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As you said, "Science is an ideal." I think you and I have fundamentally different views of science. You are an idealist, whereas I am a practical person who has seen how the sausage of science is actually made.

"Jesus a radical feminist?" - MAGA Inc.

Voting is a chore. You have to set aside a block of time, drive to a polling station, stand in line, and vote. Gas is expensive. Time is expensive. Groups of people who are agitated gathering in the same place is risky. The return on that investment of time, at a personal level, is practically nonexistent. From an individual cost-benefit perspective, voting does not make much rational sense.

So you have to appeal to something beyond rationality. Emotion. You need someone to be so swayed by what you say that they forget to think critically and simply go out and vote.

Committees have approved these ads. They understand that the system is not driven purely by rationality. And they have engineered these messages to influence people into making irrational choices voluntarily.

Nobody will speak favourably about the factorization of anything.

The "publish or perish" culture is going through what is essentially the same transformation brought by the invention of the assembly line. Academia, "as an industry", is experiencing what the automobile industry went through a century ago.

Grant approvals are public. Just go through them, and you will see a pattern emerge.

The argument I keep hearing is, "AI is good in the hands of a good researcher."

5–7 papers based on the same dataset? 5–7 papers on the same core topic, published within a six-month period?

They tell me that this is their core specialization and that I simply don't understand how science works.

Science is a self-governed, self-serving, and artificially defined concept.

> we've allowed a company

When did "we" have a say in this? I don't get these types of comments from the "open-source as a community."

Nvidia has been doing this for decades, and there are two possible arguments:

1. They are successful despite it.

2. They are successful because of it.

There is no mythical collective "we" representing the open-source community in Nvidia's supply chain of success. It's Nvidia and its consumers.

Ahhh, epistemology... Does any academic researcher even care about these things anymore?

If you're in academia, you've probably noticed a major shift recently. Research production at an industrial scale through AI.

Grants have "always" been awarded to professors based on quantity multiplied by quality. Now, some professors are churning out 1–3 papers a month with the same group of co-authors. All the grant money goes to them. Grant givers are just only counting the numbers of papers being published.

The Industrial Revolution has hit academia, and some academics are busy arguing for the artisanal value of research while some are creating factories for research.

The SEC is less of a protective agency and more of a revenue-generating agency (in practice and to some degree in principle). If Anthropic does not go public, you have nothing to stop them from receiving private funding from sovereign wealth funds. You have to understand that the Vision Fund failure did not mean that overnight sovereign wealth funds stopped making money; they are desperate to invest in private companies, and if you look at some of the, ahh... "stories"... you do not see massive non-Western investment in AI companies yet. But they are sitting on a mountain of cash.

Moreover, every branch and division across the US government recognizes one thing... the public market is plateauing. It is not a numbers thing; it is a sentiment thing. The post-pandemic tech boom needs to continue, at least be stabilized. AI's expectation to hit the public market is largely keeping a lot of the momentum going.

If Anthropic does not enter the public market, it is going to be a major distressing event for SEC who make money from regulatory fees and a shit ton of fees from publicly listed companies. There is zero incentive to stop them. The SEC tries its best for the benefit of publicly listed companies, exchanges, brokers, institutional investors etc. who all benefit from the IPO.

I trust that this is not the case. Check out both the authors. Micah's company was acquired by Cloudflare, and both of these guys actually bring good expertise around this area.

The question is less about "vibe coding" the product, and more about how their acquired teams function. For most products they have released so far, they are backed by a company they acqui-hired. They will usually rebrand the product and absorb the team.

You would not be surprised if this release was from a product for a startup company rather than a large enterprise company.

Cloudflare hired a bunch of folks for sure, but they also fired a lot of folks. What they are doing these days is building products by buying out entire companies, giving them nearly independent authority to build a product like they would build a company.

Do names really matter? Half of all Canadian universities has a building or a faculty named after "Schulich". Most people do not know who that person is.

I have worked in GTM/PM consultancy for some time now. This is the patterns I often observe:

  - Have a vague understanding of the problem
  - Architect an overcomplicated solution thinking of all possible contingencies
  - Pitching the overcomplicated solution to someone else
  - Ask them to come up with a simple solution. Ask questions to "birth" to the solution.
  - Not providing any feedback as that would mean need you to be accountable for the work
  - Trying to convince them they should work out the solution because they are the expert and much smarter then you
  - Taking credit for solving the problem

I feel like if he said, I feel like firing someone immediately for this issue would have sprouted a surprising level ownership to find the people or team (or teams) to be blamed.

