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When it becomes too big to fail, it feels to me something other than the market is intervening to keep it alive.

The USSR collapsed because of imbalances caused by decades of centralized planning and control.

China survived communism because it implemented free-market reforms (while retaining centralized control in the political structure).

I'd say generally, the free market is what makes economies work.

Edit: minor rewording

True. Sometimes we pursue technology to its own ends forgetting that technology is supposed to help humans.

And some of these companies pride themselves as AI technology pioneers. Yet it seems their automated systems in this case are simply doing keyword matching.

Mind-boggling!

> At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway.

We're all making assumptions here, but let's assume they had legitimate business reasons for the layoffs. What you suggest is that they make less optimal decisions for the sake of optics.

In a free-market economy, the companies that make less optimal decisions will have their lunch eaten by those that don't.

If I understand the statement below right, 27 of the union members received offers

> “Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members. None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer.”

Especially if the 6 users are completely happy with it, then that is validation that it has a solid use-case. It means there are possibly many more who would use it, just that they've not heard about it yet.

If only they had continued on their trajectory of the early 2010s.

When Brendan Eich was still there they seemed to have a clear purpose and identity. A lot of interesting stuff was happening: the birth of what would become Rust, PDF.js which is now ubiquitous back when downloading PDFs was the norm, Firefox OS, which somehow found success after they abandoned it, asm.js, the predecessor of web assembly which killed the alternative that Google was championing called NaCl (very few remember it now).

Then they just seemed to lose their way I can't tell how

Yet many software developers have personally benefited a lot from FOSS and are aware of the principles behind it.

But when someone is willing to pay us a lot of money, many of us will willingly become deaf to the free software ideals and submit to the corporations in exchange for stable employment.

Of course, yet another way for the new generation of programmers to relearn the hard way the lessons of the older generation, like happens a lot in software.

When I started out, it was pretty clear to me that to solve problems, first read the error message clearly and try understand it, then search the relevant forum or google for someone in the past who experienced the same error. Finally, if unable to solve, post a message describing the problem clearly and what you have tried to do and still failed.

Well, good luck finding any thread from discord on Google. The chat interface also wants you to post one liner chats without taking the time to properly describe the scenario.

Chat platforms can exist but should not be the official support channels.

> Nowadays (god-)fathers of AI are Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun

Schmidhuber part of the story should also considered more, I think

Could you elaborate? I'm finding it hard to connect this to the topic.

Can you give a concrete example where such a result was achieved by only switching libraries and modifying architecture?

Curious if you're using Lisp for the chip design at Intel? If you're allowed to talk about that..

What are the odds that I'm getting into chicken farming and this leads me to a chicken farm article?

https://mcdim.xyz/essays/hens.html

I got the sinking feeling something might have happened to Bret Victor when I saw the title. Thankfully, its just an update about his project.

Maybe it can be slightly edited to reflect that.

> It is an indictment of American universities that despite having the funding, resources and technology to do this a lot earlier, it was eventually a 3rd world country that pulled it off.

I assume knowledge discovery and sharing doesn't depend on your country's world status. A lot of fundamental knowledge was discovered and passed down to us from ancient times by people who would consider life in the so-called third world countries to be a significant upgrade.

I'm just speculating, I do not 'know'. I look up to them as well. But reading about them, things that seems to stand out is that they are/were:

1) very prolific in the engineering sense. writing lots of code or producing lots of hardware designs (in the case of wozniak). When you do that a lot on hard problems you quickly learn from mistakes and get good.

2) very persistent, bordering to stubborn (at least in the case of torvalds and wozniak). keeping at it even to unreasonable levels.

So maybe it's just about having a strong drive and sustaining it, and also a bit of luck by having the correct tools, knowledge and community available to you

The title is a bit click-bait, since it makes it sound like this is an official position by Google, yet the article clarifies that this the opinion of a Google employee

> That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email

Really? Web browsers, web servers and mail servers are beasts. I don't see them being 'simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice'

The lab pages are archived from here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141216095808/http://lynxline.c...

Likewise, I thought it was something to do with blood pressure :)

> His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers.

But aren't managers there to coordinate software engineers. So if software engineers are out of a job, so will the managers. Assuming AI replaces software engineering, the ones left may be the product people and the founders, perhaps rolled into one person in several cases?

Which aligns somewhat with what Carmack is suggesting.

I starting to believe the biggest risk of AI is that it will become good enough to fool people into thinking it is sentient, and they'll start trusting it. With its inherent biases from the training data