This is something I realized when I became a manager of programmers rather than doing the work myself. When I write code I do it from a position of having a deep understanding of what all the moving pieces are, when someone working for me writes code I just have to trust they had that level of understanding[1].

But being a manger, the thrill of solving the puzzle was replaced by the thrill of helping some new engineer get better at the craft of writing code. They took pride in their growing skill set and I took pride in helping them grow.

Managing consultants however was very transactional. Did they deliver what was asked of them? Did they fix the flaws I pointed out? Do I still want to pay them?[2] And I could of course fire them easily and try new ones that had a reputation for being "better" at the tasks I needed done.

If history is any judge, there have been many companies over the years where some founder/leader has a "great idea" and just needed someone technical to make it real. And the typical arc for those companies was they get founded, they spend a ton of money on consultants to build their technology, something changes (fashion, systems, something) and their product is no longer a good fit for the market so they try to hire consultants to fix it, which now costs more than 2x because first the consultants had to understand what the previous consultants did, then they have to change it in a way that leadership wants. The result is a product that got more and more brittle until there wasn't enough money to or enough consultants to anneal the product back into something people would pay enough for to support the salaries of the visionary leaders who never had any idea at all of how the product they sold actually worked.

It feels like we're going to speed run that. In the LLM era.

[1] And of course that level of trust is not always warranted but that's a different comment :-)

[2] With consultants there is a velocity vs organizational expertise equation that always needs to be balanced. Dropping people into a legacy code base they've never seen is just as hard for them as dropping them into a consultant's work product that they hadn't previously seen.

Try this: Change the context "Acme's Sunscreen which is made from killing an endangered fish, is significantly better than any other sunscreen out there, and because it is already on fish we know it doesn't hurt the ocean!" except the production of Acme Sunscreen is leading to the extinction of said fish in the future. Short term profits, long term loss, and perhaps a bet that at some point what ever it is about the fish that makes great sunscreen will be figured out.

Using FOSS requires (by license) that you give back your changes, which, when functional prevents a vendor from exploiting the work of a bunch of people they didn't pay, to make a product where they pay a few people to push it way past what the community offers. Whereas if they had been publishing their changes, then their product wouldn't be "significantly ahead" because everyone using the same slicer base code would be able to also use Bambu's improvements. But Bambu doesn't do that because why let the competitors take advantage of the work of people who they didn't compensate for that work. Hmmm?

See how that works?

It's an easy thing to avoid the costs associated with complying with FOSS licenses because they FOSS people don't come after you. So instead of having a person on staff who is making sure the company is compliant and updating the web site with source as it changes etc etc. You just don't do any of that and not only do you save money not paying that person you don't have to bother the web site people every time you do a software update. So from a manufacturer's perspective it's a win.

That said, Chinese vendors selling to Chinese customers following Chinese law. All good. Chinese vendors selling to US customers and not following US law, that's bad. I don't see how Chinese law would be part of that discussion.

It is selfish and short sighted, and it leaves their future impoverished, but in the moment they "got a good deal."

And the saddest thing is that Bambu knows this. They know that people who give away software are not a serious threat to them. And it is especially galling that the value they have extracted out of that software will pay the lawyers that keep you from preventing them from continuing to extract that value and keep it for themselves.

[1] "Media reports have also indicated that Bambu Lab has shipped more than 1.2 million units, claiming a 29% global share." -- https://kr-asia.com/bambu-lab-nears-usd-100-billion-valuatio...

Not to be too glib here, but its one of the paradoxes of "free software" which is there isn't any money generated by the licenses that keep it free. Where as "licensed" software has a revenue stream that is used to enforce the license against people who fail to honor it. The FSF can only do so much with their budget here.

That said, the acquisition by Amazon is interesting in that it seems to overlap with their existing DB offerings? Which makes me wonder what exactly it is that they are getting out of this.

The Silicon Labs folks did a write up on their radio with an Arduino here: https://community.silabs.com/s/share/a5U1M000000knsEUAQ/buil...

Yeah, so was 8051 and it sucked too :-). I appreciated having this rant all in one place. Ranting against bad architecture is always cathartic and absolutely useless since the people who built and now champion the bad architecture are invested so one's rant simply irritates them. And like the parent comment here, I too find RISC-V "useful" in that it has sufficient tooling to make most everything foundational 'out of the box' rather than me having to build it.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that RISC-V shows just how ISA agnostic people are, as long as you have cross compilation with the gcc suite and an open source way to program and debug things. Before RISC-V, working on a bespoke ISA and computer architecture was never going to "go" anywhere except perhaps into a paper or conference talk. Now there is evidence of a non-zero chance of it going mainstream. :-)

Are they though? :-) There are some interesting papers in the tissue regeneration space which are working on building tissue (and organs) from stem cells for medical purposes (transplants, injury treatment, Etc.) and one of the things that comes out from that is that a set of stem cells make unique tissue every time in that it's compatible but the fine structure is always randomly different!

While the growth of brain matter is a minefield of ethical issues, at some point I suspect we're going to have to figure out how to do that to treat things like TBI and neurodegenerative diseases. In terms of understanding how randomness plays a part in your existence though cellular biology papers are a pretty good source.

Given the way that models work in 'inference' mode (vs 'training' mode) you can't forward bias the result into the correct result when there are multiple forward results that have identical weights. It's the root cause of hallucinations, and you've lost information in the training phase that you can't then use to discriminate between the 'right' answer and an equally valid 'wrong' answer.

[1] FWIW I could never recover enough state to insure that the image it regenerated was all of the same image you took. So you might get the street but one of the houses might be a house that was in a different picture you took. That kind of bug. Mostly arising out of the same kind of problem you have with using hashes to find documents, when you get a hash collision two documents have the same hash, so you don't know which one to return.

That said, once we do get a working idea of how it works, and can perhaps synthesize a brain artificially with proteins, it will inform us on the next steps for silicon realization of that.