They have a track record of failed IT projects, because they have a very high bar for handling data properly.
Palantir have a track record of successful IT projects, because they do what they want and hope there's limited blowback - they've modelled their biggest customer very well, there.
As somebody born in an NHS hospital whose life has been saved by the NHS on at least 3 occasions, I'm more than happy to defend their record.
Palantir, given what we know that has leaked about what they do and how they do it, considerably less so.
> Palantir have a track record of successful IT projects, because they do what they want and hope there's limited blowback - they've modelled their biggest customer very well, there.
There are proven advantages to hand-writing out notes and planning on paper over digital tools - the physical, tactile experience engages your brain in different ways, and this has been proven by multiple studies.
Digital tools are great. They're why they're here. But a lot of people want paper for good reasons, and it's a very different experience to wanting a wooden holder for your phone.
I agree on the benefits of tactile experience. But it need not come from paper, which is very modern thing. Information is being sucked out from real world, into digital space. College teachers are no longer writing on blackboards. Money is no longer a physical thing. Work is being done in virtual spaces. The only things that are left in physical world are the information-less objects, just like how the world was before invention of writing.
When information finds its natural habitat in the digital space, we need to re-orient ourselves.
I have recently been RTO'ed so I'm expecting to have a lot of time to read in coming months - yay for all transport between two points in London taking ~1 hour no matter what the actual physical distance - but in the last year I've been pretty busy with stressful projects and homelife, so feel lightly read compared to previous years.
Despite that, some recommendations:
First, remember that everybody's reading list is naturally capped. If it takes you a week to read a fiction book, and you're 30 years old, you have ~2,500 books left in your life. If you're closer to 50, it's more like ~1,500. And if it takes you a month to finish a book, you're at ~600 and ~350 respectively.
This means being picky is a necessity. Do not read books on "100 hundred books you must read before you die", style lists unless they all appeal to you. Do not try and cover the ground of every Nobel laureate unless you're a) a prolific reader, b) multi-lingual, and c) not easily bored. The same goes for any other prestigious prize, list, etc.
The most important thing is to read things you like reading. Don't read classics unless you like classics. Don't read sci-fi just because you work in tech unless you like sci-fi. I like a lot of contemporary "high brow" literature because I enjoy how people discover new ways to play with language to convey emotions. A lot of people find this incredibly dull, and that's fine.
You do you. You don't have time to read books somebody else says you "should" or "must" read.
One thing I think we can all agree on though is that almost all self-help books and airport style management or "popular science" books do not return the investment they demand. It's for you to decide how to interpret this, but please, read things that bring you a depth of joy not because they're popular or on a list or seem to be "everywhere".
For my style of reading, I like to get pointers from two magazines I subscribe to: The Literary Review [0] and Granta[1]. I am sure there are other sources for your preferred type of reading. Go support them. Be prepared to hand over cash to writers who publish a physical artefact, it's the only way they'll keep eating and doing that thing.
I would like to find time to add other magazines to my list (TLS, Paris Review, etc.), but I have limited time, these specific two tick boxes for me stylistically, have proven the test of time indicating quality, and even if I only find one or two books or authors a year out of them, have paid for themselves many times over. Further, I get a reasonable review of what's out there and can get a sense of what isn't for me, without reading it or feeling guilty about not reading it even though others tell me I "must".
As an aside, Lit Review's history reviews often are so good at covering the ground of the material the book covers, I feel like I've had a 1,000 word Cliff Notes version of the book in my hand and can decide to dig deeper if I want, but if not, I could understand a basic conversation about that topic if I needed to, and on occasion something I read has helped in a pub quiz.
One last point: try and break out of your echo chamber sometimes. It is easy to pick up and enjoy books that support one's own World view, but I like to challenge mine and keep it in check.
Reading the Communist Manifesto will not make you a Communist. Reading Mein Kampf will not convert you into a Nazi, because you have the perspective to rip it to shreds and see it for what it is.
Buying (OK, pirating, maybe you don't want to vote with your money in this category), books that heap praise on people you perhaps don't like or disagree with - Trump, Obama, Putin, Fidel Castro, Biden, Palosi, Blair, Thatcher, Pinochet, whoever... - these books will not make you those people or somebody who heaps praise on them. Develop the critical muscle to question things you read.
I say this because not only has this helped me navigate the news and political cycles of my life, but because it's helped me improve relationships with friends and family and even my reading of fiction.
Books really are the most marvellous things, and they all deserve more of our attention, even the bad ones.
I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it.
However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?
I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.
It’s not a neutral service though. The owner is very opinionated and likes to get involved in what projects are and are not allowed to be hosted there, and changes these rules on a whim.
In my eyes, this disqualifies Sourcehut for anything serious. You could get booted off any second, if Drew decides that he does not like you.
(I like Drew, and I like opinionated and outspoken people. But Service Providers should be neutral, and only involve themselves as far as required by law.)
I think Sourcehut is the more portable of Git forges. Everything is stored in standard formats, its workflow isn't anything bespoke but just a good automation for git send-email, and I believe the source code should be all published.
In my eyes, if this ever does become a problem, migrating elsewhere wouldn't be that much trouble. When the "cryptocurrency purge" happened, maintainers were given 2 months of advance notice, which is a little short but reasonable.
What's surprising to me is that TFA is from GH who are uniquely placed to have a real impact in terms of OSS maintainer quality of life.
