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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

    As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

    We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

    In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.


  • You’re not seeing the whole picture: I’m paid by the government to do research, and in doing that research my group develops several libraries that can benefit not only other research groups, but also industry. We license these libraries under MIT, because otherwise industry would be far more hesitant to integrate our libraries with their proprietary production code.

    I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus. Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

    Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.


  • I do exactly this: Write code/frameworks that are used in academic research, which is useful to industry. Once we publish an article, we publish our models open-source under the MIT license. That is because companies that want to use it can then embed our models into their proprietary software, with essentially no strings attached. This gives them an incentive to support our research in terms of collaborative projects, because they see that our research results in stuff they can use.

    If we had used the GPL, our main collaborators would probably not have been interested.


  • Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.

    (1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.



  • You are neglecting the cost-benefit of temporarily jumping to the wrong conclusion while waiting for more conclusive evidence though. Not doing anything because evidence that this is bad is too thin, and being wrong, can have severe long-term consequences. Restricting tiktok and later finding out that it has no detrimental effects has essentially zero negative consequences. We have a word for this principle in my native language - that if you are in doubt about whether something can have severe negative consequences, you are cautious about it until you can conclude with relative certainty that it is safe, rather than the other way around, which would be what you are suggesting: Treating something as safe until you have conclusive evidence that it is not, at which point a lot of damage may already be done.








  • We tried the “trade your skills for something you need”. In every surviving society it eventually lead to the development of a currency (not hard to see why), which requires/leads to regulation, which requires enforcement, aaaand you’re back at a modern society. I’m all for more regulation to reduce economic and social differences in society, but the people that are talking about abolishing governments and currencies need to pick up a history book and follow their ideas to their natural conclusion.

    “Controlling speech” is a hallmark of authoritarian governments, be they far-left or far-right, there are plenty of historical examples of both.






  • Yeah, the famous fascists that are actively working hard to join the EU, which we’ve seen so clearly the past decade just loves having fascist states in its ranks. You know, the fascist government that had an actual election as late as 2019 where southern and eastern regions largely voted for the person that won.

    Notice how there was actually a change of power in that election - a known hallmark of fascist states.


  • Yup, who would have though that Russia invading their neighbour suddenly caused the entirety of western Europe to start the largest investments in military and weapons manufacturing since the cold war?

    Looking at the results of this war so far (major expansion of NATO in the North, massively increased military spending in all of NATO, massively increased size of the Ukrainian military), you would almost think Putins goal was something completely different than preventing NATO expansion and “de-militarizing” Ukraine.

    It’s almost like the best way of preventing your neighbours from building huge militaries and joining alliances is by cooperating with them and helping them feel safe, rather than threatening, coercing and bombing them.