linuxhansl

That is exactly why:

1. I only run Linux where possible, and I install myself (and I realize I do not control the BIOS, etc). OpenBSD would probably be even better.

2. I assume that Google knows everything that is going on my Android phone, Apple knows everything on any Apple device, and Microsoft know everything going on on my son's gaming PC.

This is a dangerous trajectory and we'll hear "But think of the children!" or the good old "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." ad nauseam.

We've been over the fallacy of these statements already, so I will just quote Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Although apparently the original context of that quote was not about Liberty at all.)

Yeah, yeah, autoconf sucks, so does maven (IMHO), software is complex, and, yes, we could do better... But, to reason from these examples about thousands of projects is disingenuous.

The rumors of open source's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

I use open source both privately (Linux, some open source games, FreeBSD a long time ago), and professionally (mostly Java and database stuff), and while sometimes I can't help rolling my eyes, on the whole open source works incredibly and surprisingly well; especially compared to the alternative of closed-only corporate software.

It is interesting to me that the only thing in the universe that we can observe directly it's also thought to be the least understood.

We experience physical phenomena by proxy only - through the senses and sensors we built, followed by an interpretation by our brain; while we can observe our consciousness by just observing ourselves from "within".

I do not mean to question the paper, just pointing out that I find this fascinating.

In fact I strongly believe that consciousness is - in the end - the result of physical processes.

What I do question is that we understand what we mean by "physics". Physics is a model of the world, a model that we created based on our understanding how things ought to be, namely that all things are separate and that thus we can explain reality (and hence consciousness) by analyzing (i.e. dividing) the model more and more. Who says that that is a correct representation of the world?

That's what I meant, but I agree with GP, that perhaps that wasn't the best example.

That is possible. And I'll readily admit that my direct sample set is small, so it's mostly from what I read. I have some friends who do escalator construction and they mentioned similar issues. Again, small sample set.

Being born in Europe I always was a huge fan of unions, as agents to level the balance of power between employers and employees. The unions negotiate pay rates, safety procedures, benefits, etc, etc, and have the financial means to back the negotiations with strikes.

After coming to US I became less enthusiastic. Unions seem to frequently go overboard. For example only union workers being allowed to plug power cords into the outlets at trade-shows - at great cost - and similar shenanigans that basically seem to only increase cost and reduce productivity.

Some of the resentment against unions is self-inflicted. Perhaps that was and is historically needed here in the US...?

"Only 108kb of ram."

That quote reminded me of my first computer: The ZX81, which had 1kb of RAM! About 150 bytes of that was used by system variables, and depending on how you use the screen up to 768 bytes are used by the display buffer.

And yet I managed to write code on it as a kid. :) (Of course nothing like Doom)

Can't you enforce a license too? A license is a contract and if code is released in breach of that license than should be enforceable as well. Is the issue that a license breach is a legally weaker case than copyright infringement?

IANAL but an employee generally does not have to just contribute work related code. The company has to OK it either for specific contributions or as a blanket policy, but it's opt in.

Then there is a secondary question on whether you contribute the code under a specific license (say Apache 2.0 GPL, etc.) or whether you assign the copyright.

In the former case the code can only be used in accordance with that specific license, in the latter case the code can be re-licensed by the copyright holder.

In either case the company could claim that the employee did not have the right to contribute the code, but (AFAIK) that is independent of a copyright grant vs license grant.

Copyright assignment is an interesting topic.

With the copyright assigned the owner of said copyright can release the code under any license of their choosing.

Some dual license open source projects do this, the organization requires the copyright assignment and hence they can release the code under an open source license and their own closed license. License changes here are perfectly OK (legally at least).

Interesting cases are those without a copyright grant. Now you allow the group to only produce copies and releases in accordance to that specific license. License changes now are questionable. Can you relicense Apache 2.0 as AGPL? BSD as Apache 2.0? (Without owning the copyright, my guess in both cases is no.)

You try another connection (after some timeout)? Or you start N requests in parallel and then pick the first response?

Not sure why you got downvoted. I came here to say the same.

While it is in theory true that you cannot have a CA system, in practice if you control your H/W and data centers as well, you can build enough redundancy that a P is not more likely than (say) being hit by a meteor. So still not a CA system, but practically CA 99.9..% (add as many 9's as you have money).

Edit: Spelling.

I think this is a step in the wrong direction.

Open source is about an open community, open contributions, the multiplier you get from contributions from multiple companies. That way open source is a win-win. Companies benefit from each other's contributions.

Once you have free and non-free tiers or need restrictive licensing it is already broken. The incentives no longer align.

I'm being paid in part to work on the open source projects that we utilize for our service(s). Some of those we started, some of those we're contributing to, but we _own_ none of them. We handed them off to external entities (Apache and others) for governance and we actively encourage others to participate. And, yes, some of those are used by Amazon, and we welcome their contributions to the code.

Single support companies that use the popularity and reach of permissive licenses for profit that then turn around and bemoan the fact that their licenses are too permissive are disingenuous.

FWIW, I've been blocking all 3rd party cookies in Firefox for years.

ext4 has a default "Reserved block count" of 5%, only usable by root.

I was referring to my statement being of theoretical nature - as opposed to this test which was a real benchmark. :)

Upon re-reading I realize the wording was ambiguous.

Not sure if that means much since it's theoretical only... The GTX 1650 Max-Q in my laptop can reach 5.1 TFLOPS at half precision according to spec.

I always cringe when I come across any kind of loop with unnecessary polynomial or even exponential complexity, even when it is found in a non-critical part of the code.

