MatLab was taught and used extensively at my university, and has many strong sides and a fantastic standard library. We used it mainly for physics and robotics calculations. The licenses are (were?) prohibitively expensive outside of academia though. Hard to compete with free Python + NumPy and a larger talent pool.
Wife has a 16 pro, I’m on a 13 mini. Other than her phone being way too big I don’t notice any difference.
And why should I? Reading text on the web, calling, sms’ing, listening to music or using navigation does not require “next gen” hardware. Hell, it doesn’t even require current gen hardware. It would probably work just fine on 2000s era hardware.
I would love to hear more about your definition of corruption and why it is inevitable. From what I can tell it is that an organization with “morals”, meaning some sort of code restricting their possible actions, will be out competed by an organization without “morals”, whatever that might be. I think it is compelling at face value, but I’m not sure I see a world of wolves out there. Maybe I’m naive.
I want to argue that the rule of law is one moral system that applies to all organizations. Sure, some overstep and may gain some advantage due to that. But in principle and hopefully on average the result should be net negative. In democratic countries the laws are more or less directly the will of the people, about as egalitarian as we can get, no? Anyways, following the rule of laws should lead to “morally sound” corporations as defined by the people. Corporations can go further than what is legally required, too. That is often used in marketing.
Finally i think the same principles apply wherever humans (or other species) compete. Humans on the whole are not entirely cruel barbarians, we try to care for individuals who are not able to care for themselves etc. Whether “true” altruism exists is another discussion, but it certainly looks like it. So if that’s how people act, why should corporations be more corrupt than the bodies that make them up and govern them?
Have you looked at sports federations (especially in Europe, not in US). They're primarily funded by membership fees, some survived over century, and while they have some governance issues (like conflict of interest due to wearing two hats – regulatory function and event organiszing one), it would be a strong claim to say that they're corrupted by their roots/nature.
In fact one of my close friends is a co-owner of the Kraken
Sports teams and leagues are primarily owned by billionaires - like the amount of discussion around who is the owner is a significant portion of sports reporting
The only exception I know off the top of my head I believe is the Packers are community owned but even then I would be skeptical as to how the power dynamics play out in practice
I think it’s a weak form of a mutual cooperative - which unfortunately doesn’t have the ability to defeat a state-billionaire backed corporation in the market.
I guess I don't know what you prefer, I'm guessing anarchy in the academic sense?
But I want to add, that workplace democracy would be turning the billionaire owned companies into democracies themselves. That is the goal of economic democracy at least, changing the fiefdoms into democracies can't be a worse system.
I have always been in favor of changing the definition if incorporation to ensure that over time ownership transfers slowly but increasingly to the employees of the corporate entity. How that would work, though, would require detailed thought by experts more knowledgeable than i :)
At the most basic biological level the human species can’t organize action larger than a few hundred people in any kind of coherent way.
There are no coherent organizations that are larger than a few hundred people.
It is a biological impossibility for the human species to maintain long lasting (thousands of years) groups that can have social structures that last long enough to encode genetic fitness changes at the rate of environmental change.,
We do not have the ability to comfortably maintain coherent heirarchies, and subordinated structures, around a coherent epistemological grounding.
Humans are not eusocial.
I just fundamentally don’t see any future for the species level organization whatsoever
> Sports teams and leagues are primarily owned by billionaires
My question was about sports federations, and not about leagues and commercial clubs (and definitely not in US). Take FIS (International Ski and Snowboard Federation) for example, or smaller European national and regional federations.
You could point to any organization smaller than 1000 people is being reasonably coherent I don’t think that this is relevant for the context we were discussing the Amish also doing a pretty good job and maintaining stable community but they are irrelevant
What context are you discussing? Parent comment talks about "all organisations".
You know what, forget it. I thought you have some interesting/insightful framework and thoughts about power/structures in organisations and happy to share it.
Would be really cool to graph out causes of death over the centuries! Wikipedia cites continous publication from 1527 to 1858[1]. Collecting the data seems daunting, though.
One thing you will have trouble with however, is that disease categories and the process of determining cause of death changed a great deal from 1527 to 1858. So the categories you're working with aren't stable at all.
Why not take it further and not update dependencies at all until you need to because of some missing feature or systems compatibility you need? If it works it works.
The arguments for doing frequent releases partially apply to upgrading dependencies. Upgrading gets harder the longer you put it off. It’s better to do it on a regular schedule, so there are fewer changes at once and it preserves knowledge about how to do it.
There's another variable, though, which is how valuable "engineering time now" is vs. "engineering time later."
