ptero

I came in to say the same thing -- major, major respect to Powell.

I am not a big fan of his earlier policies (or of Greenspan's and anyone after him for that matter). His "unlearn the importance of M2" did not age well. He made the tail end of the ZIRP more painful than it needed to be. But those were honest mistakes from a public servant who did his best and believed in what he is doing.

And standing up for what he believes is right, against this insanity from the president is the gold standard of what we need from public servants. My 2c.

I am not absolutely sure, but I do not think so.

Being old(ish) I recall in the early 90s Stallman advocating for (and mostly winning the argument in the tech circles at the time) open source as the primary tool for freedom to build things. With financial motivation possible, but completely orthogonal to the development of the open source software.

And how his argument (he was also a strong proponent of freedom to fork and improve in ways that the original developer did not do/want/agree with) was used against him in the early Emacs-XEmacs wars. When he tried to advocate that developers should support his Emacs version because he was the one who built Emacs (with tech retort being that his version sucks, he does not want to let others change it, so the community will build the features they want in XEmacs, thank you very much).

I think viable financial models of the last 15-20 years morphed open source into something different (in a kind of embrace-extend way). But I think that "extinguish" is very hard with OSS, so with financial models becoming less viable, open source might morph back somewhat. Or not; we shall see.

> I think it’s rather that people need to eat.

They do and always did. But open source was originally not about that, but about building something cool and letting others build on that. And, crucially, about GPL preventing large companies from extinguishing your work "because copyright". I remember Bill Gates calling GPL a spreading virus that tech world has to fight.

Sometime along this path monetizing open source became a thing. Now it is apparently becoming less lucrative. OK. That's the nature of changes, but IMO it does not kill open source. It might eventually make it even better, as commercial open source has become too widespread and money corrupts. My 2c.

I don't know what "ready for prime time desktop use" means. I suspect it means different things for different people.

But with Linux being mostly hobbyist-friendly a number of folks have custom setups and do not want to be forced into the standardized mold for the sake of making it super smooth to transition from Windows.

I have such a setup (using FVWM with customized key bindings and virtual layout that I like, which cannot work under Wayland), so can I donate some money to Microsoft to keep Windows users less grumpy and not bringing yet another eternal September to Linux. I like my xorg, thank you very much :).

> No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/

Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.

Why? Work hard doesn't mean fully succeed.

HN policies and algorithms slow the slide, and keep it better than reddit, but the set of topics that allow one to take a minority opinion without downvoting keeps shrinking. At least compared to the time 10-15 years ago.

That view is about 18 years old and HN was very different then.

As with any communication platform it risks turning into an echo chamber, and I am pretty sure that particular PG view has been rejected for many years (I think dang wrote on this more than once). HN works very hard to avoid becoming politicized and not discouraging minority views is a large part of that.

For example, I now seldom bother to write anything that I expect to rub the left coast folks the wrong way: I don't care about karma, but downvoted posts are effectively hidden. There is little point of writing things that few will see. It is not too bad at HN yet, but the acceptance of the downvote for disagreement is the strongest thing that pushes HN from discussions of curious individuals towards the blah-quality of "who gets more supporters" goals of the modern social media. My 2c.

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. While I might agree or disagree with the argument, it is a clear, politely expressed view.

It is sad HN is sliding in the direction of folks being downvoted for opinions instead of the tone they use to express them :(

> I still don't see the problem. You can criticize things you're part of.

Certainly. But this, IMO, is not the reason for the criticism in the comments. If Rob ranted about AI, about spam, slop, whatever, most of those criticizing his take would nod instead.

However, the one and only thing that Rob says in his post is "fuck you people who build datacenters, you rape the planet". And this coming from someone who worked at Google from 2004 to 2021 and instead could have picked any job anywhere. He knew full well what Google was doing; those youtube videos and ad machines were not hosted in a parallel universe.

I have no problem with someone working at Google on whatever with full knowledge that Google is pushing ads, hosting videos, working on next gen compute, LLM, AGI, whatever. I also have no problem with someone who rails against cloud compute, AI, etc. and fights it as a colossal waste or misallocation of resources or whatever. But not when one person does both. Just my 2c, not pushing my worldview on anyone else.

Yes, after working there for more than 17 years (IIRC he joined Google in 2004).

> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration

No, but it puts some perspective on things. IMO Google, after abandoning its early "don't be evil" motto is directly responsible for a significant chunk of the current evil in the developed world, from screen addiction to kids' mental health and social polarization.

