They should set up a foundation/LLC if they don't have one already and require a support contract for fixing any bugs in niche codecs. Target the 95%-98% use cases for "free" work. If someone gives them a CVE on something ancient, just note it with an issue tracker and that the problem is currently unsponsored. Have default build flags to omit all the ancient/buggy stuff. If nobody is willing to pay to fix all the ancient crap, then nobody should be using it. But if someone is willing to pay, then it gets fixed.
I'm pretty well "on the spectrum" and people glazing me in real life produce suspicion and discomfort rather than any good feelings.
I don't have a problem just ignoring all the LLM glazing, although I'd really like the ability to turn it off.
The fact that they've all been trained to do it, because so many of the "normies" fall for it, is kind of an indictment in my eyes. Bit of a mirror held up to society.
You should probably be worried about how fake flattery works so well in society, and how this enables sociopaths and narcissists to flourish and control everything.
It seems we have a sort of Cantillon Effect in wages (spilling over from IT down into HVAC and food service), but not in goods.
And I'm not sure the AI/LLM focus sheds any light at all on the situation. Unfortunately, AI/LLMs aren't AGI and they're just a tool. They're just a better machine (assuming it all pans out) that radiologists all need to become experts in using. The way to analyze the situation isn't that the radiologists are the "bottleneck", the radiologists are the experts who are trained to use the tools.
The ridiculously wealthy view the system as a strictly zero-sum game, and they want to keep everything they have, and deny the rest of the population of everything. They understand this isn't sustainable, so they're fortifying bunkers and buying up islands.
The days of Henry Ford capitalists who think their workers should be paid enough to buy their products seems to be unfashionable (even though he was a Nazi supporting racist, he had his head screwed on better than they do).
The end game of full on narcissistic capitalism is coming. Hopefully the Henry Ford types wake the fuck up and do something about their peers losing the fucking plot entirely.
The dependency on telemetry instead of actually sitting down with a user and watching them use your software is part of the problem. No amount of screen captures, heatmaps or abandoned workflow metrics will show you the expression on a person's face.
You actually skipped over the most important part:
> You can and will happily do things your users/customers hate if ... you dont have to face their criticisms directly.
A lot of software developers can't take criticism well when it comes to their pet projects. The entire FreeCAD community, for instance, is based entirely around the idea that FreeCAD is fine and the people criticising it are wrong and have an axe to grind, when that is exactly backwards.
> It's interesting to me that Apple made such a large fit change without considering 2's are simply better for some people fit wise.
I immediately ran out and bought aftermarket foam tips for my 2's since the silicone ones never stayed in. Apple is likely trying to fix that kind of problem (and may have done so on average entirely successfully) but now you're seeing the people that it doesn't work for show up in these comments. This comment section is going to be biased towards complaining about the 3's so you can't really judge if what they did was effective or not on average, only that clearly it wasn't perfect.
> Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes.
Amazon has been doing that since it was founded, certainly 2001-2006. Every year there would be stack ranking, and they'd get rid of employees and even entire departments in reorgs and layoffs.
> Over the past decade, people in the community, not just Shopify employees, started to conclude that rubygems and bundler were being monetized by some key maintainers.
The logical conclusion of this argument is that if you maintain a critical piece of infrastructure with a "large moat" you are apparently expected to live in poverty, or turn it over to a $2.68B revenue per quarter company because trying to extract $60k/yr of living expenses from rubygems is a bridge too far.
And I just don't buy all the framing that donating your employee's time is fundamentally different from donating money.
No one should live poor, but any entity that takes donations (code, money, etc.) should be VERY above board with disclosures and conflicts of interest. The point isn't that they can't make money, the point is it shouldn't be a secret.
Yes I would actually be mad if a volunteer at an org sold member lists or gave preferential treatment to outside sponsors as a way to make ends meet for himself, for example. Like are you kidding? If you don’t like the terms and pay, change them or don’t sign up. Anything else - like monetizing off your own insider access - is underhanded and unethical.
Also, divide the cost of the product by the replacement interval.
I have some landfill android tablets that are too slow to run the moral equivalent of flash games. The iPad’s I have (all low end models) are older than the androids (in one case, 2x older) and still work much better.
Retail price / years supported is pretty comparable for Apple and Android. On top of that, you can get deals on “discontinued” newly manufactured apple devices, and used ones as well.
I have many complaints about Apple, but value for money isn’t one of them.
Meanwhile, in computer land, it's not even at all. I use both a PC and a Mac at home. In the time since I bought the MacBook, I've had to replace the PC three times.
I did pay for some out of warranty repairs on the Mac about 5 years ago. (Keyboard and battery replacement.) So that evens the total cost of ownership situation a little bit. Having a PC has only cost me about twice as much as having a Mac over the past 10 years.
You should qualify that with “in your chosen location.” And there is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing to live where housing happens to be expensive.
