IME, because of pay, they have a hard time retaining "senior" talent, eg Nvidia, Chainguard, Amutable, Lambda, etc etc etc all have lots and lots of senior+ Canonical engineers. Especially in the age of AI, I think this is a "people-strategy" mistake.

The application process is very long and you absolutely lose great candidates because of it. Salaries are not US-tech competitive, but absolutely are Central/South America and Europe competitive. Lots of great Brazilian and Polish engineers, for example.

Also I have never seen a post on HN, Reddit etc about Canonical/Ubuntu that doesn't complain about hiring process. I think it does a pretty incredible amount of damage to the brand.

https://www.maslowcnc.com/

basically a cable driven 4x8 sheet router.

I don't think this is totally the case! College costs continue to grow (well exceeding already high inflation), and the most recent way I have seen the value was framing it not around academics (or even job readiness, which is still not what college is about), but "building social skills" [1]. The college referenced in the piece is 40-70k/y depending on your status; fewer and fewer young people see taking out 100k+ of debt, 4+ years to "build social skills" as a worthwhile endeavor.

Asians are notably missing from that Gallup poll, I suspect the decline will not be so severe.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANHnFgyjx08

Hutter prize (I think mentioned in a 3b1b video somewhere else in this thread) is a great example. Given this was written before advent of LLM, I would love to see someone throw openAI/Anthropic levels of compute at a similar problem to see what the swarm can produce.

https://arxiv.org/html/2404.09937v1

I am not a believer in winner-take-all mechanics for models (even for AGI -- look no further than the natural world for many examples), and a large F50 company committing money/strategy to something outside the frontier labs is a great thing for the ecosystem.

It looks like a teen vogue profile. It is kind of hilarious to have an guy who is objectively brilliant posing in flowerbed or deliberately quasi-candid overexposed shots. Not even a pick of him up at 2am wandering around or hunched over a terminal or whatever he does.

I think this idea can be expanded on, and it is to separate the merits of the idea from the delivery of the idea. I see this frequently with: - neurodivergent people (of whatever variety) - ESL speakers - cultural clashes (eg Dutch / American meetings)

If you can separate delivery and the merits of a discussion, you can benefit both ways -- taking a skeptical view on the best pitches (eg from anyone on a Forbes 30 for 30 list) and an optimistic view on the worst.

You solve the credibility problem (they ended up successful) while still distilling down the more valuable failures.

Internal tools, IME, are almost always short budget. unless it is in path of revenue, then there is $ and performance matters a great deal *if* more performance means more $.

Absolutes matter. If 1x is good enough, making it 20x literally does not matter.

Disagree, this is an unreasonable framing. We just need to exchange goods/services for money, not optimize every transaction on a curve by some measure of "extract everything"

There are many incentives apart from $ -- general fame, specific, niche credibility, love of the thing, internal projects (eg a phd/masters/capstone project), etc. Looking at everything from a $-incentive only will lead you to actions and incentives that don't make any sense. Look at the linux kernel or something like sqlite -- more deployed than almost any piece of "commercial" closed-source software, huge community, signifigant resources, but tiny, tiny slice of revenue by any metric of popularity.

IMO, something like home assistant is a good example of what tech can be. No nagware, open ecosystem, no subscription, self-hosted (with optional hosting/support if you want it), etc.

That is user-centric design, but the are not exactly be rewarded commercially for it. Until we can better align commercial incentives and technical excellence, you're going to keep having the same shit experience with a lot of tech products.

Work on changing the incentives, it is the only thing that matters in the long run and is, to steal a phrase, "scalable".

https://itdaily.com/blogs/datacenter/broadcom-makes-a-u-turn...

I am not too worried about Linux specifically. RH is a large committer, but a lot of those commits are down to a handful to very talented individuals. One of the other BigCos will sweep them up if RH culture falls apart, imo likely Qualcomm (see their large open source push recently), maybe Linaro (although I dont know much about them).

I think this approach of integration is the mistake in IBM's strategy -- they are squeezing some very slippery customer hard, and IMO this was Broadcom's mistake. The integration must go very deep, be multi-threaded, beyond a single app, OS, whatever, and it has to be a slow noose, not a hard jerk.

If I am IBM, I continue to invest in core, open source, deploy my army of PS people to build custom business solutions around that core open-source (but tailored to their specific issue), use "AI" and very strong core product engineering to reduce risk/time-to-effect, and keep pushing their entire ecosystem (rhel, hashicorp, confluence, whatever else) to customers.

Integrate deeply, then put those annual increases at 9% and build a very healthy, strong moat on a premium brand, experience and level of trust. Better to not give anyone a critical event to justify walking away from you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxqrSXiRja4, 6:37 starts discussion about integration, so you can judge exactly what he says.

"The only one we have not fully fully integrated yet, and I will emphasize the "yet" is RedHat".

"on the go to market side, I really believe in full integration".

you already mentioned the engineering teams, and I do think your framing is mostly right. However, I think it unrealistic to say I am going to fully integrate back-office, fully integrate GTM, and somehow engineering is totally untouched.

Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it. For example, look at kernel committers:

https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...

weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo.

There is more visible projects (eg Ansible) that are great, but with very lackluster monetization and little impetus for IBM to GAF.

These guys are pursuing the wrong strategy, they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions leveraging existing consulting teams they already have (IBM revenue to hugely reliant on PS, 33%). Basically the largest "forward deployed eng" transition ever, backed by existing very strong open-source software and tailored (with Watson, dear god) as the "AI powered" engine to appease the shareholder gods. You would run over so many startups with poor penetration at the F2000 level.

It's so over

We're so back

It's so over

Multipolar model world, here we come!