Certainly, having a regular/automated update schedule may take less clock time in total (due to preserved knowledge etc.), and incur less long-term risk, than deferring updates until a giant, risky multi-version multi-dependency bump months or years down the road.
But if you have limited engineering resources (especially for a bootstrapped or cost-conscious company), or if the risks of outages now are much greater than the risks of outages later (say, once you're 5 years in and have much broader knowledge on your engineering team), then the calculus may very well shift towards freezing now, upgrading later.
And in a world where supply chain attacks will get far more subtle than Shai-Hulud, especially with AI-generated payloads that can evolve as worms spread to avoid detection, and may not require build-time scripting but defer their behavior to when called by your code - macro-level slowness isn't necessarily a bad thing.
(It should go without saying that if you choose to freeze things, you should subscribe to security notification services that can tell you when a security update does release for a core server-side library, particularly for things like SQL injection vulnerabilities, and that your team needs the discipline to prioritize these alerts.)
At the same time, unplanned engineering time is almost always more expensive than planned engineering time. I'd rather have some regular, expected, upgrade work, than all of a sudden having to scramble because I need something at a moment when I didn't plan for that.
When you do regular updates, they are quick. But also, you can timebox it and then back out and plan a harder than expected update.
Also, it keeps you in touch with your deps so you can consider if it’s even worth it. My favorite update was removing the dep (or starting a plan to remove it because it was interfering with regular updates)
There is a Goldilocks effect. Dependency just came out a few minutes ago? There is no time for the community to catch the vulnerability, no real coverage from dependency scans, and it's a risk. Dependency came out a few months ago? It likely has a large number of known vulns
That is indeed what one should do IMO. We've known for a long time now in the ops world that keeping versions stable is a good way to reduce issues, and it seems to me that the same principle applies quite well to software dev. I've never found the "but then upgrading is more of a pain" argument to be persuasive, as it seems to be equally a pain to upgrade whether you do it once every six months or once every six years.
The 'pain' comes from breaking changes, at worst if you delay you're going to ingest the same quantity of changes, and at best you might skip some short-lived ideas.
> Why not take it further and not update dependencies at all until you need to because of some missing feature or systems compatibility you need? If it works it works.
Indeed there are people doing that and communities with a consensus such approach makes sense, or at least is not frowned upon. (Hi, Gophers)
This only makes sense for vulnerabilities that can actually be exploited in your particular use-case and configuration of the library. A lot of vulns might be just noise and not exploitable so no need to patch.
Problem is code bases are continuously evolving. A safe decision now, might not be a safe decision in the future. It's very easy to accidentally introduce a new code path that does make you vulnerable.
Because updates don't just include new features but also bug and security fixes. As always, it probably depends on the context how relevant this is to you. I agree that cooldown is a good idea though.
> Because updates don't just include new features but also bug and security fixes.
This practice needs to change, although it will be almost impossible to get a whole ecosystem to adopt. You shouldn’t have to take new features (and associated new problems) just to get bug fixes and security updates. They should be offered in parallel. We need to get comfortable again with parallel maintenance branches for each major feature branch, and comfortable with backporting fixes to older releases.
I maintain both commercial and open source libs. This is a non starter in both cases. It would easily double if not triple the workload.
For open source, well these are volunteer projects on my own time, you are always welcome to fork a given version and backport any fixes that land on main/master.
For commercial libs, our users are not willing to pay extra for this service, so we don't provide it. They would rather stay on an old version and update the entire code base at given intervals. Even when we do release patch versions, there is surprisingly little uptake.
Semver doesn't help. The primary issue is effort. If it's an open source project with 1-2 devs, they probably won't be able to handle supporting multiple branches unless they're being paid to do this.
Of course it doesn't provide backports by itself, it's a versioning system. But version number changes with SemVer are meant to indicate whether an update includes new fearhews or not (minor bump means new features, patch bump means bugfixes only).
Of course, the actual issue is that maintaining backports isn't free, so expecting it from random single-person projects is a little unrealistic. Bug fixes in new code often need to be rewritten to work on old code. I do maintain old release branches for some projects and backporting single patches can cause whole new bugs that were never present in the main branch quite easily.
IMO for “boring software” you usually want to be on the oldest supported main/minor version, keeping an eye on the newest point version. That will have all the security patches. But you don't need to take every bug fix blindly.
CI fights this. But that’s peanuts compared to feature branches and nothing compared to lack of a monolith.
