I don't think their point was about knowing the stack, but being able to point a harness at something running on your desktop GUI and say "change this".

Being able to edit and recompile pretty much any part of the OS and userland (often not even needing to reboot!) is not something that can be said about Windows for sure, or even lots of things on Macs too. Or even when the browser is effectively the operating system, the JS/TS others write is also hard to change in your end.

Except when it comes to protesting certain things.

Like what am I missing? I use Structured Outputs every day and this just seems like that with fewer steps?

edit: Where I'm coming from, I can triage 10,000 support tickets with deepseek flash for less than $1, and latency is sub 1 second if it needs to be integrated into a live user flow. I don't need anything cheaper or faster than that.

The most shocking thing I've read in this entire thread. Are SWE salaries really that low across the pond? That's entry level in the US. So 90k GBP a year all in, including benefits, employer-paid taxes, seat licenses, hardware, furniture, HR? So what's the after-tax takehome for someone senior enough to convert an enterprise codebase to a new language over one year?

You can't describe how various forms of monetary value work in the modern monetary system as if it were a rural village with physical items, because it is fundamentally different.

It is a lot harder to corner the market when you have very non-perishable or very perishable goods and/or much larger domestic and global markets with harvests that vary across geography and time, like wheat and frozen orange juice concentrate. Most goods traded via futures have those properties. Onions is right on the edge of even making sense as a futures commodity, and because of that, it's a recipe for manipulation.

And there were calls to regulate potatoes the same way in the fallout of the onion market manipulation, but those didn't pass, and in 1976 the potato market was almost cornered in the same way.

But sure, govment bad.

For most people, cryptocurrency is just another stock market / betting app.

"A series of tubes" was the same kind of political character assassination that led to Howard Dean getting ridiculed for his infamous scream. He butchered the sentence. Fair. But Stevens should be ridiculed for parroting a tech industry lobby stance about net neutrality, not for the series of tubes metaphor.

You are probably too young to remember that the dominant metaphor for the internet in 1990s politics was "the information superhighway." It was easy to think of the web as "driving" browsers to visit web "sites", with slow bandwidth being analogous to being caught in traffic. But the internet is closer to water, gas, and electricity than roads. Concepts like bandwidth and throughput are closer to how they play out in infrastructure policy for various things with tubes, versus cars and roads. Do you think he's wrong and that the internet is closer to "a big truck" versus "a series of tubes"?

The issue being debated was net neutrality and bandwidth, including specifics about who pays for what and the downstream second-order consequences of various policies. He was parroting some line from some telecom lobbyist, but the point the lobbyist was trying to make through Stevens was about how if certain policies about who pays for bandwidth were adopted, it could disincentivize some things at the Tier 1/2 layer that could increase transport costs at the Tier 2/3 layer that impacts ordinary people's bandwidth.

It's not about what the answers to those questions are. Those are questions about the merits of the case, to be answered at trial. It's about if it should even go to trial.

https://enwp.org/Van_Buren_v._United_States

https://enwp.org/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn