If you personally are willing to invest more, to dedicate attention and effort to every user/contributor/member of the opensource community you are maintaining, then that is great, and does not even conflict with the essay at all.
The only point is that all the time that you and other selfless maintainers are spending on their projects is not something that anyone is entitled to; it's a gift, not a duty.
To actually conflict witht the essay you would need to hold that any developer that ever publishes a piece of software is not only duty-bound to maintain it forever, but also to engage with every potential (crackpot) user or collaborator, and that's simply not a defensible perspective to me.
The AI completeley failed to address the actual reasons for being rejected, and instead turned to soapboxing and personal insults.
Matplotlib is rejecting AI contributions for issues that are intended to onboard human contributors because those are wasted on AI agents, requiring the same level of effort from the project maintainers with none of the benefits (no meaningful learning on the AI side for now).
Furthermore, AI agents in an open source context (as independent contributors) are a burden for now (requiring review, being unable to meaningfully learn, and messing up in more frequent and different ways than human contributors).
If the project in question wanted huge volume of somewhat questionable changes without human monitoring/supervising/directing, they could just run those agents themselves, without any of the friction.
edit:
Human "drive-by contributors" (people with very limited understanding of project specific conventions/processes/design, little willingness to learn and an interest in a singular "pet-peeve" feature or bug only) face quite similar pushback to AI agent contributors for similar reasons, in many projects (for arguably good reason).
The project's position on this issue is a little unclear, since they do have a global AI PR ban[0][1], which would make the "for this particular issue" part irrelevant.
The "for first time contributors" rule seems reasonable, considering that AIs have an unfair advantage over (beginner) human programmers :)
Re: drive by contributors
I think the AI would agree with you here. It basically made the same argument in its follow up post. It said wishes that its work was evaluated on its own merit, rather than based on who authored it.
Even if that state is just straight up burning all the tax income from single-use plastic bags, by taxing them you incentivize consumers and distributors towards untaxed, ideally more sustainable alternatives, like single use paper bags or robust multi-use bags.
> Our city just banned chain stores from giving out plastic bags under 4 mils thick, and stores now give out paper and sell re-usable bags
I don't see how this is not a massive win? Paper bags are significantly more sustainable, and multi-use bags are more durable and thrown aways less simply from being more expensive alone.
People are much more wasteful with things they didn't pay for, regardless of "inherent" value.
We’re not disagreeing. I’m saying that the tax should be set high enough that it creates the desired behavior, which is to disincentivize the widespread use of polluting plastic bags AND/OR ensure that they’re recycled and don’t wind up in the environment. If you’re charging $.05 per bag and people are just eating the tax and the bags are winding up in wetlands in similar amounts, that means your tax regime isn’t effective. You should either increase the tax or improve the system. My city’s absolute ban is equivalent to setting the tax to infinity, which is one solution that seems to work well.
Completely agree with the outlook ("fusion power irrelevant for climate change in every realistic scenario").
But where did you take those grid cost numbers from? Iter costs are <100bn AFAIC; and Germany alone (!!) projects more than that (top end) for grid expansion/operation within 2040 (mainly north/south and offshore connectivity).
Putting this note first, because it's probably the main point of confusion/surprise: I did say "bill of materials"; the estimated full cost for European and US grid upgrades that we need anyway for other reasons, with far less material, is order-of a trillion or so for US, half a trillion for EU.
For scale, this is about what China makes in 2 years; if this is rolled out over 30, which would be optimistic but plausible, it's within the realm of just how much China increased production between 2023 and 2025, being spent every year.
To get to 10x ITER's own estimate for ITER, the wikipedia page says the organisation estimates the reactor will cost about €18-22bn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
There are a lot of reasons not to do this as a single big 1m^2 "wire", amongst them being that the surface magnetic field is strong enough to be dangerous to approach with ferrous materials.
The "square meter of aluminium" is an interesting take. Not sure how much power you'd get over that thing; extrapolating from existing HVDC systems (Inga-Shaba is 1GW over 2x520mm²), I'd expect around 1TW, so twice the US demand?
But because Nimbys have no appreciation for beautiful pylons, projects in that direction are doomed for now anyway and everything needs to be buried underground at extra cost :(
Losses are I^2 R, which has the annoying consequence that % loss depends on how much juice you put through it, it isn't a constant percentage.