We had so many distinct packages on my last project that I had to massively upgrade a tool a coworker started to track the dependency tree so people stopped being afraid of the release process.
I could not think of any way to make lock files not be the absolute worst thing about our entire dev and release process, so the handful of deployables had a lockfile each that was only utilized to do hotfix releases without changing the dep tree out from underneath us. Artifactory helps only a little here.
Just make sure to update when new CVEs are revealed.
Also, some software are always buggy and every version is a mixed bag of new features, bugs and regressions. It could be due to the complexity of the problem the software is trying to solve, or because it's just not written well.
A good and thought provoking read. This is obviously navel-gazing, but looking at this from an individual or family perspective, I'm wondering about how you could prosper in a depopulating, aging, and warming world.
Traditional investments like real estate and property may not be solid bets if there are suddenly a lot of it to go around due to there being less of us around. Then again, city growth seems stable.
Another point is what happens to stock markets when there are less consumers and producers. Stagnating GDP and indices do not make attractive investments. Where do I invest my hard earned cash then? Private elderly care, drug companies, robotics companies?
We should probably look to the countries mentioned in the article, like South Korea or Japan for answers. But I'm not sure I'm able to pick out winning strategies looking at those, or even be sure they would work where I'm based.
I'm curious what your thoughts are - how do you invest and prepare for the next fifty years?
I realize this is a selfish comment to make, but shoring up oneself is at least actionable for us as individuals, in addition to trying to make the world a better place for everyone else.
I just fundamentally do not understand the economics of why everybody is so worried about aging and depopulation. TECHNOLOGY. ROBOTS. We us technology to increase production. We create more with less. Automation and technology should create an environment where less people can care for more more efficiently than ever before. Food production should require less people than ever before. Shipping. And not even just mechanical robots. Sunlight and yeast -> food.
The problem becomes the banks financing private ownership of the robots. Maybe the populations livelihood shouldn't be a profit center. Or in the case of the modern economy, where consistent profit is failure, an wealth extraction growth center.
I think we are on the same page actually - I'm not dismissing the notion that we might engineer ourselves out of a declining work force. But then the question is, if human labor (me, you, us) is -gradually- becoming unwanted, then how do I make a living?
Maybe there is a Star-Trek utopia at the far end, but in the meantime we are looking at potentially several years where me and a chunk of other white-collar workers are unemployable. I'm not sure UBI will be enacted before a large chunk of the general population is unemployable. And how will we fund UBI? Taxing the automators? They can just move their business to a tax haven.
Maybe I can find a job in some sector that's hard to automate, but I imagine a lot of people will be looking for those jobs. And that would probably lead to a pay cut.
So, what then if we want to maintain or even improve our standard of living? Invest in tech stocks? Sure. But we will still need to pick out winners or spread our bets. Will the gains in the stock market be enough to cancel out job loss?
Tech does useful stuff like cure smallpox, provide ample food, central heating and so on. Salvation is more of a Jesus thing - I'm not sure tech is really promising to deliver our souls from sin but might be ok for food and shelter.
> I'm not sure tech is really promising to deliver our souls from sin but might be ok for food and shelter.
Tech cannot promise anything. That's silly! There are people, on the other hand, that go around and preach their gospel, where technology is placed in the center.
Stock market? As you write - what will happen when the next generation of consumers and workers won't be born? On the other hand it is clear that market is anything but rational, and maybe it doesn't really need people in the same way internet doesn't need real people. Maybe the future is bots trading with each other, pumping up the bubble.
Bonds? The same problem, lack of next generations.
Real estate? Land? Maybe if you already have something in very good location, though even then I am a bit skeptical.
Then one needs to remember that money is just a number. It doesn't matter how much digits you have, but what can you get with them - real resources and services. So maybe the question is wrong from the very beginning.
I sometimes believe that ironically the best insurance in childless world are your own children. Unless, of course, we will face a scenario where old people, constituting majority of the population, will squeeze those few remaining young hard to get their pensions and healthcare. Yes, the same people that today preach about how it is good to not have children etc. will be first to put a boot on them in the future. For this reason I expect growing tensions between those people with children and childless ones.
This is why I constantly find most such discussions on demography pointless, as participants rarely understand how everything in our society depends on the assumption that no longer holds - that there will be more people, and that young will be more numerous than old.
In the end probably best things to safeguard you in the upcoming crisis will be the same as always - local community, family (including children), friends and your own skills. People living in more agrarian societies, or just in the countryside, generally have better situation in that regard.
Agreed, children were the original pension scheme and might well become one again!
