> The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise
If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.
The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.
Decades ago I was a Fortran developer and encountered a very odd bug in which the wrong values were being calculated. After a lot of investigation I tracked it down to a subroutine call in which a hard-coded zero was being passed as an argument. It turned out that in the body of that subroutine the value 4 was being assigned to that parameter for some reason. The side effect was that the value of zero because 4 for the rest of the program execution because Fortran aliases all parameters since it passes by descriptor (or at least DEC FORTRAN IV did so on RSX/11). As you can imagine, hilarity ensued.
In old school FORTRAN (I only recall WATFOR/F77, my uni's computers were quite ancient) subroutine (aka "subprogram") parameters are call-by-reference. If you passed a literal constant it would be treated as a variable in order to be aliased/passed by reference. Due to "constant pooling", modifications to a variable that aliased a constant could then propagate throughout the rest of the program where that constant[sic] was used.
Yes. That is the main solution and it is not a good one.
1- `restrict` need to be used carefully. Putting it everywhere in large codebase can lead to pretty tricky bugs if aliasing does occurs under the hood.
1- Restrict is not an official keyword in C++. C++ always has refused to standardize it because it plays terribly with almost any object model.
Regarding "restrict", I don't think one puts it everywhere, just for certain numerical loops which otherwise are not vectorized should be sufficient. FORTRAN seems even more dangerous to me. IMHO a better solution would be to have explicit notation for vectorized operations. Hopefully we will get this in C. Otherwise, I am very happy with C for numerics, especially with variably modified typs.
Spoiler: He is not. But he is very good at faking it.
Anytime he tries to give a serious opinion on anything related to computers: It is laughably bad and out of touch (SQL, compilers, languages, performance, etc... ).
He definitively has a scientific background but definitively not "Tech" as far as computer are concerned.
I don’t see how “tech” is limited to software. While your case might be made for software, according to many accounts Musk is a strong driver on the hardware side. For instance, I’ve read the Tesla and SpaceX books by Eric Berger, which are much more focused on technical things compared to the more mainstream books. And while Musk is not in the trenches with a screwdriver, he’s not faking it either.
To be honest, I’m actually interested in this hypothesis: is he legitimately skilled/knowledgeable, or is he indeed faking it? And for either side I would like to see evidence. This question is interesting to me because some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).
If he is really faking it, that might even be good, because the success of his companies might be replicable and could continue without him. But what if he is not?
He has a public image of "geek/need hero" that is honestly inspiring.
And that benefits him a lot because it bring people to trust his decisions. He has all the interest of the world to maintain this image.
> some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).
People he hired for these companies made contributions.
Unlike the more common pattern, Elon doesn't hesitate to make straight up engineering decisions for his businesses, including ones that look unnecessarily high risk to a lot of his own engineers. Chopsticks catching spaceships made of stainless steel and self driving cars without lidar are well known examples. The success of those choices earns him legit nerd cred.
Disagree. The current limitations of Tesla self driving are not around difficulties in judging distances that lidar solves. They're around inference deficiencies with accurate geometry.
If the AI was good enough, vision-only self-driving would be at least as good as the best human.
The AI isn't good enough. I'm starting to suspect that current ML learning rates can't be good enough in reasonable wall-clock timeframes due to how long it takes between relevant examples for them to learn from.
It's fine to lean on other sensory modalities (including LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, whatever else you fancy) until the AI gets good enough.
It's safer than human drivers now. That's good enough. It will take more than that to convince world, and it should. I applaud the well earned skepticism. But I'm an old guy who has no problem qualifying for a driver's license, and if you replaced me with FSD 14.2, especially under not ideal conditions like at night or in a storm, everyone would be safer.
I predict a cusp to be reached in the next few years when safety advocates flip from trying to slow down self driving to trying to mandate it.
I can't speak to your driving level, but everything I see about Tesla's FSD has unfortunately been giving me "this seems sus" vibes even back when I was extremely optimistic about them in particular and self driving cars more generally (so, last decade).
Unfortunately, the only stats about Tesla's FSD that I can find are crowd-sourced, and what they show is that despite recent improvements, they're still not particularly good.