Pylons… eh. Doing this realistically rather than my napkin-maths, it would be a mix of many different solutions in different parts of the world, from competing environmental issues. Some would be pylons, some underground cables. Is the Sahara dry enough to run it on the ground, or in a concrete trench? I have no idea.
As a side note, every so often I keep being surprised on here by Americans who can't rely on the grid in winter because snow disables it, and some Californian forest fires are attributed to unmaintained pylons failing, dropping live wires onto the forest where they spark and light up the dry wood. These could both be resolved by burying more cables. Likewise within urban areas: here in Europe it's rather rare to see overhead lines in urban or suburban areas, unless they're over a tram/railway line.
IMO the real killer of any project like this, is geopolitics, not local politics. EU doesn't trust China, the US, or Russia; the current US administration doesn't trust or doesn't like basically everyone; Russia kinda gets along with China but few else; China would like to sell stuff to everyone but also have border disputes and other friction with many of their neighbours.
I do agree that politics is a big enemy here (with nations historically being most willing to spend big on energy when reducing interdependence, like the french Messmer plan, instead of the reverse).
Honestly the "1m² around the world" is probably a pretty good proxy for what we would need to solve intermittency problems exclusively by boosting grid connectivity (instead of storage), rescaling this to 4m² cumulative cross-section could probably transport the total global electrical energy consumption over ~10000km (but the losses would get uncomfortably high from an economical point of view after crossing the 1000-2000km distance threshold, so you might want even more aluminium when you desire connections that long).
Btw: Underground cables instead of pylons are absolutely a nimby thing. Not only is it much more expensive, because you pay for the earthwork and additional insulator, but it also limits your voltage (to avoid overpaying for insulation even more).
Return current is typically free, either from balancing 3phase AC or because decent electrodes get you <1Ohm over any distance thanks to math for the DC case. Just talking high voltage here; for short range, lower power residential connections the situation is different.
Every industry ever is going to externalize all the costs you allow it to externalize.
The individual responsibility is to vote for representatives that prevent such externalization through regulation, and to stand behind such regulation even if it is slightly inconvenient (plastic drinking straws) or somewhat costly (gas, flights).
The biggest problem is that a significant part of the global population is not willing to make even the smallest sacrifice in lifestyle towards such a goal (=> this is often difficult to see if you are in a more left/green bubble, but i absolutely true of the average citizen).
We, as voters, have expressed so little care for climate and environment sustainability that politicians don't even bother catering towards that niche any more.
In the US there was an super obvious choice 25 years ago in the US between genuine, ambitious sustainability and some generic politician not even half as competent as his father, and we all saw the outcome; politicians since barely even bother pretending to be concerned about climate sustainability because voters just don't care.
Most certainly not, but I don't see how that is relevant.
The problem (from a victim/Dutch perspective) is that there is complete denial from the Russian side (despite heaps of evidence around the people involved, origin and transport of the launcher from Russian territory).
Even if Russian judges and prosecutors are completely corrupt and biased, an actual investigation/trial is the least that would be expected here, but all we got are the bald faced lies that Russia is particularly fond of.
Because the thread was about how shooting down a civilian airliner has consequences, and the person I replied to insinuated it didn't because Malaysia was ill-equipped to push the issue militarily.
Which isn't relevant if the people who shot it down had no idea if it was / wasn't Malaysian.
Similar to how cartels likely wouldn't have the sophistication to nationally ID any aerial targets they choose to shoot.
At least some vengeance has been already done in blood, although indirectly, given how oversized has been dutch support for Ukraine compared to other similarly sized countries.
I have no doubt that this has positive effects on the national economy as a whole (you get workers, on demand, without really paying for raising, educating, training them), but it is not really sustainable because population growth is low/negative pretty much everywhere, and it also leads to significant pushback from cultural friction and local workers (that dislike competition).
You could argue that the whole rise of somwhat radical rightwing parties all over Europe is mainly the result of policies like this during the last half century...
As I see it, the root of unhappiness in voters is nonperformant housing markets and unaddressed growth of inequality where wages are not sharing in growth of profits. This creates a raft of difficult issues. And the rightwing indeed has an effective playbook to exploit these unaddressed shortfalls while blaming immigration. And the center left parties seem unwilling or unable to address the root problems.