At the top level most people are not designed to get shit done. They are accountable for only reporting. So, even if you want to get things done finding the team or person from that point high is impossible as they are not designed for that.

But as I write this I realized that even that wouldn’t work...as they will create a committee and hire an consulting agency whose exec was in the same sorority as them. And the consulting agency will recommend teams to be laid off. And then the same exec will come in pitching the board to buy a startup which has a great team and apparently was invested by a VC who went to same class of Wharton of that exec.

I made a prediction that motherduck will be acquired by GCP. But I could not imagine duckdb labs will be acquired by AWS. I do not think of AWS as a serious contender in the data space. So, we have now Pola.rs and motherduck in the market. Who will acquire them? I believe Microsoft has brought in a fair few industry talent to build their Azure Fabric product. Then you also have AI companies that are buying devtool/utility companies left and right.

Theranos lady.

It is practical. When mobile wallets was taking off a lot of people starting pitching "blockchain technogloy" in fintech and said decentralization needs to be the foundation for everything. The whole process largely become about technogical philosophical discussion about decentralization, p2p, intermediate crypto transactions, stablecoins etc. A lot of consulting firms made a shit ton of money while at the end of the government agencies and banks was scratching their head trying to find out how they "invested" millions without an iota of progress in terms of product development. The conclusion largely was fintech innovation should not be led with governments.

If you look at very large scale IT infrastructure engineering, a lot of times those technologies are developed and sold to governments by US or west EU government controled or influenced companies that does impose to some degree to the sovereignty aspect of a government.

So, with decentralization discussion most government lost a ton of money to consultants. They could wait for to buy off the shelf software that comes control risk. Or they could accept the risk and limitations and build a software that works now.

I think india made the right choice to build a system on framework that is proven and predicatable.

Is the guy from CoreJS still looking for a job?

The issue is that I did not discover the problem until it was already too late. Then I asked myself is DNS level filtering even useful for me? A traditional browser based adblocker already does the job. Pihole does not block ads YouTube.

The quality of life improvement of having pihole was minimum. I would rather just use cloudflare or google's DNS. What value prop pihole provides I have no idea. I think that is what I feel about many if not all privacy focused tooling this way.

Privacy tooling often is devoid of common human nature which is get shit done without making a religion out of it. Good tools are not configurable or dynamic, they just serve a purpose. A hammer or a toaster over...these are good tools. The issue with privacy tools is more about the movement and mission aspect of it.

I underestimated how prolific the idea of tracker - first engineering. Tracking (by the defintion of privacy advocate) is inherent in many if not most system. The privacy preaching that I have been subject to made me believe that privacy is a one button tool.

Whether open source or privacy, I feel like has very little net utility when you offset it by convenience or consequences. You can pay for YouTube premium or you can update the sideloaded app every other week.

I did some interviewing rounds with PaaS platforms for advisory roles. I loved Heroku and was ruined by Heroku so I thought maybe the industry has something new to offer.

The model is largely "built to be locked in" model. It is not something innovative. The issue is that to what scale of operation the platform considers there customer to be locked in where they can hand them a bill that compensates for the ease of entry model for all the hobby/free tier.

With Vercel I feel like these level is becoming lower and lower. You can within minutes launch a full startup with Vercel and AI assisted coding. And Vercel assumes that as long as you do not recieve any traffic that is good. The moment you recieve even a mild amount of traffic you are considered locked in.

To some people that is a fair trade because they have so little trust in their products in the first place investing hours instead minutes is a fair trade. If the traffic comes they are already in the green. If the traffic does not come any effort they have put in puts them in red. So, you put as little effort as possible to get thing out there.

I like Vercel. They have figured a monetization model for Slop SaaS. The other PaaS needs to catch up. In 2026, PaaS exists as a model to make revenue out of slop.

If you can afford it hire a virtual assistant and have them filter things for you and curate stuff. If you are suffering through things to find glimpses of enjoyment it is best you outsource your suffering to someone dedicated. Seriously, I had a $5 dollar an hour assistant who did all sorts random stuff for me. This even included curating things to read, talking to professional acquaintances on behalf of me using a script. It will cost you around 200-300 dollar a month but with the right person you can skip the BS.

In my advisory job founders always raise the question about open sourcing within the first hour of meeting me. They think that open sourcing product means transparency and developer trust which helps with early adoption. Every single founder I talked to brings up open source as a market penetration method to drive the initial adoption.

I always say to just stop with the virtue signaling led sales technique.

