But that's precisely the problem, it only takes a very tiny minority to change this. If one group, one person sometimes, in a carriage of 50 people decides to go against this, then that's that. It's not even particularly common, but it happens, it's random, and so it's just something that must be contended with.

But one huge factor that you have to contend with is the randomness of the tragedy of the commons problem on public transport / shared transport. A train journey can be blissful to sleep on right until a loud group gets on and sits across from you and there's no seats available to move.

I think this is something that can't be overlooked, especially if you're talking about something like a short trip where if you don't sleep well en route, quite a large proportion of the trip time is going to be affected. Having a private vehicle where you can guarantee control of your environment is a really huge plus.

If not you really should. IntelliJ with Java is one of the best dev experiences I've ever had. I'm a VSCode fan for most other things but for Java I wouldn't even remotely consider using it over IntelliJ if I had the option :-)

It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.

They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.

I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.

Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.

I don't think that. In fact I spent years at a company whose product let people build software backed by spreadsheets so I'm at least a little acquainted with that corner of the world :-)

The thing I'm saying is that among those who want to engage in building software via coding, I don't accept that caring about coding craft and caring about building great products that solve problems for people are opposing points on a spectrum.

If anything I'd argue the opposite, that these qualities are correlated. Again, speaking about people who are interested in building software with code.

I think the thing of building useful software with software (like spreadsheets / AI builders) while deliberately not wanting to engage with coding is a discussion apart from this. There's apparent overlap because it's true to say that those people are concerned with building useful things and not necessarily concerned with coding. But the fact they're not concerned with coding by definition puts them out the scope of the first conversation, it's just a different thing.

To me, the entire point of crafting good code is building a product with care in the detail. They're inseparable.

I don't think I've ever in my life met someone who cared a lot about code and technology who didn't also care immensely about detail, and design, and craft in what they were building. The two are different expressions of the same quality in a person, from what I've seen.

Google I'll grant you, though it's still pretty phonetic and easy to read. The other two not at all, they're incredibly well known instantaneously recognisable words.

Using a brand as a filter where you have to already know what it means to get it is exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to achieve.

Consider the most exclusive (successful) brands that exist. Even there, where exclusivity is a brand goal, none of them have this property of being obscure on first contact.

But I did justify and maybe to reword slightly, surely if one of the main drivers is opening up research, the brand name should be something that's less obscure and more accessible / understandable as to what it is on first sight?

Maybe arXiv evoking the word 'archive' with an ancient Greek twist does that for some, but it's clearly a bit cryptic for many, and if the point is to open up probably the brand should just be something much plainer.

That is, it's not readily parseable, it really gives an insider term vibe - like this isn't for you if you don't already know what it means or how you should read or say it. It sort of reminds me of the overuse of latin and latinate terms generally in the old professions and, well, the academy.

Just always struck me as being somewhat at odds with the goal.

There's a bit of an issue with the overload of 'office' in the political context, this being an EU initiative and domain but other than that I say good call.

I think most of the issue with this kind of thing, practical stuff aside like extra time invested and potential unpleasantness of actual experience, is what it implies about the culture and your relationship. If you level with people a lot of that gets addressed, and you're left with 'only' the practical inconvenience.

That's separate from the question of being taught, self teaching, and the combo of the two, I think. That's more to do with just the material itself and the goals you're set.

I do think though, all else being equal, in a business you're going to want to prefer people who have demonstrated the kind of higher order skill and agency to be able to adapt and self teach.

I get that in a lot of businesses the difference might not be material, stuff turnover is high, focus is practical and short term and not about how this or that graduate will develop within the business over a long period of time and so on.

But still, of two people with the requisite hard skills to get going quickly you're probably always going to favour the one who seems better able to also adapt to changes and learn new skills in a totally self directed way, right?

Particularly in today's environment - I can hardly imagine a point in history where this has broadly been more important.

The piece of paper is just the evidence that you've been through a journey successfully. What you're really paying for is access to the environment that facilitates that journey.

The journey is essentially transitioning from a system which is pricipally about executing diligently on well-defined instructions, to one which is about reaching more broadly defined and often even self-selected goals by whatever means you choose.

Obviously aspects overlap, the changes come in steadily over the years of a degree, and even in the most ideal case it's still basically just practice, but the journey is supposed to develop the higher order skills that at that age you are ready to develop, and must develop to succeed 'in the wild' so to speak.

Absolutely 100% one of those higher order skills, indeed maybe the most important, is being able to self-teach whatever necessary to fill in gaps in order to do something interesting, that won't be provided for you or made easy for you in any way. You have to figure it out on your own. Just as you will have to in more or less every single challenge you encounter in the world after university.

So again, the environment in which you develop those skills (along with so many other benefits) is what you're paying for and the piece of paper, such that it is, is just the evidence you succeeded in that.

The real role they play is something very different to everything that comes before in education, and a bit closer to everything in the world that will ideally come after: immersion in your field of choice in an environment full of curious peers who are variously a few steps ahead of you, all the way up to world class experts in the field doing research.

Parts of your interactions there may include being actively taught relevant things, but the more important goal is to let you explore this environment and the material (yes, with a bit of structure) and in doing so figure out how to learn on your own.

You absolutely should be able to get a degree with top marks without attending a single lecture, seminar, lab, whatever, just by reading the material and interacting with those around you less formally, and never being actively 'taught' anything.

Many in fact do something approaching this, particularly in the later years of a degree.

Presumably this is where it'll evolve to with the product just being the brand with a pricing tier and you always get {latest} within that, whatever that means (you don't have to care). They could even shuffle models around internally using some sort of auto-like mode for simpler questions. Again why should I care as long as average output is not subjectively worse.

Just as I don't want to select resources for my SaaS software to use or have that explictly linked to pricing, I don't want to care what my OpenAI model or Anthropic model is today, I just want to pay and for it to hopefully keep getting better but at a minimum not get worse.