I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong, and not even plausible (anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings, and they could not even afford proper sunday shoes for all of them, much less current living standards).
I think the biggest impact is from kids being obsolete/net negative as both workforce (when young) and retirement scheme (when the parents are old). But there is no reverting that development.
Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too, though.
Animals have "r/k selection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory ; some have huge numbers of offspring (e.g. spiders, most fish), some carefully nurture a single egg per year. Humans are already at the smaller number of offspring compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but what I think is happening is that social pressure has simply pushed the tradeoff hard into "quality".
That is, the message is "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Certainly the main victory against birthrate worldwide has been the long process of eradicating teen pregnancy.
> Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too
This is so basic as to be an axiom of the whole thing. The politics of going back to forced childrearing through suppression of healthcare are horrific, but some of the US is pushing for that.
> "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Except in real life, income is negatively correlated with fertility. Meaning, those most able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the least likely to have kids, while those least able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the most likely to have kids.
Yes - because they have high standards! Higher than achievable standards, and more income to give up if they start trading off time from work to actually raising their own children.
I'm not going to find sources right now, but from my understanding the research shows that the greatest impact on number of children is education of girls. Once women have more options, staying home their whole life popping out babies seems less desirable.
There will no doubt be a push by some of the most conservative idiots to stop educating girls.
I'd argue that the minimum education level rising in general is already strongly correlated itself, because it indicates that "uneducated" children are economically worthless (=> parents need to pay more to educate and children take longer until self-sustainable and economic "worth" of adolescents is relatively lower).
Flash news - todays people have higher standards and expectations of living than your grandma and grandpa. In particular - most people want college education for their kids. College education comes with tens of thousands in expenses and people are like "how am I gonna put 2 kids in college? I think I will have 1"
Another flash news for people who haven't had kids in daycare for a while - pricing for daycare means that for the first kid the mom could work and come ahead money wise. Second kid is about neutral (depending on location and salary, in some cases the mom comes ahead money wise, in other case she does not). Daycare pricing made us decide to have 1 kid - if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Access to contraceptives make a significant difference as well.
The college explanation cannot be the full or even the main driver, because countries with free college (+ scholarships) have the same issue. Same for daycare pricing.
> if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Why the sexist idea that only your wife you could stay home? There are a growing number of men who are staying home to raise their kids - still a minority, but a good trend to encourage.
Of course I have no idea what your personal situation is. You may have made the best choice for your situation - but you implied you didn't even consider one of your options and that is bad.
In my opinion, it mostly comes down to contraception and changing lifestyle choices. Most child-free people I know simply prefer not to have kids.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, within a few decades, the dominant concern swings back toward "overpopulation" as major advances significantly slow or reverse aging.
>I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong
If you're demanding it be all-or-nothing, then sure it is "wrong". It obviously isn't the only reason. As countries get richer, people have fewer kids.
Is it a factor? Of course it is. Children are incredibly expensive if you subscribe to modern norms and expectations. There are many, many, many people who want kids but can't afford it, and if they do have a kid it's prohibitive having more than 1. Two is basically financial suicide for many. And to be clear, I have four children which is a luxury of being in a financially rewarding career at the right time, but even still it was unbelievably tough making it happen.
"anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings"
Standards change. You understand that, right? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago. People generally aren't keen on having six kids sharing a room these days. Even bunkbeds are considered poor by many. Now since both parents will have to work, account for childcare, massive vehicles, education savings, and so on.
>? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago.
I think this is it. Watching children bore me to death. I enjoy it for about an hour and that is it. The child doesn't appreciate having someone hover over them and the parent has better things to do than play children's games all day.
When I was a kid kids would walk home by themselves, spend all day either at school or playing outside, basically parents are there to provide general guidance, food, housing, a few luxuries, and protection. But none of this insanity where it is negligent if someone is not watching the child 24/7.
The biggest regret I have about parenthood is I envisioned it as it was when I was a child, and failed to take note that nothing that was allowed when I was a child is allowed anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split. This mean the child gets little of the independence and neither does the parent get a chance to give it to them. It's made me horribly, horribly sad on so many occasions to the point I've begged my spouse to let us move to another country where children can actually experience a childhood without the busybody enforced-by-law-helicoptering nonsense.
