You are meant to "own the means of production" not in an actual, but more ideal sense. Owning a farm or workshop to the exclusion of other people makes you petit bourgeois and this is bad. Communism promotes collective farms. AFAIK Poland was the only European Eastern Bloc country to tolerate small private farms, as a concession to obstinate peasants after the death of Stalin.

Promoting small individual farms is a more Georgist, populist capitalist or possibly strictly conservative policy. Not speaking to its economic sense though.

The important point is, if the erosion of civil liberties continues, these governments are losing their high ground. They must stop.

As in the Cold War, I would give an allowance for the West to still be preferable (modulo strict rights record) if they actually muster some sort of power to confront tyranny. But if the rulers only want cheap rhetoric wins, no.

To be fair, it's hard to imagine economy and civilization crashing hard enough to force us to be more efficient. But who knows.

Organizationally enforcing strategy would be the issue. And also that the people most interested in making rules for others in an organization may not be the ones best qualified to program. And automatic tools (linters) by necessity focus on very surface level, local stuff.

That's how you get the argument for the small teams productivity camp.

LLM could commit plagiarism if authorship of generated media was claimed for either the LLM or its creators.

Sadly these things are often decided by rhetoric in society, but then again, there's no actual debate if it's just throwing slogans.

Now some of the same rhetoric is used in the AI battle. The only question worth asking here is what's the social benefit, as human culture is by nature all commons and derivation. But in this case, the AI companies are also accumulating power, and LLMs are removing attribution which could be argued to discourage publishing new works more than piracy. A "pirate" may learn about you and later buy from you in different ways, a LLM user won't even know that you exist.

[1] Not even discussing how exaggerated these privileges are from what would be reasonable.

I'm not a fan of bundling everything under the sun personally. But it could work if people had more discipline of adding a minimal number of dependencies that would be themselves lightweight. OR be big, common and maintain backwards compatibility so they can be deduplicated. So sort of the opposite of the culture of putting everything through HTTP APIs, deprecating stuff left and right every month, Electron (which puts the browser complexity into anything), and pulling whole trees of dependencies in dynamic languages.

This is probably one of the biggest pitfalls of Linux, saying this as someone to whom it's the sanest available OS despite this. But the root of the problem is wider, it's just the fact that we tend to dump the reduction of development costs onto all users in more resources usage. Unless some big corp cares to make stuff more economical, or the project is right for some mad hobbyist. As someone else said, corps don't really care about Linux desktop.

On the other hand, people tend to be happy with a history that ignores 90+% of what happened, instead focusing on a "central" narrative, which traditionally focussed on maybe 5 Euro-Atlantic great powers, and nowadays somewhat pretends not to.

That being said, I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth advanced by the article. Maybe it's hard to positively establish facts, but it doesn't mean one cannot negatively establish falsehoods and this matters more in practice, in the end. This feels salient when touching on opinions of Carr's as a Soviet-friendly historian.

The internet is like media (press) or communication by letters. Both extremely established in terms of guaranteeing freedom of speech and in the latter case, also secrecy. And the ID identification (that you then make your argument about) is only loosely related to free speech strictly. It's about being constantly searched and surveilled with a presumption of crime.

The problem is there is no money and fame in using it that way, or at least so people think in the current moment. But we could return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-reader writing and bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page 30.

Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only argument for the LLM summaries here.

Not to pick on you, but I find it quicker to open new tab and do "!w robots.txt" (for search engines supporting the bang notation) or "wiki robots.txt" (for Google I guess). The answer is right there, no need to explain to LLM what I want or verify [1].

[1] Ok, Wikipedia can be wrong, but at least it is a commonly accessible source of wrong I can point people to if they call me out. Plus my predictive model of Wikipedia wrongness gives me pretty low likelihood for something like this, while for ChatGPT it is more random.

That being said I do find the tone of this guide somewhat annoying and condescending at times. It could use some editing to make it more impersonal and to the point. Justifications and explanations could be attached separately and most people won't read them anyway. When people ask poor questions, it's often precisely because they don't read longform text for some reason.

I guess there is still something left here from there from the concept of programming language as a tool for top-down shaping and guiding the thinking of its users. Pascal being the classic example. Golang tries to be like that. I get how annoying it can be. I don't know how JS/TypeScript constructs evolve, but I suspect this is more Fortran-style committee planning than trying to "enlighten" people into doing the "right" things. Happy to be corrected on this.

Maybe the hardest to interpret in hindsight is the point that in the sixties programming has been an overpaid profession, the hardware costs will be dropping and software costs cannot stay the same (You cannot expect society to accept this, and therefore we must learn to program an order of magnitude more effectively). Yeah, in some sense, what paying for software even is anymore.

But interestingly, the situation now is kind of similar to the very old days: bunch of mainframe ("cloud") owners paying programmers to program and manage their machines. And maybe the effectiveness really has gone up dramatically. There's relatively little software running in comparison to the crazy volume of metal machines, even though the programmers for that scale are still paid a lot. It's not like you get a team of 10 guys for programming each individual server.

Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.

I can see the intellectual appeal and even the argument for formalism in some high-risk areas. I guess I am most burnt by the advent of hyperlinted, theatrically "typechecked" enterprise Python. I don't think people pushing this stuff would have the balls to introduce an actually formal environment, since even Java is there, not to mention ML-style languages, Rust etc. Maybe there's fear about the staffing and scary appearance, which the article also mentions. (I still sincerely wait for a bigger niche for functional and lispy shops, maybe when the industry transforms with de-monopolization.)

But there is a common thread in the bad kind of arguing for formalisms, where the Scotsmen are never true and your lazy human mind isn't Godlike enough to reason about the program correctly from the start. I actually like how TFA moves toward communicating better so maybe conversations could be more productive in these aspects.

There's no inherent metaphysical worth in being on any particular level of strength, height etc., so we can spread whatever is the most convenient. I think arguments against (that I see being made) ultimately devolve into some magical thinking and a priori thing bad. (I am glad to be shown otherwise.) In fact we are already messing with human fertility in possibly unsustainable ways, so maybe more tools are needed as a part of the way out.

Of course there is political execution, corruption etc., but I don't see it any different from other technological challenges that civilization has dealt with. I.e. we need better politics but the tech is not at fault. Gene editing is isolated interventions, so it's in that detail more manageable than for example mass surveillance which is hidden and continuous.

One more esoteric argument is that we cannot socially agree on what traits are desirable. The ‘The Twenty-first Voyage of Ijon Tichy’ scenario. So opposite to "monoculture" in a way. But I don't see people expanding on that.

Not saying these are universal masterpieces. To every reader slightly different books will be the most enriching. It's true that at a certain age, there is often a transformation from the young adult interest in self to interest in the wider world. But the self is still what humans have, so it's not like it ever ceases to be relevant for one's experience.

While there is something romantic in finding a subculture, even one just slightly adjacent to the mainstream, [being] more chancy, on reflection I'm glad we no longer have it like that. (In fact, we probably regressed a little bit because of the decline of open internet and Google, and the move to group chats.) But today's youth can find and pirate whatever they want. The establishment is founded more on pure concentration of money and financing for legacy institutions, not actual technological hurdles like it used to be.