> narrative only got picked up because people needed a reason to demonize evil corps
Either they aren't evil in which case they're being demonized, or they're already evil in which case demonization is redundant.
Keeping aside the motives of people, what is clear is that scale effects of AI cannot be ignored. An AI "learning" millions of pieces of content in a short span is not the same as humans spending time, effort and energy to replicate someone's style. You can argue that its 'neural nets' in both cases, but the massive scale is what separates the two.
A village is not a large family, a city is not a large village, ... and all that.
>Either they aren't evil in which case they're being demonized, or they're already evil in which case demonization is redundant.
If you were trying to be charitable rather than clever, you would have read "evil corps" as "corps that the critic regards as evil".
>Keeping aside the motives of people, what is clear is that scale effects of AI cannot be ignored.
Okay, so just give some kind of standard -- any clear, articulable standard -- for how and why the scale matters. It's a cop-out to just rest your case on a hand-wavy "it changes at scale".
This is advice I've never seen or received. It's always been the latter, exit early, etc. Languages like Swift even encode this into a feature, a la if guards.
Positive branch first is good advice when both branches are roughly even in terms of complexity. If the negative branch is just a return, I’d bail early instead.
Negative first makes else-branches double negative which reads weird, eg. if !userExists {…} else {…}
It’s fine. I don’t see the click-bait-ness of what the other person is talking about. Especially since I’ve run into the title length limit before. Some people have bad days and are more (overly?) critical.
“You Can't Build Interactive Web Apps Except as Single Page Applications” is false, which would make that title clickbait, specifically of the “ragebait” family.
You obviously shouldn't build interactive pure-HTML apps, but that’s a talk for another day ;)
> "Why did you decide to merge Keras into TensorFlow in 2019": I didn't! The decision was made in 2018 by the TF leads -- I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision. The TF team was huge at the time, 50+ people, while Keras was just me and the open-source community. In retrospect I think Keras would have been better off as an independent multi-backend framework -- but that would have required me quitting Google back then.
The fact that an "L8" at Google ranks above an OSS maintainer of a super-popular library "L5" is incredibly interesting. How are these levels determined? Doesn't this represent a conflict of interest between the FOSS library and Google's own motivations? The maintainer having to pick between a great paycheck or control of the library (with the impending possibility of Google forking).
This is just the standard Google ladder. Your initial level when you join is based on your past experience. Then you gain levels by going through the infamous promo process. L8 represents the level of Director.
Yes, there are conflicts of interests inherent to the fact that OSS maintainers are usually employed by big tech companies (since OSS itself doesn't make money). And it is often the case that big tech companies leverage their involvement in OSS development to further their own strategic interests and undermine their competitors, such as in the case of Meta, or to a lesser extent Google. But without the involvement of big tech companies, you would see a lot less open-source in the world. So you can view it as a trade off.
L8 at Google is not a random pecking order level. L8s generally have massive systems design experience and decades of software engineering experience at all levels of scale. They make decisions at Google which can have impacts on the workflows of 100s of engineers on products with 100millions/billions of users. There are less L8s than there are technical VPs (excluding all the random biz side VP roles)
L5 here designates that they were a tenured (but not designated Senior) software engineer. It doesn't meant they don't have a voice in these discussions (very likely an L8 reached out to learn more about the issue, the options, and ideally considered Francois's role and expertise before making a decision), it just means its above their pay grade.
I'll let Francois provide more detail on the exact situation.
I have no knowledge of Google, but if L5 is the highest IC rank, then L8 will often be obtained through politics and playing the popularity game.
The U.S. corporate system is set up to humiliate and exploit real contributors. The demeaning term "IC" is a reflection of that. It is also applied when someone literally writes a whole application and the idle corporate masters stand by and take the credit.
Unfortunately, this is also how captured "open" source projects like Python work these days.
L5 isn't the highest IC level at Google. Broadly would go up to L10, but the ratio at every level is ~1:4 or 1:5 b/w IC levels.
The L7/L8 level engineers I've spoken or worked with have definitely earned it - they bring to bear significant large scale systems knowledge and bring it to bear on very large problem statements. Impact would be felt on billion$ impact wise.
An L8 IC has similar responsibilities as a Director (roughly 100ish people) but rather than people, and priority responsibility it is systems, architecture, reliability responsibility.
Spark's Advanced Query Pushdown feature automatically ensures that all possible filters and aggregations are performed on the underlying warehouse instead of being performed in-memory.
No talk of the license on the frontpage. Visiting the GitHub repo tells me it is 2-clause BSD license. It's high time we had a GPLv3 web browser, otherwise, this risks the same fate as the rest of the browsers with proprietary forks.
This of course comes at the cost of not being able to support non-free parts of the web standard such as DRM.
Perhaps BSD in its anarchic freedom is compelling to the kinds of people who decide to do something crazy like building a brand new browser engine from scratch, and GPLv3 with its detailed rules and regulations is compelling to people who like to talk about how they wish the world had more software licensed under GPLv3.
Open source isn’t handed down from God, it starts with one person deciding to type mkdir.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with have proprietary forks. They exist for good reasons -- either a new browser or get embedded in another product which provides value for their end users. They may (or may not) contribute back to the original projects with bug reports, fixes and features.
Sorry this is not the GPLv3 everywhere world you are dreaming of, and I'm glad it works this way.
Like others said, if you want to have a GPLv3 licensed browser (that will probably be as unusable as GIMP), write one yourself.
Absolutism like this hurts adoption of otherwise-useful tools. Given the choice between a tool which simply cannot play DRM-protected content, and a tool which can, _ceteris paribus_ most consumers will prefer the former. If you believe there are other properties of a proposed tool that mean it is a public good for it to be adopted, it behooves you to make it attractive to adopt.
Most consumers will prefer the browser that comes with their OS or is advertised on google.com no matter what you do. Compromising your priciples to chase after the mass market is exactly the reason for the decline of Firefox.
DRM'd content on the web is also not nearly as common as you are implying it to be. Outside of specific streaming sites that many use through dedicated apps on their TV or phone anyway it is almost nonexistent so this crap doesn't need to be in your desktop or mobile browser. Not to mention that even with DRM support you are not guaranteed to get decent content if you are on the wrong OS or don't give up ownership of your entire display pipeline or just have slightly older hardware or live in the wrong country. It's also not hard to avoid these streaming services entirely.
If you are writing an open source web browser, I guess you only care about the preference that programmers who are likely to become contributors have. I’m not sure if that would be a big change really, though.
Or GPLv2 with binaries loaded at runtime, like Linux does. This is a definitive good candidate for v2 as not having DRM is simply just not going to work.
Either they aren't evil in which case they're being demonized, or they're already evil in which case demonization is redundant.
Keeping aside the motives of people, what is clear is that scale effects of AI cannot be ignored. An AI "learning" millions of pieces of content in a short span is not the same as humans spending time, effort and energy to replicate someone's style. You can argue that its 'neural nets' in both cases, but the massive scale is what separates the two.
A village is not a large family, a city is not a large village, ... and all that.