In the US, what the parent comment was getting it, is why are we even talking about this in the first place? What problem is privatization trying to solve?

As an American, I have zero complaints about our postal service or how much we pay for it. Apart from the fact that I wish there were more branch offices and a few more workers at most locations. I don’t think privatization will solve either of those.

Why do we need to reform something that already works?

One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives.

Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the example of money moving between international account, detached from inherent physical value.

That also seems obviously false. The purported benefit of finance and tech is that they act as a force multiplier for the rest of the economy. In exchange they get to skim value off of the top.

If middle class consumption stopped or decreased in a serious way, finance and tech would be impacted. It seems weird to argue otherwise when we have such recent examples, like the great financial crisis.

Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.

Software projects will grow in complexity to consume whatever budget you give it. If you hire 50 devs and give them a bunch of business objectives, they are going to do what they do and write a ton of software.

It’s not obvious to me that it would be theoretically impossible to build a cheaper package manager.

Versus any F500 company running their services on GCP.

It’s a bit whacky to think about because Apple will operate Google owned software on GCP. But it should be sandboxed just the same.

I’m not making a normative privacy argument here. Just pointing out that this is cloud business as usual. Perhaps it’s interesting Apple is doing it, but basically everything else is already using either AWS or GCP at this point.

Just to make a point: I could throw out SQLite as a project that bans open contributions and is wildly successful.

Also, as others pointed out, Linux is technically open contribution bazaar style by 2000s standards. But if you look at how to actually get involved, there’s way more friction compared to the average GitHub project.

I actually think GCC falls into the same category. Even though it’s technically open contribution these days, it’s not exactly a free for all where any AI agent can open a GitHub pull request and get it reviewed.

You have to mail patches to a mailing list and follow a bunch of super specific and arcane rules set by the grey beards.

I didn’t realize this until I was 32.

Obviously some companies will actually punish you. You might get fired from your Amazon or Microsoft job, for instance.

But typically what happens is the work just gets offloaded to another yes-man.

And the funny thing with promotions is most orgs don’t reward work volume. Nobody will remember that you took 11pm meetings or did that one unpleasant migration nobody wanted to do anyways.

Wouldn’t it be in Amazon’s interest to run open models and sell time slots at around the cost of running them?

My only guess for why they don’t is that AI labs are currently selling their models at a huge loss, so this isn’t worth Amazon spending low-margin compute on compared to other higher margin products.

What I’m getting at, is maybe we won’t even need to run the models locally for the current status quo to implode. After today’s AI labs run out of free-money runway and actually have to sell their models at a price above running them, there will be the incentive for anyone with compute to just undercut by selling open-models-as-a-service at commodity prices.

Yes I know there's no evidence and this is lazy reasoning. But there's probably a bit of truth to this line of thought.

Just one example, owning a home protects you against price shocks. As others have pointed out, this can sometimes be a bad thing, because when prices decrease you are also leveraged.

But it’s pretty important to a lot of middle class people that they are protected against forced relocation due to 5x housing price increases.

Of course, there’s other reasons to not own a home.

My point is that localized housing markets have all sorts of factors that are perfectly explainable by economic theory but aren’t just “Econ 101, run the supply and demand” curve.

First, that this is challenging to scale across large orgs. Even if your plans produce high quality code, that isn’t true for everyone. I’m definitely struggling with slop code being collectively mailed to me for review my our 1,000 engineers that were told to use their AI subscription all at once.

I feel like we should be taking “prompt engineering” more seriously. And when people mail me code to review, it should also include the agentic workflow and plan. So that when code isn’t up to quality, and can have a discussion about the prompts used to generate it.

My second thought is related to your senior engineer comment. This isn’t surprising, because in most engineering orgs, seniority is completely unrelated to code quality. In fact, many orgs incentive the opposite: “senior” devs that push out buggy code quickly and push accountability downhill to the junior devs.

I still think that’s about accurate. Maybe it should’ve been 40%.

Everyone forgets that it was a pretty close election. Clinton could’ve won without the Comey announcement.

This is just some Disney suits being extraordinarily petty.

The fact that basically none of these multi-million dollar companies are vendoring their entire dependency tree.

At most companies, even ones worth millions of dollars, it would be impossible for them to rebuild their software if someone ripped a package off of npm’s registry or whatever.

We were deducted points for trivial syntax mistakes.

If these stories I keep hearing are true, then university programs have really taken a nose dive recently. This isn’t a “back in my day” thing, but within the past 5 years.

The pace of the purported decline makes me question if some of these stories are sensationalist. But I don’t know, I keep hearing about them.

Code references are less important inside Google editors, because we have a code viewer tool inside the web browser.

Most people read, explore, follow references, and share permalinks to the view-only tool. It’s a lot better than viewing code in GitHub. It’s super fast, is connected to language servers and can actually trace referenced, and overall has a million little features optimized for reading code.

We also have a code reviewer tool, and a separate tool to run and view CI runs.

So what’s left for the editor? Syntax highlighting?

I would tend to view code, run tests and CI, and review in separate tools specialized for their specific use case. The code editor was just a place where I would type in my changes.

I’d imagine this workflow feels weird to people who learned in one-stop-shop IntelliJ and GitHub world. But I can’t emphasize how much better these other tools were compared to GitHib. So a code editor that also lets me read, review, and test code didn’t really matter for me when I had a collection of smaller tools specialized for each individual task.

There is no “modern” alternative. If you read Reddit threads, C++ programmers actually believe that it’s a reasonable file reading API.

Most companies that I’ve worked at have just implemented our own on top of the OS syscalls. Which is annoying because it requires at least a Windows and UNIX variant.

Look, I like C++. I’ve been programming in it for years. But some of the stereotypes around C++ programmers are true. I still occasionally run into design decisions so untethered from reality that it still shocks me after all these years.

So a lot of code quality debates don’t matter for the typical enterprise app. While a dev spends their afternoon shaving off 100 nanoseconds in the hot path, a second developer on a deadline added a poorly thought out round trip that adds 800milliseconds.

This architectural problems are also more difficult to unwind later since they tend to have cascading effects.