Also unfortunately, the limited geo-fencing of the areas in which the robo-taxi service operates, and that they initially* launched the service without the permits to avoid needing a human safety monitor, strongly suggests that it hasn't generalised to enough domains yet.
Lack of generality means that it's possible for you to be 100% right about Tesla's FSD on the roads you normally use, and yet if you took them a little bit outside that area you might find the AI shocking you by reliably disengaging for no human-apparent reason while at speed and leaving you upside down in a field.
* I'm not sure what has or hasn't changed since launch: all the news reporting on this was from sites with more space dedicated to ads than to copy, so IMO slop news irregardless of if it was written by an AI or not
No reason we can't rely on other sensory modalities after the AI "gets good enough," either. Humans don't have LIDAR, but that doesn't mean that LIDAR is a "cheat" for self-driving cars, or something we should try to move past.
In principle, I agree; but remember that people like to save money, and that includes by not spending on excessive sensors when the minimum set will do.
What I think went wrong with Musk/Tesla/FSD is that he tried to cut costs here to save money before it would actually save money.
Im sorry that is just not true. You can never achive the kind of data with vison-only tech. its easy to confuse, you need lidar. anybody that thinks they can achieve self driving safety without that tech is lost.
> Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books, and had attributed his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[11][28] At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual.[29] At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500 (equivalent to $1,579 in 2024).[30][31]
I think it's fair to say he at least was a nerd. He was a dweeb getting beaten up in school, burying himself in books and computers at home. His skills are doubtlessly outdated now, but does that really mean much? Woz's skills (which to be perfectly clear, outclassed Musk's by miles) are doubtlessly out of date now too, but nobody would say Woz isn't a nerd.
I think the part where he grew into an unstable dirtbag might be influencing the way people see him now. Saying that is is, or at least was, a genuine nerd shouldn't be seen as any sort of excuse for his scamming, lying, etc.
He definitely has talked about a lot of nerdy books. Don't know about his attention span and not sure how to square what he likes with his values. He brings up the Culture all the time but I have my doubts that he's actually read them
I don't know either, I haven't read the Culture books (yet) either so I can't really evaluate that.
I do believe he read a lot of sci-fi in his youth, if only because that would fit the pattern of a young boy who doesn't get along well with their peers and turns towards solitary pursuits like computer programming. He seems exactly the sort to have read lots of Heinlein.
Almost everything about The Culture will be immediately apparent from stuff Musk talks about, but only about half of it would look like he's understood it.
The only real crimes are reading/writing someone's brain without permission (at which point others may call you names and stop inviting you to social events) or destroying a consciousness without backups (where you'll get permanent supervision to make sure you don't do it again). Most biological citizens have a full-brain computer interface for backups and general fun, called a "neural lace".
The AI Minds in charge of everything give themselves fanciful names, which Musk has used for his SpaceX drone ships.
For the reverse:
Almost every biological citizen is gender-fluid, can change physical gender by willing it, and there's a certain expectation that you try things both ways around so you know how to be a good lover. They dislike explosive population growth regardless of if it's organic or machine reproduction, and as everyone can get pregnant if they want to (because everyone can be a woman if they want to and it all works), it's considered quite scandalous to have more than one child.
It's sufficiently post-scarcity that money is considered a sign of poverty. They mostly avoid colonising planets, instead living on ships, or on habitats so large that if one was located at any Earth-Sun Lagrange point (including the one on the far side of the sun), we could see it.
- In large structures, you indubitably finishes with 4 teams doing the exact same thing in parallel and ignoring each other because communication did not pass through
- Managers who tend to do that tend to concentrate all communications through them. This is disastrous for multiple reasons:
- It creates communication bottleneck through them and slow down the entire organization
- "Filtered" information tend to have reduced technical quality that lead to wrong technical decision
- Soon or later, a dubious mid manager somewhere will leverage that to make his team follow *his* agenda and not the one of the company.
- On long term, isolated teams indubitably loose touch with the current mission of the organization precisely because they can not see the big picture
Most people I have seen following this ill practice are some maniac micro-managers that finishes burn out after few years when they do not make their entire team burn out.
The initial 'problem' that silos try to solve is the fact many-many communication in large organization does not scale.
And there is absolutely no need to create 'Silos' or similar non-sense to solve that.