It offends my taste as a software engineer and I always fix these.

I'm not sure I understand what Apple contributed here. It's not supported, helped, or encouraged by Apple. And Apple does not document their H/W in ways that allow reuse. Hence these are all reverse engineering projects.

Apple _is_ a walled garden ecosystem. That has many obvious advantages, things just work, etc.

Personally I happen to not like it, but it's a choice folks have to make by themselves.

I buy my H/W from vendors that actually support running Linux (in my case) like Dell, Lenovo, and others.

I hear you. The down-votes are unfair since you just voiced your opinion.

At the same time...

ODs frequently happen because of lack quality control. You get this stuff from some shady folks, who got it from other shady folks, you have no idea whether you can trust the dosage, or whether you even get the drug you paid for.

The drugs themselves are often not the problem.

You can kill yourself with alcohol and nicotine is one of _the_ most additive substances we know. Should be prohibit these as well?

The key is regulation and quality control, and that you can only do within a legal framework.

Yep. I never took psychedelics, but I spent a decent amount of my time in meditation.

I think these drugs can be very beneficial if you use them to "expand your mind". But the cases you mention above are almost the opposite. Instead of an expanded, non-attached viewpoint these people formed new and even stronger attachments.

In the end it's more than just legalization. Regulation and quality control are key factors as well. You easily kill yourself with alcohol, but due to regulation, quality control (and experience in society) we can manage the risks vs the rewards.

Finally! The risk of getting an unclean drug from some street dealer is far higher than the risk from the substance itself. The key is legalization and regulation and quality control.

This is true to alcohol as well. Alcohol is ethanol (C2H5OH). When created unskillfully also you get methanol (CH3OH), which is really poisonous. A controlled, regulated market here is far safer.

Like with alcohol there is risk of abuse with psychedelics, but IMHO that risk is smaller than the risk of bad products from the black market.

Note that I am not talking about opiods. Those are very additive.

Heh. I remember the Java 1.0 days. At work someone showed me Java and just running a "Hello World" took a few seconds to start. And complex code was sloooow.

I immediately concluded that no-one will ever use it and that's it's just a fad. (Just like I predicted there's no way to make money from a search engine :) ).

Things changed a lot with Java 1.3, which, for the first time, came with JIT compiler.

And with modern escape analysis, lock elision, new GCs, etc, I no longer (OK very rarely) look to C/C++ for performance anymore.

I still miss real pointers (better unsafe, et al), native types collections (there are external ones) and more control over what gets put on the stack vs. on the heap (escape analysis is not good enough, yet.) sometimes.

When I first read of the messenger RNA based vaccines I was thinking that perhaps the one good thing coming from this horrific pandemic is providing mRNA treatments the funding they needed.

I think originally BioNTech worked on cancer treatments.

IMHO, part of the technical questions is to evaluate reactions. Perhaps I disagree with a solution. Or I do not give all the information needed to solve a problem so the person has to ask. Or I give hints on the way and see how receptive the person is. And so on.

After that it's just part of the conversation. Probing the resume. And asking some of these question flat out. I also discuss real practical problems/challenges we have at work, most of which require a team to work together.

We also (used to pre-covid) take the person for lunch and decidedly talk not about work at that time.

Of course it's different between an engineer fresh from college and a seasoned software engineer or architect.

In the end, I think interviewing is itself a skill one needs to train. Just having a person solve some brain-teasers doesn't cut it. I have _way_ more teams, co-founders, etc, fail due to social issue rather than technical skills.

And I am by no means presuming that I'm good at it, just that these are things I look for.

An important part I forgot to mention in the first post that the person is interviewing the company as much as we interview the person. So we leave a significant amount of time for asking questions about the company... and try to make a good impression.

(Sorry for the essay.)

In my hiring for software engineers and architects I always consider coding/design skill to be merely a necessary condition - something you just briefly test for, mostly to detect b*llshit on the resume.

What I found is far more important are social skills. Can the person work as member of a team? How do they respond to feedback? Or when something is hard? When they get stuck? How do they communicate a design? Rally a team around them? Deal with disputes? React to changing situations? Can they take the initiative or need to be told what to do? Etc, etc.

Together with actual coding/design skills - and with proper management - these are the necessary conditions. All my humble opinion, of course.

IMHO "open core" is not a good idea in the first place.

Open source is about an open community, open contributions, the multiplier you get from contributions from multiple companies. That way open source is a win-win. Companies benefit from each other's contributions.

It's _not_ about just showing the code or a free-for-all.

Once you have free and non-free tiers it's already broken. The incentives no longer align.

I'm being paid in part to work on the open source projects that we utilize for our service(s). Some of those we started, some of those we're contributing to, but we _own_ none of them. We handed them off to external entities (Apache and others) for governance and we actively encourage others to participate.

That's an excellent point, I didn't consider that.

Do I need to worry now that a walled-garden company - with all its advantages - pulls ahead of open ecosystems?

I only use Linux at home. Will I be doomed to inferior H/W going forward?

This is not a rhetorical question or a flame... It's an honest question... Is Apple pulling ahead of everybody else and soon going to be our only option?

All this talk about "sides" is not helpful.

What I will say is that there are those are reflective of their viewpoint, will question and review their choices, and change their mind about things in light of new information...

And then there are those who are not and won't; those who act out of tradition and pride, those who believe in conspiracy theories, those who let themselves be played like marionettes with simple trigger topics, etc.

There is a difference; but it's not left or right, conservative or liberal, it's reflective or not reflective.