very few people ever had that rare privilege.
Technical skills aren't worth shit and never were, except as far as they enable you to engage with other people in ways you and they find valuable. This used to be really far! It made it easy to believe that the technical skills on their own were what was valuable.
But the engagement was always the valuable thing, generating technical insight was a necessary prerequisite for it. Now anyone with a $20 claude sub can generate technical insight into niche problems, so what's left is everything else. Everything of value.
You had a generation of people making legal, hiring, sentencing, admission, loan decisions that smoothly transitioned from enforcing the law to being very concerned about standards or however they personally decided was the best way to publicly approach it within their little political sphere.
Then they selected and trained the next generation of administrators, bureaucrats, and enforcers about the "right" way to do this work. A lot of things have changed but at no point did this process end in any meaningful way.
"Source available" is definitely in much wider use than "weights available" but it's not that common and it's not used consistently at all in my experience.
Weights are different enough from source code I don't find the metaphor useful or compelling. I don't see any value in trying to apply it to a novel subdomain of software engineering, frankly.
"Weights available" does not seem to be in wide use and doesn't, to me, communicate anything different than "open weights."
I think it is a threat model thing primarily, which I should have been more clear about. I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read. But the ssh thing is a totally valid concern for someone doing different activities than I am and I shouldn't have dismissed it.
Hillel Wayne wrote a really excellent well researched article about software engineering compared to other forms of engineering a few years ago. It necessarily goes into a lot of this stuff but what emerges is that these definitions are regulatory and historical debris.
You don't need medical board or a bar to certify or constrain professional behavior and those organizations may not constrain as much as you assume anyway. The reasons we do have those institutions is as much a matter of historical accident as any modern need for it, and the reasons we don't have it for other high impact fields is pretty much an accident too.
And in a lot of the world software engineering does have professional certification and standards of practice. They still ship adware and racist loan denial algorithms too.
These aren't universally positive attributes I'm not necessarily praising them. But militaries have come down into a very broad spectrum of positions around specific coups, revolutions, insurrections etc including abetting or openly joining them, both pro- and anti-democratic.
This is also why the second trump term has been so focused on officer purges! You definitely want the military to come down on your side and making sure all of its leadership is on your side is a reliable step if you can take it.
Americans should absolutely imo not be looking for their military to help them with the problems they're facing. But depending on the exact arrangement, people in other countries may have good reason to hope for that.
The problem here is the cops not where the computer sits.
The original view presented by the quote is a child's view of authoritarians: they force you to behave the way they want you to.
The other commenter is pointing out how they work in practice, how they'll work with this, is by making noncompliant behavior the accepted norm and then enforcing it selectively based on their changing goals and targets.
HN when an organization achieves its intended goals: this can't be bureaucracy because it's good.
It does make me sharper I think. If you only ever use claude or whatever you don’t even really know exactly how tied to it you are.
Funny enough the drug dealer thing still holds. A deal’s a deal if you’re going to buy it anyway.
The reality is that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized. Pretty much every sub that's not run by one of the money-burning frontier labs has had to drop it or dramatically increase prices and lower limits in the last few months. Cheap tokens are an acquisition tool, not a real product. It sounds dramatic but it really is the drug dealer sales funnel.
At some point they're going to drop the real prices in your lab and you're going to have to figure out how to pay that much or pay someone else a lot less. Better to get a handle on it now.