I despise the "we are like the market leader of our niche but open source" angle. Developer as a buyer and as a community these days in my opinion do not care about open source anymore. There is no long term value to that. The moment a product gets traction the open source elements is a constant mild headache as open source product means that they have no intellectual copyright on the core aspect of the product and it is hard to raise money or sell the company. And whenever a product gets traction they will take any excuse to make it close source again. With an open source product they are just coasting on brand. Regardless of what your personal opinion is, this has been largely true for most for-profit business.

Open source is largely is nothing more then a branding concept for a company who is backed by investors.

I do not think that is the issue. The recent acquisitions from all these big tech companies did not have any "meaningful" user base to begin with.

I think your name alone carries significant weight in the industry and you have built a very large community.

If you even vibe code something with, you will get a stupid amount of money thrown at you and a contract that bounds your existing projects and the next 3-5 years to a particular company as project lead.

Here is a list of acquisitions Cloudflare made recently: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/

Most of these companies did not have a half dozen paying customer or even a fully fleshed-out product before they were acquired.

Well, Cloudflare does not launch anything. They acquire to build products. Look into all their recent product launches. They acquired a relatively small company and converted the founding team to a product team.

So, if you want them to build stuff, ask yourself, are there any "Docker Registry" startups out there. If jsdelivr/globalping is not keeping you busy enough... there is an idea

I am not sure that is possible because I act as a buffer between him and my parents.

My other siblings drew a line, and they are miserable themselves because they can't help.

He is the kind of guy who will take a mortgage on my parents' house to do some sort of forex play because he has figured out the true intention of US oil policies and how that impacts South East Asian oil-supplying countries—and wants to bet everything on Brunei and Malaysian currency.

So, I am trying my best to divert his attention.

No, I am not. That is the thing—it has been 7 years, and we are stuck in the same loop. If I were to give your friend advice, it is to send a lot of warm emails. Joining a freelance marketplace is going to be brutal. Connect with folks in different communities, talk with them a bit, and then ask if they have any jobs. The success rate I would say is about 1 out of 50 to 70 outreaches.

He has a physical disability, and he had major trauma that he is dealing with, but that was more than a decade ago. He went to therapy a few times but a couple of therapist essentially gave up on him. He said they were zoned out when he keeps talking.

I have been at my "limit" for several years already. I have a day job, and at night I am making freaking "Happy Easter" posters in Canva for a print shop with 200 followers on Instagram. Everyday I am begging the guy to take over the contract while he continuously keeps saying "you do it" or that his brain does not work. He is literally doing the whole 9 yards. Even has a podcast and live streams. I am not kidding at all. I told myself maybe talking to the camera is a way for him to connect with his friends and a coping mechanism.

We all carry our burdens. It sounds extremely disrespectful and dishonorable, but without the help of autistic parenting groups, I wouldn’t have lasted this long. He is my platonic autistic surrogate son.

My hobby involves trying to help my brother get a job. He has a disability and can only work remotely at low-skill jobs. So, I have spent years applying, starting, and doing work in virtual assistant, support desk, and social media management roles for him. I apply to contract and freelance projects on his behalf, get started with the work, and later try to hand it off to him. He will either say one of two things: "You do it yourself" or that his brain cannot process the work. I make 10-15 times more money at my regular job, so hearing him say "You do it yourself" is not fun.

This hobby also includes trying to convince him that the business schemes he comes up with are not great—they're exclusively fraud-related, such as various forms of gambling and crypto stuff.

Mum keeps telling me that if I do not look after him, he will likely end up in a worst situation. He is in his early 40s by the way.

I did a second job as a hobby so I could just pay him the money, but that did not work because he keeps investing it in one of his schemes. So, I have to find him a job and convince him to keep it. I have a set of fake accounts that I use to apply to jobs and beg him take them on while he continuously says "you do it".

This has been going on for 7 years now.

I do not understand what bubble even means, and I do not think the developer influencers do either.

Was NFT or Crypto a bubble? The idea of a bubble means that it "pops" in a dramatic fashion. NFT prices in aggregate faded slowly, and the impact it has only applies to a handful of individuals. Moreover, the behavior we have seen with crypto and nft can largely be speculated that the purpose was largely illicit financial engineering.

If a handful of bad PRs "are destroying open source," Open Source as a concept is surprisingly in a vulnerable project. No project worth its salt ever integrates unverifiable PRs. No valid OSS ever integrates uninvited PRs in the first place. Every PR is driven by an issue or a very robust that is specific description. Any project that receives an "unsolicited" PR does not make the project maintainer yell "Oh, I am ruined."

I have stopped checking out these programming content videos for the last year or so. But I stupidly did it here. Every single channel has become like Coffeezilla with an agenda, being AI as a catalyst of great harm.

