growse

The subtext here is that there's a difference between someone saying "I don't like this community, I'm going to make my own" and "I don't like this community, I'm going to change it".

Building communities is hard. It's not obvious why someone who wants a community on their terms gets to piggyback on an existing community rather than putting the effort in to make their own.

The point of "just fork it" is that if your ideas are popular, then sustainability shouldn't be a problem.

I don't remember if this is in the original text, but is there a time constraints on distributing the source on request?

If a user asks for the source, and the distributor says "sure" and then delivers it 12 months later, have they violated the license?

> I have generally told that story with the ISV anonymized -- but you clearly found an example where I named them.

It was on one of the OaF podcasts about dtrace. I worked for Reuters at the time and contempt for their customers was definitely a thread that ran through some parts of that org, even as it made a bunch of us feel very icky.

(I still have a side quest to find / talk to some of the people involved on 'our' side of the fence about this!)

There's a bus factor equivalent with the cloud, too. The power to severely disrupt your service (either accidentally, or on purpose) rests with a single org (and often, a single compliance department within that org).

Ironically, this becomes more of a concern the larger the supplier. AWS can live with firing any one of their customers - a smaller outfit probably couldn't.

And this speaks to the lack of alignment about what's good for the decision makers Vs what's good for the customer.

Why are you locked into a single platform?

I use bitwarden, Google and a yubikey for passkeys. Which of these am I locked into?

> The value is in how clear the final output is.

Clarity is useless if it's inaccurate.

Excel is deterministic. ChatGPT isn't.

> Did anyone use AFS (Andrew File System)?

Glances round to see if there's any alumni from a certain Large Investment Bank also present...

This paper so affected me that I scrapped a talk I was writing three days ahead of an (internal) conference and wrote a talk about this paper instead!

Participating in the market certainly used to be more expensive. I'm not sure regressing to this is... A good thing?

> Why do people doing normal trading want to avoid the exchanges that have HFT computers skimming money off their trades?

What's "normal trading"? A prop desk at an investment bank? A hedge fund? A pension fund? Someone who's just installed Robin Hood on their phone?

Most rational participants want lower trading costs and overheads, smaller spreads etc. HFT provides that - the evidence being "look at what the spreads are today, compared with what they were pre computerised trading".

And you don't have to take my word for it, Vanguard thinks this too. https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-...

> The price is going to get discovered either way just as it has for hundreds of years, it happening a billion times per second does normal traders no good.

Could you explain how a market participant who makes one trade a day is negatively impacted by high resolution price discovery?

I agree with a lot of this.

> My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out.

100%. I "burnt out" (actually, I think I discovered there was more to life than the academic slog I'd spent my entire schooling immersed in) and despite 6 A levels came 94/97 in my third year.

It happens a lot, and my suspicion is that the burnout is caused by the whiplash of going from a high intensity/pressure school environment (where you're likely told you're the smartest person in the room), to a more adult, self-driven one (where it's clear you're not).

> You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early.

This depends on the course I think. I did natural sciences which is extremely broad, and allows much later specialisation. Other courses are far narrower d think.

I'd be extremely wary of asserting that privately educated kids are any more successful at university than state-educated kids (on the same course) when there's no evidence to bear this out.

If, however, you want to convince yourself that the amount of money you've spent on your child's education means they're smarter than the rest, go right ahead and believe that.

Universities don't select for whether a candidate has "reached their full potential". They select for what that potential is.

Not least to say that most kids don't want to go to university thousands of miles away from their family, friends, and support networks.

> Otherwise, all those years of preparation and all that talent is wasted.

In other words, the parents should get a return on their investment?

Your child is not entitled to an Oxbridge place over a state-educated child because they might have more potential and ability, they're entitled because you paid extra for it?

Poor people just need to try harder, right?

Or do they need to just be luckier?

> Parents in state schools don't put in even half of the effort on average.

I wondered how long it'd be before we'd see "parents who can't afford private education just aren't putting the effort in".

Interestingly, some colleges tacitly subdivide these groups further.

Christ's Cambridge famously used to hand out "2 E" offers to those in the first group who they know would put the effort in anyway, but "3/4 A" offers to those in the first group they thought might just coast with a 2E offer.

A "2E" offer was certainly a mark of prestige.

(You get your offer in around December time, but sit your A levels in the summer).

Why do you think the school & A level system is perfectly meritocratic when the evidence squarely suggests it's far from it?

So people who've been taught more things are "smarter" than people who've not been taught as much?

All babies are stupid, I therefore assume?

What about the people who never get the chance to do any A levels? Are they all less smart than those who do?

> No, you can get a scholarship

Of course! So easy! What percentage of foreign students applying get aid or scholarships?

> Again, this is really the best of the best, those with the highest merit.

You're assuming that "the best of the best" are applying. This is not true. "The best of the best who are encouraged to apply and/or have the means", apply. This is not the same population.

> All they had to do was convince a bureaucrat their life was hard

I don't know who this "bureaucrat" is. When I interviewed at Cambridge I was seen by 3 fellows, all members of the relevant departments.

> If you can't get the grades, you don't have merit.

Nobody's this naive, surely?

I got six A's at A level, over 20 years ago.

Am i objectively smarter than every single other peer who only got 4 As?

(I, for one, am confident I know the answer to this question).

> The very top aren't applying there any more at all, you don't need to: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, all better.

The only people applying to those from the UK are the wealthy.

If by "very top" you mean "richest", then maybe. But I'm not sure we care about that?

If you can pay to be better at the test, then the test just becomes a test of how wealthy you are.

Maybe they should be based on a range of factors that influence how successful the university thinks the candidate will be as an undergraduate? Not just exam results?

> It's letting in dumber people, worse students

It's a very bold assertion that A level grades are the ultimate arbiter of "dumbness".

> Kids worrying that Oxford and Cambridge will discriminate against them are among the smartest in the country.

pg's lack of awareness that this has basically always been true smacks of naiveté.

> But by kumbaya ethics or community spirit or whatever you want to call it, they're scummy vultures.

> They're dipping into the "take a penny" jar and not replenishing it.

> I can't square this with any sense of justice or morality.

Speak for yourself. Other people have different values and therefore interpretations of what's "moral" or "just".

If you want to make the argument that the only use of open source that's moral is one in which the user contributes back, that's fine. But I think you'll find yourself in a minority.

They're using the software to achieve a useful aim (build a business that offers a service).

Difficult to get a purer example of a "user" than this.

What's the specific use case that benefits from a shorter key?

The only interaction I can ever see having with this key is putting it into and taking it out of my password manager....