Juliate

That's up to you (and the customers) to understand that the location where the compute/data is happening is as important a criteria to consider. As it is today.

And most (not all) of these workloads are custom software that try to fully reproduce/plumb functionalities that already mostly exist in Unix tools, with worse performance, instead of using/plugging into them.

> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.

But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific offering to start an online business.

Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology development while staying outside of them.

It's a matter of strategy and of choice.

I call that a lack of situational awareness…

This has happened about every year in the past 10 years during Summer in France at least (I guess Spain/Portugal/Italy, all mediterranean countries are alike in this regard, even most continental European countries).

There is at least one obvious company in the list where the founder does not advertise the slightest discernment in his public discourse (about the tech, about the business and about the impact on society).

We do not have to be charitable with people that have such financial and industrial (hence political) power over our lives, and that do not display obvious and verifiable signs of charity upon the human kind either.

Downvote as much as you want, this is a simple observation of a truth of life: introducing/forcing antisocial behaviour on people (filming without their consent, "cosplaying" intellect (with AI)) begets antisocial behaviour.

> Do people think the world will just give them things?

No. But just that more and more people are more and more fed up of collectively paying/enduring the consequences of the ambition of a few people that do. not. care. about. their. fellow. humans. neither. the. planet.

> When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.

Indeed. And if you act "regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way", without discernement, that tells something about you that you may, or may not realise.

It's amazing as, however good they could be at technology, they are so bad at just reading the room.

AI/smart glasses companies don't realise it yet it seems but I feel the backlash against smart glasses is likely to be very brutal before it becomes legal/regulatory.

As in: stolen, broken glasses on the spot. Perhaps even glasses with coloured "fuck AI & cameras" stickers on it will be a trend.

The thing is that in Europe, you don't need your employer to have health insurance. It's more beneficial for everyone in the end (well, obviously not for the private health insurance companies who care more about their margins than public wellness).

Even basic local names in Western contexts (with characters other than just [a-zA-Z0-9_\ ]) cannot be properly and consistently input or searched in most of corporate or retail software, at the basic text level, because they rely on broken assumptions that even modern ERPs still follow. I routinely sift through 3 or 4 different spellings of my name every time someone asks for my name in their systems.

I cannot imagine the nightmare it must be for non-western languages.

I don't know exactly what the real, hard incentive is to make it happen at last, as this needs a strong perspective over software as a tool to serve people, as well as some kind of artistic literacy: we need more people to care about the tools they build, and more people to pay the makers because of that. Steve Jobs, with all his downsides, had this kind of focus and impact. But this needs to be systemic, not exceptional.

I expected Anthropic to be clever enough to position themselves differently from OpenAI. This sounds like a failing marketing message; their critical long-term customers are people, not CEOs.

Yes, but you both don’t raise investor money with efficient understanding of the chaining of CLI tools that already do the job, neither convince your clients that they can get value for their money.

How do these people manage to get people to pay them?...

Just a few years ago, no one would have contemplated putting in production or connecting their systems, whatever the level of criticality, to systems that have so little deterministic behaviour.

In most companies I've worked for, even barebones startups, connecting your IDE to such a remote service, or even uploading requirements, would have been ground for suspension or at least thorough discussion.

The enshitification of all this industry and its mode of operation is truly baffling. Shall the bubble burst at last!

"Tensions surround the effort." You don't say. We don't even know what the world will look like in 3 months.

The ongoing state of the world is not supportive of this concept.

Of course not. But that's only the raw tech.

The tech will still be there. As much as blockchains, crypto, NFTs and such, whose bubbles have not yet burst (well, the NFT one did, it was fast).

But (Gen)AI today is much less about the tech, and much more about the illegal actions (harvesting copyrighted works) that permit it to run and the disastrous impact it has on ... everything (resources, jobs, mistaken prospectives, distorted IT markets, culture, politics) because it is not (yet) regulated to the extent it should.

Context matters, but this what I would do (and I always apply when landing in a project, own or client, that has no documented or enforced code style):

1/ always have pre-commit hooks running lint/fmt, and document how to implement them in a common fashion in the team,

2/ strive to follow the language conventions (and if not, have those divergences explicitly defined in the linter/formatter tool configuration), this helps the team to align with it,

3/ having a job server-side that blocks merging PRs that do not pass both of these steps.

> What is the social solution, then? Innovation can't be taken back after all.

It definitely can.

The innovation that was the open, social web of 20 years ago? still an option, but drowned between closed ad-fueled toxic gardens and drained by AI illegal copy bots.

The innovation that was democracy? Purposely under attack in every single place it still exists today.

Insulin at almost no cost (because it costs next to nothing to produce)? Out of the question for people that live under the regime of pharmaceutical corporations that are not reigned by government, by collective rules.

So, a technology that has a dubious ROI over the energy and water and land consumed, incites illegal activities and suicides, and that is in the process of killing the consumer public IT market for the next 5 years if not more, because one unprofitable company without solid verifiable prospects managed to pass dubious orders with unproven money that lock memory components for unproven data centers... yes, it definitely can be taken back.

Diff tools have managed pretty much well this formatting issue (ignore whitespace) so it's not really a topic anymore.

I am truly, both as a being and having a manager, at loss as to how a manager would ask that, and would get such an answer… what is the rationale and the expectation?

The ethical issue is consent and normalisation: asking individuals to donate to a system they believe is undermining their livelihood and the commons they depend on, while the amplified value is captured somewhere else.

"It barely changes the model" is an engineering claim. It does not imply "therefore it may be taken without consent or compensation" (an ethical claim) nor "there it has no meaningful impact on the contributor or their community" (moral claim).

The ethical framework is simply this one: what is the worth of doing +1 to everyone, if the very thing you wish didn't exist (because you believe it is destroying the world) benefits x10 more from it?

If bringing fire to a species lights and warms them, but also gives the means and incentives to some members of this species to burn everything for good, you have every ethical freedom to ponder whether you contribute to this fire or not.

GenAI would be decades away (if not more) with only proprietary software (which would never have reached both the quality, coordination and volume open source enabled in such a relatively short time frame).

Ha! I was expecting/wondering something about the semantics of )( parenthesis (which I have no idea what it could be, but... why not?)

The problem is the way this is written and formulated, these red flags "this thing has been thought and written extensively with an LLM" make the whole (rather compelling at first consideration but hollow-feeling when thinking more about it) thesis not very enticing.

Saying #1 and #2 are not possible or not likely is not a good take, in a world where our digital accounts take more and more a central place in our daily lives. It may work for autocratic societies, it won't cut it for democratic ones: imagine if our legal systems were that irresponsible to us collectively and individually?

Why not introduce friction on both sides, like: 1/ just face to face, physical meeting? 2/ or a basic (paid, yet reasonable) insurance that account management doesn't happen over the shoulder?

If it were this inevitable, would AI be pushed down our throats, against our will, against our own laws, even, so hard?

A good culture, as time goes, is not reactionary and conservative, if only because it opens itself to the contribution of the younger generations.

It wouldn't fit most of the current LLM cloud providers narrative about privacy and copyright either, so, not sure they would be as cooperative with a prosecutor as they are today with lawmakers and right holders.