I myself confused the person for the symbol and owe him an apology. But also eff all the child men walking around always taking and never giving. Be more like Ramses.

While I have deep empathy for what the author must be feeling. It feels tone deaf to me that as someone working in the model industry, likely using data sets scraped from other folks work, he doesn't see the hypocrisy in this.

We've hit an interesting question in our society where a lot of us are getting tremendous value out of the uncredited and uncompensated use of people's hard work and sleepness nights. It seems naive of the author or anyone at this point to believe that the same won't happen to them.

The question is whether we want this to be how our society operates? I can see a number of pros and cons and I know it's not a straight line from they trained on the works to derived works. But it's hard to imagine as humans how we will sustain broad motivation over a long period if we keep allowing this to happen.

I think this is largely a similar thing. The labs should be running at certain levels of containment given the vitality/risk of the organism under study. Hopefully they get there for all our sakes.

But the revealed preference of society at this point is the damage is worth the benefits both in wuhan and with AI. Unfortunately with some of these "substances" it could eventually prove lethal.

The idea that we all have an open map free to use by developers and users not controlled by a rent collecting corporate entity should be wonderful resource for humanity.

The practicalities are often unfortunately far from wonderful:

1. A lot of the POI data in OSM is often either out of date, wrong or incomplete, including names, web addresses, phone numbers, closures, etc.

2. They often don't have addresses as you're supposed to resolve the address from the location, but if you have multi-story buildings this gets problematic.

Part of this I believe is due to the community requirement that this data come from folks walking around vs from providers that say restaurant owners use (square, toast, etc) to manage their online presences.

Google Maps is just dominant in terms of gravity with folks are throwing all their photos and reviews and edits on there. But if google maps had to build google maps on the Places API google itself would be out of business the prices and terms are so out of control.

But even in the more open space you've got:

1. Overture trying to to make OSM actually usable by combining multiple data sources and doing validation. But overture is up to 1 month or more out of date.

2. MapBox and others are trying to make money selling improved POI data on top of OSM derived data with their own sources added.

I ended up building a system that combined OSM (for freshness) plus Overture for reliability plus validation, but no data duplication from google maps to filter bad data coming from OSM and Overture.

You'll still need to learn stuff and learn your craft but if you don't become an expert at programming switch statements so much the better or the next garbage web framework.

Given the history here, No matter which tool becomes the death star of developer workflow it always trends towards complexity and the challenges that come with it. Hosting your own doesn't become a panacea as most IT/ops teams also struggle with uptime and upgrades (increasingly relevant).

The only way out IMHO as customers picking two of these goliaths of sending a clear signal to them that we're happy to pay them handsomely for a stable and less sprawling product. Or a hosted open source version with a different cost structure that doesn't drive these wild swings at feature bloat and the inherent instability that comes with that chase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

I'm curious what the game theoretic optimal here is.

In the US we try to maintain inflation at a target rate of 2%. For commodities where the costs aren't able to keep pace with inflation you'd either expect prices to double every 35 years or for the product to be half-ish the size (assuming labor costs scale by size). It's a 99 cent candy bar so...

I think inflation rate and costs of lots of things due to oil has jumped so much in the last few years that both the costs have gotten mouth watering and sizes have gotten noticeably smaller. But I prefer either of those to leveraging even more low cost filler, which I assume is the other option.

I honestly think in the US portion sizes tend to be larger than I need here so I'd honestly prefer if they lowered prices and dropped sizes to something reasonable.

1. Our incentive structure in software has always been to a large extent driven by more features [1]. Agent driven development has poured gasoline on that fire.

2. Despite all the effort we put into quality assurance by engineering teams, it's still hard to full de-risk releases across a broad set of configurations use cases, etc. Especially as most agents and even the test hierarchy itself tends to favor unit or module tests and these issues tend to pop up at integration points or hard to test non functional requirements.

So I think what we're seeing is people are rapidly adopting agent lead development due to #1 but the risk reduction pipelines haven't caught up with #2. I think they eventually will but we're definitely in for a rough road for a bit.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/