oytis

> is civil servants developing OSS commodities too much of a heresy

I see two problems here for Germany. First, the salaries of civil servants are regulated, and might be not what most developers, even German ones, expect. In addition civil servant status is bundled with privileges and duties that make it painful to lay it down. Most developers are used to job flexibility though, especially as, as I said, the salaries are not going to be great.

Second, there is a decision by the Constitutional Court that prohibits the state from competing with the market. Temporary grants to independent actors are among other things a way to work around it.

Great to see open source projects funded, but the value of Flatpak for tech sovereignty evades me somewhat. It's a pretty niche and questionable piece of technology, and likely won't be there in 10 years. Some grants by STF, like Mastodon, Openstreetmaps, Let's Encrypt, rustls are spot on, but there are many questionable ones.

My first reflex would be to ctiticise PG, but after reading the article, I don't think I agree here.

First he doesn't say universities should prepare founders - his advice is to those universities that do want to do that.

Second, his advice is basically to skip BS business education and make students good professionals, well-rounded intellectuals, not afraid of starting a business. Anyone would benefit from such education, not only prospective founders

I wish people actually making stuff had a veto right on things they make

What kind of guarantres does Github offer?

I don't think I would enjoy AI powered communism more than AI powered capitalism

Gdpr doen't apply to work you do for your employer, on employer's equipment either AFAIK

But then you still have to buy birthday presents on top of that

African continent is probably the last place in the world where this is relevant, and they are on track to fix it.

Nobody buys new though, these are for companies and posh people

You are calling a Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux) killer small silly stuff?

Hm... I vaguely remember a different article debunking the Dunning-Kruger. Basically the conclusion was that the data from the experiment shows that people's estimations of their results are all over the place, with people scoring high being actually slightly (but only slightly) more confident that they did well.

UPD: probably this one https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...

The article in the post is older though

Are we not expecting any practical benefits from mathematical discoveries any more? Not even as a means to help other sciences?

One should differentiate between "working in academia" and "doing science" here. Science is fundamentally about the curiosity, the desire to know, not the process of getting there.

If we can now know anything we want, we have an age of unimaginable abundance before us. I think it's more likely though that we will just be able to know more things than before and/or maybe learning new things faster - which is a good thing too, but there is still work for human scientists to do

Wouldn't it be great if we had a cure for cancer, working fusion energy or at least a proof for P vs NP even if no human had a joy of discovering it?

I think the author means if it happens regularly, and asking people to stop doesn't work or marks you as a dangerous dissident. Obviously, it is wrong to quit in response to one person doing something stupid

I don't know about you, but occasionally going outside to breathe some fresh air makes a lot of difference for me

I feel like the real takeaway should be "don't make a competition out of a technical discussion". A culture that doesn't allow openly debating technical decisions sounds like one I wouldn't want to be part of.

Good UX makes you achieve your goals on a website faster. It implies that the website has a purpose apart from spending your time on it. If it has no such purpose, and yet people are spending a lot of time there, it's probably addictive

Yeah, we are not talking about ecological impact of France enough

Uh-oh

Small songbirds apparently

So far it's only US doing this. I don't think it's in anyone else's interest to limit development of open source models or chips. Nvidia has secured a leading position in GPU market by being the best overall, but if US continues to mess up with the export, that changes the calculation and surely we'll see the alternatives

With every interview process you say "yes" only once and "no" many times. Where there are a lot of candidates, then many more times, while spending less time on each candidate. There is no way to design a process that will not leave the majority of candidates disappointed - as soon as they are up front with the amount of work you'll need to do, it sounds ethical to me

Yeah, but I've also appreciated the symbolism much more as an angsty teen than as an adult.

The best part about Tolstoy is how he depicts the intricacies of human relationships, and that's a thing most people cannot appreciate until they hit like 30

I dunno, I feel like Dostoevsky hits perfectly around high school. I enjoyed Crime and Punishment around 9th grade, but tried read some Dostoevsky as an adult, and it really reads like young adult luterature.

I only learned to appreciate Tolstoy as an adult though - it was extremely boring for me as a teenager barring some smaller pieces

Absolutely. Either you use LLMs and tolerate unreliability or you are writing proper reliable software yourself

That's a huge stretch. Age verification is a worrying, but a wordwide trend, several US states introduced it as well.

The first country to introduce it was Australia, which is only related to Europe by participating in Eurovision

China doesn't allow foreign social media on their territory at all. US had one for a short time, then panicked and forced them to sell. EU can neither buy American platforms, nor does it want to build a great firewall of Europe, so it's trying to find other ways to get in control

EU doesn't have enough money to just buy the competition