Way back in 2015 I was building a large static site using Jekyll and Wordpress CMS as a backend. We had 30+ content editors using it, writing Markdown and I had Jekyll Generator that would execute a SQL query against the Wordpress database to build static content. Every new post would build and deploy the whole site in 2-3 minutes. Over 50k pages of content. This powered a very large marketing website straddling multiple top 10 Google Ad keywords. Business was bringing in several hundred million in ARR.

I knew of at least 3 other similarly large businesses doing this. All the way back in 2015. My current company today builds a static site from a Wordpress backend and I was totally uninvolved in this work (or even suggesting it). The user that this author thinks is a fable is very very real. There is absolutely a market for a CMS backend for an SSG.

Not that I as a developer would have used it, but if my employers could have paid a company for what I built in a nice box instead of paying my salary, they would have.

I'm actually with you on basic philosophy but the weird political snipes undercut everything they're doing and I can't support any nonprofi who stonewalls questions about what they're doing with my money.

And while I respect everyone on it for their achievements, from their own bios and other political work they're involved in you can clearly tell which stated goal is in service of another.

I've met and spoken to at least half of them and...yeah.

John Gilmore is gone. Brad Templeton is gone. John Perry Barlow is dead. The civil libertarian bent that the organization began with is long gone.

EFF is a Ship of Theseus like any other.

If you actually care about getting your point across, hostile environments are exactly the place that you need to be broadcasting. Especially when they haven't put up any barriers for you.

EFF leadership just totally doesn't get it.

Unless the goal isn't what they say it is and they just need the cheerleading squad to make it look like their fundraising is effective.

A decade ago they lost the plot. They pulled some bullshit and lied to their entire membership in order to boost their cronies/friends at the Library of Congress. They framed efforts to keep the LoC under loose Congressional/Presidential oversight and free to do as they want as some Anti-Trump fight. Requests about why they would do this went completely unanswered to the membership.

The EFF Board serves their own goals and believe themselves unaccountable to their membership, so they no longer get my money and I no longer entertain or signal boost their message.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/sugar-weasel-the-clown-escor... This article by Vice is 100% bullshit. Vice basically published this PR piece for the guy as a favor. A lot of articles that you read are really coordinated press releases -- like the initial Blake Lively v Justin Baldoni NYT hitpiece. Yes, I know this is dumb and totally entertainment and not "news", but this article actually harmed the business of the actual guy that Weasel ripped his shtick off from. Aaron Zilch used to rant about this guy and how bullshit this article was for years. There's a small clown kink/BDSM community in Vegas and those in it at the time this was published all called it out for the bullshit it was. Asked Vice for a correction/retraction and they did nothing.

Somebody handed them a clickbait story and they published it for the clicks.

One can only narrow the things they care about to those they can verify (or personally affect them) and go after primary sources themselves and form their own conclusions. I'm no longer convinced that modern journalism is good for anything more than starting bonfires.

It's been argued frequently that families and tech companies are structured like socialist states. Central planning, flatter structures, division of labor...I'm not starting down that thread or opening up that debate.

This only is not a capitalist structure but capitalism itself doesn't really offer any ideas about structure or governance beyond encouraging the free movement of capital.

Both more data and better data are very expensive. Procuring... Handling... All of the above...

You can spend bottomless piles of cash and by not doing the right things not get there. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen business/investor incentives line up with r&d incentives.

There's no guarantee that there is enough or good-enough data, regardless of how much money you have.

I was big on correctness, software safety (think medical devices, not memory) and formal proofs anyway, so I think I'm just going to take the pay cut and start selecting for those types of jobs. Your run of the mill SaaS or open source+commercial companies are all becoming a death march.

The problem is that vanishingly few people actually understand the code and are asking the agents to do all of the interpretation and reasoning for them.

This code that you've built is only maintainable for as long as you are still around at the company to work on it -- it's essentially a codebase that you're the only domain expert in. That's not a good outcome for companies either.

My prediction is that the companies that learn this lesson are the ones that are going to stick around. LLMs won't be in wide use for features but for throwaway busy-work type problems that eat lots of human resources and can't be ignored.

Plausibly your text looks equivalent but we all (should) have the context to know better.

It's literally just not worth it. Time is the most finite resource that we all have.

Up until the 2024 board election, the organization ran on meritocracy in the sense that those who contributed the most had the most say.

Equality means here that the organization shifted to everyone present having an equal voice. It was no longer proportional to the work contributed.