It would be impossible to buy a company as a steward. We worked with them. In the early 2020s, their teams were as lazy as IBM boomers. Happy to hop on a call, but let's do an rain check or whatever and come back to you after 17 weeks to say no in an email CCed with 42 people playing hot potato between commercial people who try their best to sound technical. You need a mind map to know which person you were talking to and who introduced you to them.

My money is on holding companies like IAC buying the brand first through financial engineering and restructuring finances initially. They would load it up with debt like they did with the sporting goods store in Sopranos.

Afterward, they would sell it to a Euro-based caretaking company like Bending Spoons, with a focus on maintenance engineering rather than innovation engineering.

The strategy is simple.

- Buy a product that has name recognition overshadowed by a monopolistic company and the leadership is trying to make a pivot and failing terribly.

- Leadership is aggressively rebranding to appease a takeover. They keep doing the most basic forbes council op-ed title moves to make the product appealing.

- It is not a parts-shop, the team is used to sense of "eh what you are going to do about it". It is a signboard and patents that you can use to hostage bigger companies.

- The takeover company has figured out maintenance engineering. You buy the product, you cull the team because they are not a growth engine. You focus on maintenance, and you milk the brand. Any eastern European or LATAM team can approve an automated version bump PR and send out "let's jump on a call" email.

Heck, even Tai fricking Lopez bought Radio Shack under similar pretense.

I do advisory for pre-Series A startups as a last ditch effort to save them.

I do not get the unified industry delusion about "why X company has a bad product". It is usually either one of two things: comfort or ego. Everyone knows that but do not want to say it out loud.

I have seen these happen time and time again. Companies that are cash cow, do not care to do a better job. There is no incentive to do a better job. Moreover, the recurring thing is that if I did something different, I wouldn't have been this much successful in the first place.

The rest of the smart consultants walk on eggshells. They hint at stuff but never want to bite the hand that feeds them because the clients would rather fire you than be challenged.

It is not an IBM thing; it's generic business thing to some degree. I really have to call this a delusion. Good consultants submit generic reports that just tell them what they want to hear. It is not you; it is the economy. Stupid consultants that are well-meaning tell them they should be the best on competitor intel. Do you not think some stupid person did not approach IBM to do what Oracle or AWS is doing? Of course, they did, and they were fired immediately.

The best consultants are less of a consultant and more of a therapist.

After doing only four-month projects for the entire year, this year's realization was that nobody in the industry wants to do better. Everyone is in their place because of ego or a perceived sense of success. Or because of a grand conspiracy theory. IBM has a significant number of government contracts, so they are set for life because the vast majority government IT systems are pigeonholed into IBM systems. The acquisition is to tell the shareholders that we are so successful that we can literally buy companies. We do not even care to do things. Whatever the new thing is, we will buy it at some point.

Here is the secret rule to AI for the guys who really want to use AI to replace "outsourcable" positions, "AI is a helper" not an absolute solution to means.

I have an extensive experience with dealing with Chatbots and hang out in places where people tell everyone AI will not take job while knowing fully well it might alteast take away the job of starbucks drinker sitting next to your cubicle.

Here is the truth, a single AI implementation won't replace a 15 person support team out in Philippines/India, AI won't replace a 8 person team in Michigan, but.... You pick 3 people and tell them to use AI to automate their jobs.... Now that is how you get AI to do stuff.

AI is a helper. Period. Do not let anyone else tell you otherwise. I have dealt with enough support teams to know an AI can surely do a better job than $3 dollar an hour fixed contract 8 hour shift offshore support hand telling me let me escalate your question to our north american team who will be back on monday as my reponse to "Hi" and no that is not a chatbot response.

You get three decently smart guys, and you hint at them use AI to automate your job. You pay these guys the salary of 5 US support desk salary which is equal to 10 offshore support desk salary. Then you can implement AI. You need a human to AI to work. You need a guy to snooze at the steering wheel so when a guy wearing all black jumps in front of your car in the dark road who can atleast come out and call 911. Does not even need to be a smart person. Just someone capable of calling 91. Hear that Uber? What your mckinsey consultant friend from the same frat or you ex-sister in law did not tell you that to you?

AI is not going to do well in full autopilot but that does not mean it is bad. You need someone with reasonable cognition ans allow them to be in full sync. That is the future and complaining about AI won't help you keep a job or cut costs for your business.

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Now to follow up. When you have established a reasonable framework of AI driven "task execution", you keep doing incremental layoffs. As usual you want your employees to near-burnout. See where that puts you in the next few years