Creating a structure where people can peer-to-peer talk freely coupled with some more broad communication nodes (All hands, Retro, etc ...) is way more productive than any silo bullshit and way less toxic as a work environment.
> So you could be certain that such a high-profile case was not done without the go-ahead of the executive. In that sense, it can be considered politically motivated.
Not really. It is more complex than that.
There is two systems within the system for the "penal" (judiciary) in France:
- Le parquet, with a "procureur" who indirectly under the influence of the executive power.
- The "Juge d'Instruction". They are independent judges called only for complex affairs that are in charge of proof gathering and with more or less free hands.
Sarkozy affairs landed in the second system.
Politicans tend to hate the second systems for obvious reasons.
It is worth to notice that Sarkozy himself tried to reform the system and remove the "Juge d'instruction" entirely but ultimately failed.
Well yes. But no. And that's exactly why there is always a risk of a "politically tainted" investigations.
The "Juge d'instruction" is not an independent judge that will, out of his own will, start an investigation.
He can start an investigation when asked by the "procureur", directly or indirectly under influence of the executive power, or by private citizens, as a "partie civile". The Sarkozy case was started by the former.
On top of that, the "juge d'instruction" is nominated by the Minister of Justice for a period of 3 years, which means it is, once again, linked to the executive power.
It's also worth noting that members of the second system had his picture pinned on a wall called "The wall of the assholes"[1] amongst other political and public servant they did not like. They still claim they are totally independent and impartial when judging any of these figures.
> It's also worth noting that members of the second system
Nope. This picture was found in the office of an Union related to "magistrats".
Magistrats is a broad term that also include Procureurs, Judges but also some Lawyers.
The union is not specifically associated to the position of "Juge d'instruction" by any means.
But yes, generally speaking Politicians do not like Magistrats and Magistrats do not like politicians in France.
And honestly, it is more healthy like that.
> Magistrats is a broad term that also include Procureurs, Judges but also some Lawyers.
The also is key: "Juge d'instructions" absolutely are "Magistrats" - just like Procureurs, etc are. Some of those "Juge d'instructions" are part of this union who put a target on the back of some politicians. How can they claim with a straight face that they are not biased ?
Either they know it's bullshit and they are simply lying; or they really believe their claims and they are just delusional. I don't know which one I prefer.
Question: Since when a random Union is representative of the political opinions of an entire profession ?
Spoiler: They never are.
Specially in France.
Even CGT, the biggest union in the country is currently a perfect good example of that.
CGT is loud. They are often extreme in there political opinions, regularly promoting extreme left ideology, some group historically had even close ties with the communists.... And they represent statistically nobody.
They represent less than 10% of people in France because this is currently the percentage of the unionized worker in the country.
They represent the political opinion of people who are affiliated with them. Once you getting involved in organizations that have a clear and defined political agenda; your whole argument that "nothing you do would ever be politically oriented" and that you are "fully neutral in all situation" becomes incredibly weak.
I am sure some "juge d'instruction" try their very best to be as neutral as possible. Some ostensibly aren't even giving this a flying fuck but both are repeating the same "we are non-political" any time they get the chance. When I hear this, I am unable to know if the person if of the first kind or the second kind. There seems to be 0 investigation internally to weed out the liars which thus casts shadow on the entire profession.
Trust is hard-earned, easily lost, and difficult to reestablish. This scandal touched the very essence of the French judicial system, yet had no major repercussion on the internal organization and processes of those "Juges d'Instruction". It's just business as usual. So until they come up with new systems to ensure better attempt at neutrality and they remove the people that have obviously been plaguing the system for years, it's normal and healthy that any mention of "neutrality" is immediately met with heavy skepticism.
> And getting bribes from foreign dictator is, of course, not allowed.
Couldn't he setup some crypto fund instead? Or investment in ballroom? Or simply just receive present, let say plane, instead of money? Would that help him in this case?
> Couldn't he setup some crypto fund instead? Or investment in ballroom? Or simply just receive present, let say plane, instead of money? Would that help him in this case?
An other French politician, Francois Fillon, tried that with bribes as gift including some luxury Suits. In addition of some public money redirection to his own family.
If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.
The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.
That has zero relation to any European legalism.