Working for Google and drawing an extravagant salary for many, many years was a choice that does affect the way we perceive other issues being discussed by the same source. To clarify: I am not claiming that Rob is evil; on the contrary. His books and open source work were an inspiration to many, myself included. But I am going to view his opinions on social good and evil through the prism of his personal employment choices. My 2c.

I would use your software skills to get in the door as a software engineer, then weasel into a sciencey position. That is:

1. Find a company that has non-software jobs that you like. Look at what companies advertise on their web sites; go to a few conferences (or watch talks) to see if some talks strike you with "ah, I can and want to do this" vibe; reach out to folks you went to grad school with, etc.

2. Apply and join as a software engineer. Don't try to sit on both chairs (software and science) during the application. You can apply to a science role, but this is likely much harder after 8 years of software focus.

3. Once in, chat with folks working on what you want to work on. Talk to folks you saw give talks. Go to internal presentations, post cool plots in slack, etc. In most companies it is pretty easy to move within roles. Plus, HR is no longer in the filtering pipeline and is not tossing resumes of anyone they think does not have the chops for the position.

Good luck!

As a personal data point -- I decided, late in my math PhD, to switch from academia to the industry after completion. A few times I switched jobs I went in as a software engineer, but within a few months moved to working on things I wanted to do beyond software (algorithms for tracking, perception, signal processing, sensor fusion, etc.).

> university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants.

Agreed, hiring in academia is both painful and tricky. But someone running a grad program for the department and who is as overloaded as the author with other duties is well placed to advocate for a secretary or a grad assistant to lighten his non-core duties.

> And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.

More than for a bus driver, nurse, cook, physical therapist, etc., etc., etc.? The world is full of people who volunteer and self-assign tasks to their breaking point; then burn themselves out. They feel that they can do X best, so they convince themselves that they must. With very few exceptions, this is BS and a non-productive path to burnout. Don't be like that.

It is important to clarify what we mean by "obligated / not optional", as I think there is a terminology mismatch.

When I said that a particular job task is not optional I mean that not doing this task will lead to a disciplinary action from the employer (being fired, put on a performance improvement clock with the HR, etc.). Reducing those tasks brings in one set of considerations.

Your definition of "obliged", if I understand it correctly, is primarily a self-assigned or a community-expected one: "if I stop running this seminar or remove myself from that editorial board, I will feel I am not doing all I can / my colleagues will look at me askance". But it will not trigger retaliation from the employer. Reducing overload from those tasks brings a completely different set of considerations.

> As for reducing: research, grad programs, journals, media inquiries - these are not optional for profs

For a tenured professor (and someone who runs the department's grad program and teaches many classes almost certainly has a tenure) all of those are optional. During my PhD I have seen all sorts of arrangements, including tenured profs who taught minimum load and did nothing else. No grad students, no special courses, no seminars, nada. I am not advocating this. It is, in my book, not a good approach unless you spending all other time to solve Riemannian Hypothesis or something like this. But tenure gives a prof a lot of leeway on how much to work and what to work on. My 2c.

What you describe is a job that requires a lot of thoughtful, or at least meaningful, answers to a lot of people. If each answer leads to a context switch, this lands hard on any other work you do. On the comms side, this may well be a full time job; or more.

But the problem has nothing to do with email. The problem is with combining what sounds like a full time management job with a full time teaching job. In fact email makes it possible to batch those requests instead of always being interrupted at an external schedule.

And sorry -- I am not trying to tell you how to live your life, what comes next is just an engineering observation. But if one is overloaded the solution is almost always to ... reduce load. Transfer some duties and/or delegate more tasks and/or hire someone to help, etc. This is usually not easy, but IME most folks under overload who say they cannot reduce it either (1) did not try to reduce it in earnest or (2) are micromanagers who are willing to delegate only partway while maintaining the role in final decisions. My 2c.

Which is fine. Goals shift and can even completely disappear, forcing you to pick another one. But having and pursuing long term goals at most times is still the ticket for success. My 2c.

Nothing wrong in rationalizing content sharing; as in rationalizing copyright. But IMO the current form of the copyright for both the technical and the creative works is a cure that is worse than the disease.

Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.

> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos

That is a totally reasonable view. But others have different preferences. I, for example, do not want to share all my photos with Google, govvies and anyone else they leak them to.

So I self host, back up and share my files with the family. I can always dump what I want to insta, etc. but it is my choice what to share, picture by picture, with default "off". And have no dark patterns trying to catch a finger accidentally hitting a "back up to cloud" for the full album.

That, to me, is a big deal, worth dealing with occasional IT hassles for. Which is just a personal preference.

