304 karma · joined January 16, 2021
The only obstacle is - and it’s a big one - drugs and health insurance companies crying out to the gov about how tech companies are stealing their lunch and they should broke down.
PS: they were not involved in the development of this algorithm
A group of underpaid graduates was put together to crack the problem. All of them crammed for their algo & ds exam since that’s what the Italian university system incentivises so none of them did actually remember a thing about algorithm design. They googled a bunch of words and forked the first PoC they found on GitHub.
Everything was wrapped into a nice PowerPoint full of corporate BS and delivered to the government.
Edit: As expected, the algorithm was developed by a company owned by Dxc Technology [1] and Leonardo which is the Italian defence company. The contract was worth 5 million of euros.
[1]: https://www.wired.it/article/algoritmo-scuola-supplenze-mini...
I’m surprised hearing about big publishers such as Penguin using the on-demand service though. Maybe they use it to provide books which are out-of-print or which don’t sell a lot.
Given Amazon scale, I’d not be surprised if some of them are being sold by non copyright owners though.
They are not perfect - far from it - but to think of everyone who fought to establish them and keeps them running to this day… it’s inspiring.
Good for Stanford.
Does creating a vaccine justify the death of some lab animals? Probably.
Does creating supermen justify mutilating people physically and psychologically without their consent? Hell no.
You can’t just ignore the context.
There are experiments and experiments. Apart from the fact that they provided the fix right away, they didn’t do anyone harm.
And, by the way, it’s their job. Maintainers must approve patches after they ensured that the patch is fine. It’s okay to do mistakes, but don’t tell me “you’re wasting my time” after I showed you that maybe there’s something wrong with the process. If anything, you should thank me and review the process.
If your excuse is “you knew the patch was vulnerable”, then how are you going to defend the project from bad actors?
If they do so, the maintainers become more vigilant and the experiment fails. But, the key to the experiment is that maintainers are not vigilant as they should be. It’s not an attack to the maintainers though, but to the process.
If I were at the receiving end, I’d think checking a patch multiple times before accepting it.