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In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community.

FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust (architectures unsupported by Rust lose support).

So clearly there's only one correct answer here? Which is what the ffmpeg folks are driving at

I for now prefer to stick to whatever the default is from the python packaging crew and standard library i.e. `python -m venv` and `pip install` inside of it.

Python for me is great when things can remain as simple to wrap your head around as possible.

Still waiting to see how the VC-funded company behind Uv will make money.

Before that, I wouldn't want to be too dependent on it.

I agree. Google killed off a perfectly good product (Google+) just because it could not compete with Facebook.

I and a few others still remember the site fondly, and it had the best UX of any social media service I've used since.

So, what great new products or startups have these amazing coding agents helped create so far (and not on the AI supply side).

Anywhere to check?

I'm with Luke Smith [1] when it comes to non-copyleft licenses like MIT.

Andrew Tanenbaum of the MINIX fame was similarly surprised to find that Intel had quietly included the OS he wrote in Intel chips, making it perhaps the most widely used OS in the world. He seemed disappointed no one ever reached out to him to tell him about it [2]

[1]: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...

[2]: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

> “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune. “If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn’t find the tool useful… This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we’re just not seeing that—we’re seeing the opposite.”

That is quite rich coming from Braintrust. The founder should spend less time doing press interviews and more time listening to feedback from his own community. I was from the outside intrigued by the unique way of working and signed up to learn more about it.

The thing that immediately jumped out is community members complaining about failing the initial screening without any feedback at all. This initial screening is apparently an AI interview. If the AI is so great, it should be trivial to get it to explain why it rejected interviewees. Unless it has serious shortcomings that would be risky to publicize.

Alternatively, this could be a sneaky way of collecting training data for the AI by preying on unsuspecting humans.

> The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.

For a long time this was the reason I didn't move to Brave, but eventually I realized I don't need it so much because Brave already sandboxes cookies for each site so some social media or ad network won't be able to track me across different sites.

The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for my usecase I can do with Brave profiles.

Now Brave is my major browser and once in a while I'll bring up Librefox. Firefox lost me when they went all in with their strategy to feed user data into AI presumably for ad purposes.

> Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong.

Since we're now building specialized hardware for AI, emergence of languages like Mojo that take advantage of hardware architecture and what I interpret as a renewed interest in FPGAs perhaps specialized hardware is making a comeback.

If I understand computing history correctly, chip manufacturers like Intel optimized their chips for C language compilers to take advantage of economies of scale created by C/Unix popularity. This came with the cost of killing off lisp/smalltalk specialized hardware that gave these high level languages decent performance.

Alan Kay famously said that people who are serious about their software should make their own hardware.

Your comment is quite subjective, and Python's popularity both in teaching and in industry would suggest otherwise.

Isn't that every new employee? The first few months you are not expected to be firing on all cylinders as you catch up and adjust to company norms

An intern is much more valuable than AI in the sense that everyone makes micro decisions that contribute to the business. An Intern can remember what they heard in a meeting a month ago or some important water-cooler conversation and incorporate that in their work. AI cannot do that

It's about to change to doing more with less headcount and higher AI spend

What is the difference between treating CS as an engineering discipline vs a branch of applied math?

Comments by people with more points to their name are (or at least used to be) promoted higher, which naturally leads to more upvotes.

So there's still an element of who says it that matters

At least in the case of Snap, I felt that Canonical itself played a role in making it dominant in Ubuntu so that they could control the ecosystem.

Personally I use AppImage whenever it's an option. It's the closest we get to Windows and MacOS executable applications

Clean code has lots of useful tips and techniques.

When people are criticizing it they pick a concept from one or two pages out the hundreds and use it to dismiss the whole book. This is a worse mistake than introducing concepts that may be foot guns in some situations.

Becoming an experienced engineer is learning how, when and where to apply tools from your toolkit.

I agree, that is a pretty good feature. You start feeling good when the data saved is in the gigabytes and time saved viewing ads is in the hours

> In other words, I say "SICP considered harmful" because thrusting it upon an eager newcomer as a trusted neutral guide to beginner coding (without offering any counterpoint) could set them back by a decade, filling their head with "functional object oriented programming" concepts that don't translate well to industry or CS.

I'd counter that by saying it would set them forward by a decade (compared to people who don't know these techniques). Knowing advanced techniques doesn't mean trying to shoehorn them into every run of the mill problem you encounter in the industry. But if you encounter a gnarly problem where some advanced techniques will help you out, you'll sure be glad you learnt them.

> What computer science doesn’t teach you is how memory caching works in CPUs. Your fancy graph algorithm may have good runtime complexity but it completely hoses the CPU cache and you may have been able to go faster with an array with good cache usage.

Computer architecture and organization should teach this, no?

Isn't scheme with close to zero syntax so easy to learn?

Why did someone think it was a good idea to switch to JavaScript?

I think the person who'll get value out of SICP will not have any problem picking up scheme syntax on the fly.

Maybe this was a stress test for the NFL games?

I'd expect the NFL games to have a largely American audience, but today's boxing event attracted a global audience.

An engineering manager who thinks his engineers are morons and dumb?

I have questions..

True. Also, the LLM will give you the most widely deployed versions encountered in the wild (during training).

That means one might find themselves using deprecated but still supported features.

If LLMs came out during the Python 2/3 schism for example, they'd be generating an ever increasing pile of Python 2 code.

This is a very funny comment given the context.

https://github.com/Raku/problem-solving/pull/89#pullrequestr...

A quote from the Christian Bible Luke 5:36,37

> To your comment about politics: I would say that from a high enough viewpoint "happy customers" should converge with "happy leadership" even if it doesn't happen every single time you ship something..

To look at a concrete example, with the quality issues Boeing has been having in the recent years, we can claim "happy leaders" diverged from "happy customers".

Yet Boeing will still be around for a long time, and failures can be catastrophic. Whistle blowers who came out since can be said to have advocated for "happy customers" against "happy leaders" but were suppressed.

That is before a smaller and nimbler movement, company or entity surpasses the now large, slow-moving and fossilized incumbent, which then starts the gradual process into irrelevance.

There was a time, upto 10-15 years ago when tech company culture was largely anti-corporate.

Now corporate-y things like playing office politics is order of the day in medium to large tech companies.

My (maybe uninformed) hypothesis is that tech made so much money that it brought in the MBA and HR types who brought their corporate culture with them.

Even the smaller tech companies are now mimicking big tech culture as the standard.

It's much easier when 'upper management' is 3 individuals you can have a normal conversation with, than a hierarchical hivemind above you that does inexplicable things for random reasons.

> I don’t see how you can achieve any meaningful goal without collaborating with people in power.

Depends on how you define meaningful. Raising happy & healthy kids, helping someone in need etc, can be meaningful to many people, but don't require 'collaborating with people in power'.