Just a personal opinion, but as an occasional job seeker here, I prefer the current system, seeing "no complaints in replies" policy as efficiency, not censorship. Were it not the case I suspect many job postings would become discussion battlegrounds and people looking for brief summaries would have to scroll through pages of discussions.

It is a painful process for both the seekers (who feel they are being ghosted) and the employers (who feel they are being spammed by AI bots); IMO the best approach is to follow the general HN guidance of "be kind" and "assume good intentions". And if a company ghosted you, downvote their post. My 2c.

Depends on the specific incarnation of the democracy. Not infrequently in elections the majority sees the choice as the one of the lesser evil.

For example: allocating the resources to only few industries deprives everyone else: small players, hobbyists, gamers, tinkerers from opportunities to play with their toys. And small players playing with random toys is a source of multiple innovations.

Chatgpt is not the only game in town. Any exclusivity deal will likely backfire against chatgpt.

This is probably research into protocol for time sync. Which works well for some scenarios, but not yet for others and can improve the reference implementation (I guess; I have no hard knowledge there).

And given that ntp.org runs servers that so many organizations use they should be near the top of the funding queue for any NTP research. My 2c.

It is not a free thinking paradise in academia either. Different groups fighting for hiring, promotions and influence exist there, too. And it tends to be more pronounced: it is much easier in industry to find a comparable job to escape a toxic environment, so a lot of problems in academia settings steam forever.

But the skill sets to avoid and survive personnel issues in academia is different from industry. My 2c.

This is likely very regional. As a single data point, raising the family in the Boston area for the last 25 years I do not recall not being able to see a doctor the same day for the regular scares, from ear pains and high fever to falling and later vomiting (is this a concussion?).

A few times when we needed to see specialists, we often saw them within 24 hours; occasionally longer but I would say with a median of 48-72 hours. Even things that are clearly not urgent (for dermatologist "hey, I have forgotten about skin checks for the last 2 years, can we do the next one now", for ENT "hey, my son is getting nosebleeds during high intensity sports; can you check if there is a specific blood vessel that is causing problems"?) always happened well within two weeks. Three caveats to this happy story:

1. This is Boston area with likely the highest concentration of medical practitioners of all kinds in the US. I had good insurance with a large network, decent out-of-network coverage and for most cases not needed a pre-approval to see a specialist.

2. Everyone is generally healthy and our "specialist needs" were likely well trodden paths with many available specialists.

3. Our usage of the doctors, as the kids became generally healthy teenagers and adults, dropped significantly in the last 5-7 years. I hear post-covid the situation is changing and I may be heavily skewing to the earlier period.

The equivalent of dual-booting would, IMO, be a big step towards Google-independence.

In my grad school days in the mid-90s I set up Linux because it let me write programs in a modern way, accessing all the available memory without jumping through hoops, etc. I would still switch to Windows for playing games, using Quicken, checking Usenet and email and browsing the web.

AOL not even being available on Windows and modem drivers for cheap-er hardware being Windows-only meant I had to switch back and forth (download on Windows, copy to a floppy, reboot, etc.). This sounds crazy today, but it worked "somewhat OK" for me to keep experimenting.

If we could somehow provide a similar environment for the phone, even jumping through hoops, this will enable enthusiasts to start seriously tinkering with their devices. But this is not easy -- both the hardware and the Android today place way more restrictions than much-vilified Microsoft and Intel did 30 years ago. And Microsoft tried very hard to snuff Linux out, wiping boot sectors and partition tables giving half a chance; Google will be much more successful killing any dual-boot attempts now. My 2c.

The toxicity is not about accepting contributions. I have zero issues with this, the project is, as you said, his personal garden. But the behavior in chats is absolutely toxic.

If you put out a sign "come listen to my music" and then throw out every second person, everyone wearing blue and every blonde with no warning, that is toxic. It is your play, but you are not treating people coming in with respect. My 2c.

This is all good, and as an American citizen I cheer any attempt by Europe (China, Japan, anti-China SEA players or anyone else) to provide an alternative: of tech, of weapons procurement, of social model, of political setup or of anything else. The world needs more competition.

But this article has nothing to do with the above, or with views of Musk. As others said, this request was for centralized access and SpaceX responded with a B2C proposal. It would have been rejected just as quickly even if it came from another company unaffiliated with the US.

Neither the fact that starlink seems better not that they do not trust Musk is necessary true.

In business, especially on the government side, incumbency plays a very big role. Just knowing whom to call in case of issues and how soon they respond may account for all the trust needed to renew. My 2c.