Jokes aside I agree with you on strengthening bonds with local community, and it's something that many people neglect, not even knowing their neighbors. Especially so for city dwellers. Strong social bonds are an end in its' own right!
On your agrarian note I wonder if we will see a return to the country side as younger people are priced out of cities and more jobs accept remote work. Then again, RTO and "affordable" rentals may nullify that. But as real estate prices grow I keep wondering how anyone has the money to buy real estate in the city any more. Corporations I guess.
Regarding money being just a number I don't disagree exactly, but it sure feels like my flavor of white collar work might be among the first to be automated. If not, and the stock market flat-lines and taxes shoot up because we need to support the super-centenarians then my investments and cash flow are shot. I don't count on UBI to save me before pretty much everyone is out of a job, and in the meanwhile I will need to exchange money for goods that I'm not certain will plummet in price to match my lack of funds. So that's part of the reason I'm thinking about how to hedge or even gain in a future that might look different from our past.
I feel like a lot of people are vaguely aware of the skewed demography in the northern hemisphere, but I don't feel like there is a lot of talk about how it will affect the way we work and invest.
IIRC the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as the "pinnacle of civilisation", but somewhat fallen from a time of heroes or a golden age in the past. This golden age is when many of their well known epics take place. Another point of interest here is that I have heard the estimated timing of the golden age to be right before the bronze age collapse, meaning that they were literally a kind of post apocalyptic society reminiscing about their past.
Or, if you were less charitable about the nature of Bronze Age social organization, you could say it's a society of former slaves hopelessly romanticizing their former masters.
On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)
Athens too - the vast majority of the population were slaves or 'metics' - non-Athenian foreigners. Some slaves worked as partners with their citizen master and it wasn't unusual for such a slave to be adopted into a family and thus become a citizen. Such slaves had greater rights than women, who could never become citizens.
That was chattel slavery which doesn't generate the same feelings of devotion compared to divine monarchy. We've all seen the great sadness of the North Korean people at the passing of their Dear Leaders.
This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.
This is the first time I really don't understand how people are getting good results. On https://aistudio.google.com with Nano Banana selected (gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview) I get - garbage - results. I'll upload a character reference photo and a scene and ask Gemini to place the character in the scene. What it then does is to simply cut and paste the character into the scene, even if they are completely different in style, colours, etc.
I get far better results using ChatGPT for example. Of course, the character seldom looks anything like the reference, but it looks better than what I could do in paint in two minutes.
When Nano Banana works well, it really works -- but 90% of the time the results will be weird or of poor quality, with what looks like cut-and-paste or paint-over, and it also refuses a lot of reasonable requests on "safety" grounds. (In my experience, almost anything with real people.)
I'm mostly annoyed, rather than impressed, with it.
Ok this answers my question to the nature of the page. As in: Are these examples that show results you get when using certain inputs and prompts. Or are these impressive lucky on offs.
I was a bit surprised to see quality. Last time I played around with image generation is a few months back and I’m more in the frustration camp. Not to say that I believe some people with more time and dedication at their hand can tickle better results.
From having used Nano Banana over the past few days, I think that they're extremely cherry-picked, and that each one is probably the result of multiple (probably a dozen+) attempts.
In my experience, Nano Banana would actively copy and paste if it thinks it's fine to do so. You need to explicitly prompt that the character should be seamlessly integrated into the scene or similar. In the other words, the model is superb when properly prompted especially compared to other models, but prompting itself can be annoying from time to time.
Play around with your prompt, try ask Gemini 2.5 pro to improve your prompt before sending it to Gemini 2.5 Flash, retry and learn what works and what doesn't.
I understand the results are non deterministic but I get absolute garbage too.
Uploaded pics of my (32 years old) wife and we wanted to ask it to give her a fringe/bangs to see how would she look like it either refused "because of safety" and when it complied results were horrible, it was a different person.
After many days and tries we got it to make one but there was no way to tweak the fringe, the model kept returning the same pic every time (with plenty of "content blocked" in between).
Seedream 4.0 is not always better than Gemini Flash 2.5 (nano-banana), but when it is better, there is a gulf in performance (and when it's not, it's very close.)
It's also cheaper than Gemini, and has way fewer spurious content warnings, so overall I'm done with Gemini
It's not just you and there's a ton of gaslighting and astroturfing happening with Nano Banana. Thanks to this article we can even attempt to reproduce their exact inputs and lo and behold the results are much worse. I tried a bunch of them and got far worse results than the author. I assume they are trying the same prompts again and again until they get something slightly useful.
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