If they're so keen on helping people publish more stuff and showing how awesome AI is, perhaps they can pre-screen the entitled comments and just not let them get posted? Perhaps they could see that you've not touched a repo in 5 years and when that PR comes in, they could help bootstrap you back in with a code review summary? Perhaps they could stop the idiots pressuring you by explaining to them all the reasons why their PR might not get looked at any time soon?
Perhaps, just perhaps, Github could take some ownership of the problems they have created, and do some work to fix them?
Reddit is now just AI slop, so I don't know if that's an improvement or not over this story. I'm just glad you were able to get over that BS and engage with it all again and kept going! I gave up and never went back in around 2010, but I'm going to try again in 2026.
The problem with environments designed to make interaction low-energy and gamified like Reddit, is that it gathers just the worst people. I've got ~63k karma there, and disengaged some years ago and I can't tell you how much ditching that, twitter and Facebook improved my mental health. There's some great fun to be had there, but it's often the same thing over and over again and increasingly drowned out by utter crap. They've taken multiple actions that have destroyed the sense of community and have become a poster child for ens*tification, unfortunately.
Turn off comments on platforms that allow you to do that.
One of my projects for the next few weeks is to get my blogging stuff up and running again but with a couple of tweaks:
1. I'll never allow on-blog comments again, ever. The signal/noise was always so poor. I'm sorry that you had a similar experience and the unpleasant odour of drive-by sniping got to you. For what it's worth, I'm always interested in finding new writing on tech topics, and I try to never be mean: I am not unique in this, so consider if there's another way.
2. If I ever publish code, it'll not be on a SaaS platform like GitHub, I'll manage the release through tar.gz/zip files, and if people don't like that, fine. I'm not after pull requests or starting a "real" OSS project. If somebody wants to take that OSS license code and host/manage it, godspeed to them.
3. I will write some code that looks for links back to my blogs, so if something I write is referenced by another blog, I'll learn about it at some point and I can go take a look, and that would be interesting. A long, long time ago there was some automation around this using web hooks that almost became a standard, so I'll look into whether that is a thing or not any more.
In my experience if somebody is writing a blog about something they are normally more constructive and thoughtful than if they are just writing something in a text box while "driving by". I'm OK with those articles normally even if they're critical or in disagreement with me about something.
One of the many wonderful things about being a software developer is that you can build tools that fit you perfectly, and I think I might enjoy this specific rabbit hole, but thanks for the tip, I’ll check some of them out.
Swift != SwiftUI. You need the latter to run modern iOS apps written in Swift.
It's great that Apple are pushing Swift out there a bit, but honestly if they want the World to catch fire with it, they need to give away the Crown Jewels and get SwiftUI out there as well.
Meanwhile, it's great that QNX is supporting modern languages. I can imagine having a bit of fun with this developer desktop and seeing how modern tooling plays nicely with it.
The first time I saw a computer, I saw a machine for making things. I once read a quote from actor Noel Coward who said that television was "for appearing on, not watching", and I immediately connected it to my own relationship with computers.
I don't want an LLM to write software or blog posts for me, for the same reason I don't want to hire an intern to do that for me: I enjoy the process.
Everything else, I'm in agreement on. Writing software for yourself - and only for yourself - is a wonderful superpower. You can define the ergonomics for yourself. There's lots of things that make writing software a little painful when you're the only customer: UX learning curves flatten, security concerns diminish a little, subscription costs evaporate...
I actually consider the ability to write software for yourself a more profound and important right over anything the open source movement offers. Of course, I want an environment which makes that easier, so it's this that makes me more concerned about closed ecosystems.
LLM capability improvement is hitting a plateau with recent advancements mostly relying on accessing context locally (RAG), or remotely (MCP), with a lot of extra tokens (read: drinking water and energy), being spent prompting models for "reasoning". Foundation-wise, observed improvements are incremental, not exponential.
> able to do most programming tasks, with the limitation being our ability to specify the problem sufficiently well
We've spent 80 years trying to figure that out. I'm not sure why anyone would think we're going to crack this one anytime in the next few years.
> Foundation-wise, observed improvements are incremental, not exponential.
Incremental gains are fine. I suspect capability of models scales roughly as the logarithm of their training effort.
> (read: drinking water and energy)
Water is not much of a concern in most of the world. And you can cool without using water, if you need to. (And it doesn't have to be drinking water anyway.)
Yes, energy is a limiting factor. But the big sink is in training. And we are still getting more energy efficient. At least to reach any given capability level; of course in total we will be spending more and more energy to reach ever higher levels.
Incremental gains in output seem to - so far - require exponential gains in input. This is not fine.
Water is a concern in huge parts of the World, as is energy consumption.
And if the big sink is “just” in training, why is there so much money being thrown at inference capacity?
I thought it was mad when I read that Bitcoin uses more energy than the country of Austria, but knowing AI inference using more energy than all the homes in the USA is so, so, so much worse given the quality of the outputs are so mediocre.
They have a track record of failed IT projects, because they have a very high bar for handling data properly.
Palantir have a track record of successful IT projects, because they do what they want and hope there's limited blowback - they've modelled their biggest customer very well, there.
As somebody born in an NHS hospital whose life has been saved by the NHS on at least 3 occasions, I'm more than happy to defend their record.
Palantir, given what we know that has leaked about what they do and how they do it, considerably less so.
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