I'm guessing you haven't considered evolutionary psychology? If we didn't yearn for other people, there would be a lot less reproduction, and the human species would die.
Considering that the concern is mostly and specifically about LLMs being used to automate decisions to commit acts of violence against humans: depends on how invested you are in maintaining the narrative that the US is a force for good rather than evil in the world.
Whatever happened to good old IBM's wisdom: "A computer can not be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
I find it jarring how in recent years so many Americans (and especially American politicians) seem to have given up on the idea that the US should have any claim to moral superiority whatsoever and instead pivoted to American exceptionalism merely being an excuse for why Americans can't have nice things - affordable and functional public transport just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, affordable and functional health care just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, actual democratic representation just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, holding the President accountable or limiting their power just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, lower casualties from law enforcement just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, a lower incarceration rate just isn't possible in the US because the US is different, etc etc.
Even if it was often hyperbolic, inaccurate or outright wrong, I much preferred when Americans were hyped up about "US #1" and saw being behind as a temporary challenge to correct than now where American exceptionalism mostly seems to have become an excuse for why things that are bad can't be improved upon and thinking that's a problem is anti-American.
So funny, he essentially works for free for 10 years, then finally burns out because he doesn't want to put up with a bunch of annoying work? This is why you shouldn't work on open source unless you have a business strategy to get paid. Tons of stuff in life is 100x more annoying and exhausting if you aren't making any money. If he was making $1 million per year from this I doubt his energy would be drained.
I don't claim to have a recipe that sustains itself, I just find that my energy diminishes if I'm not doing a project for its own sake.
If after ten years the spark was gone we should be happy for that ten year contribution, but I don't think there's any reason to assume that money would've prevented the problems that motivated him to step down. Maybe it could incentivize him to muscle through after the magic was gone, but that's a different sort of thing.
> burns out because he doesn't want to put up with a bunch of annoying work
It’s more than annoying work, it’s pointless work needlessly created by people other than him.
It’s like migrating from Java 8 to newer versions, the decision makers placed backwards compatibility at the back of their priority list. Literally a decade later it’s still griefing migrating users, all because “Jakarta not javax” nonsense. I’m greatly simplifying but that’s the essence of it.
Now we have some genius decision to I guess protect against untrusted code doing unexpected things. And at the same time Applets are gone and Security Manager is gone. And the reality is that Java applications aren’t run with untrusted code. The run scripts define all the jars/classes used. If there was some malicious code that wanted to run, I’m fairly confident it would also just modify the run scripts to include this new flag.
So all we’ve gained is support headache and pain, and no real net gain in practice.
I wouldn't make such a conclusion. I don't think there is any info about whether OP got financial incentives for his work or not. In fact, he posted on Mastodon, he's gonna be doing open source Rust work further on.
It gives really good caching functionality so you can have large amounts of traffic and your site can easily handle it. Plus they don't charge for egress traffic.
Well think of this: if you knew there was $100 million in a dufflebag of gold at the bottom of a pond, would you learn how to put on scuba gear and retrieve it?
Perhaps you don't have compelling enough reasons to do things.
1) you're talking about ADHD which is a disability. It's like asking someone with no legs if they could sprout legs if the reason was compelling enough. The answer is still no.
2) If you were to counter the above by saying that, if you were compelled enough you might devote a small fortune and a few years training yourself and researching how to develop and use bionic legs, we then run into problem no 2: exceptional incentives / circumstances are not scalable, and the logic cannot be applied to problems of daily routine.
Back when I was a med student, I was expected to attend a clinic which started at 9. Unfortunately the local bus always arrived at that stop at 9:05, and the line was known for its flakiness. The route was 1h and 5min long, and I was about an hour's walk away from the stop myself. So in order to be at the hospital at 8:05 instead of 9:05, I aimed for the 7am bus, meaning I woke up at 5:30 to get to it. Except the 7am bus never showed up. So I waited another hour and got the 8am one, which inevitably arrived at 9:05.
When I got to the clinic 5 minutes late and got told off, I explained what happened, and the consultant said exactly the same thing you said: if there was a pot of money waiting you'd have been on time.
Yes except there wasn't, and I have to be at clinic every day, there was no way of knowing the first bus would not show up, and I can't afford to wake up at 4:30 everyday to get two buses ahead of the 8am one, just because some idiot thinks an imaginary pot of guilt-trip money would have instantly solved the problem.
I have a similar issue, I can find motivation to start something but then it spirals into other things.
For $100 million I would probably just learn to put on the scuba gear but for instance my mind would go to "I should make my own scuba gear". So for a personal project I start on something and decide I need something else, so then I want to make a tool to help me make that thing and so on. I think it's probably related to a shorter attention span so I'm working on that.
Actually do it? That's a lot less certain than you would expect.
I would probably start. Since this hypothetical is a pretty simple one-off, I might even manage to generate enough executive functioning to follow through.
What I can tell you for certain is that I am still very excited to work on a custom keyboard project that I started 4 years ago. I have all the parts and equipment readily available at home, and plenty of free time. I have not worked on it at all over the past 4 years.
I do need a compelling reason to do something. I can't figure out how all these people get through what they do without wanting to jump out their office windows, to be honest.
Is it fun/interesting? Can I make it fun/interesting? Does it make me or save me money so I can do something fun/interesting?
If the answer is no to all of these questions, I'm going to have a bad time. Unfortunately, I'm that simple. I've gotten better at number two over the years, though.
Scuba diving sounds fun. I'd probably do it for less.
The way that works best for me is a 2-step approach:
1. Think about the ultimate goal and why you want to do it. If there isn't a compelling reason, there is no reason to do it, especially if there is short-term pain or annoyance.
2. Take at least one small action towards it per day. This often puts you in the mindset to do more things.
Do you think it's better if all companies with competitive moats have a collapse in share price? I'm not really understanding what you're implying here.
It was shown time and time again, defaults are what most consumers will use even if better alternatives exist. A ton of Bing market share comes from Edge pushing it so hard.
Google would not spend all this money with Apple/Firefox if they knew that customers would use Google without being forced into it. Since they won't change search engines, Google realized they need to force it.
...owning some tiny percentage of stock, often not knowingly. Those same 60% would also benefit from having a less monopolistic Internet. Well, that's the theory at least.
I think a lot of regular users actually might prefer one company that makes all their choices for them so they don't have to deal with decision fatigue so often... the browser wars of the 90s and 2000s were not pretty, either...
They're not mutually exclusive? Especially with antitrust, where the whole point is to enable a healthier marketplace such that all shareholders of Google's competitors can also benefit (not to mention users).
It's not that high-QoL societies cannot have shareholders, it's that the stock market shouldn't take precedence over laws and regulations and anti-trust enforcement.
But I think this problem should be solved at the level of countries, not individuals.
Because individuals are always looking for a way to avoid taxes, they can disappear as a class, and there is not that much money if it is fairly redistributed among everyone.
In fairness, EVERY American should be taxed an additional 80-90% in favor of poorer countries. How can a country with a minimum wage of $10-20 an hour not share with other countries when billions of people make less than a dollar an hour?
bluntly, because incentives for investors to benefit from anticompetitive practices should be removed, in order to deter those anticompetitive practices. regulation works when you let it.
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