If I could parent children under the standards of the 1960s, or in most foreign countries with more liberal standard on the age appropriate independence of children, I would happily have a few more.
> anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split.
They will, but CPS will investigate and then close the case. It is still annoying, but they mostly understand some people think if you are not there 24x7 you are neglectful.
It doesn't always work out that way, but mostly it does.
I'd argue that those higher standards/costs for raising children are the effect and not the cause.
We (need to) invest more into their education because uneducated children/adults have little or even negative value as workers (especially to their parents), this was not the case two centuries ago.
Children appear to be a "luxury" nowadays because there is no longer any expectation that they "net contribute" to their family economically (might be a positive change ethics-wise, but this is a huge shift in incentives for parents).
> expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago
This is at the root of "it's too expensive" - what are in the "needs" column has vastly changed.
It is very likely that if you want a large family, one spouse (usually the mother) is going to have to stay at home, or at most work very part time - at least until all kids are into school. The costs otherwise simply don't work out unless you have "free childcare" from grandparents or other family members - which used to be quite common.
The easiest thing to do is unsubscribe from modern norms and expectations - but this is a personal decision and too hard for many.
Your post implies that costs for raising kids stop when the kids are in school. Your post did not include costs for college - which is becoming a norm for a lot of people. Un-subscribing from the idea of giving your kids college education is a bad decision.....
Another anecdote. Nobody in my extended family has more than 3 kids. My grandmothers from both sides had more. But the trend is pretty clear. Fewer kids for the modern generation. Regardless of the level of education and income. In fact, the lower education/income ones in my extended family have fewer kids.
I can't agree with you enough. I am so sick and tired of the cost of living argument. Back in the 1800s people were living in tiny cramped places and having 5-6 kids while barely able to afford necessities.
People then also largely worked on family farms and having kids was the economically sensible thing to do. Times change and people expect differently for both their own lives as well as the lives of their children.
FWIW I have one child and financial strain is a big reason I don’t have more.
I would absolutely start looking for an actual wife if I had any certainty I would not be renting at some point, and my parents sold the detached house they raised my brother and myself in to move into a condo closer downtown, so they didn't even profit. But with rent very nearly doubling from 800 to 1400 for a single bedroom apartment since covid, my savings is evaporating and not even going into something I can sell, so I intentionally got with an infertile girlfriend instead.
In a perfect world, when you realise that your company creates and fuels addiction in children, that company should be concerned about having resulting profits seized (fully!) and responsible decisionmakers criminally prosecuted.
I would argue that we fail completely at doing this (historically, too, see e.g. leaded gas).
This incentivizes companies toward net-negative behavior until it is fully regulated despite knowing better, because it is clear that it won't be really punished anyway and remain a net-positive for them.
I am all for it, I do not think Mark Zuckerberg deserves any of the billions of dollars he has and he has contributed nothing to society in return for that. On the contrary, everyone knows his contribution has been a net negative but our systems do not accurately reward positive contribution, or disincentivise the negative.
Without discounting social media's harmful effects:
I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.
Social media has also been a way for communities to connect organically with discoverability features missing on the old web.
There are positives and negatives - if it was only negatives people would be quicker to abandon the platforms.
Although I'm not familiar with the case at hand, I agree there's potential there for real harm, especially to children.
> I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.
I am reminded of two Dominos Pizza announcements: in 2012 they launched an app to give "customers the ability to order from nearly every Domino's store in the U.S. from the palm of their hand"[0]; in 2014 they launched… voice ordering[1].
As if we had not already been ordering pizza on our "what's an app?" landlines using only our voices two decades earlier.
Regarding small business visibility, I'm old enough to remember when this visibility was provided by a thick tome delivered every so often to our doorstop, printed entirely on pages made of yellow paper. Hence the name "yellow pages": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages
In the UK, direct adverts were also supplied via our letterbox. This was also annoying, and still is, which is why many around here (I have moved to Berlin) have stickers on them reading (translated from German) "No adverts".
It has been frequently demonstrated that capitalism is terrible at pricing in externalities. In the U.S. it used to be industrial waste in the environment; now it's climate change and addiction and culture wars.
Upvoting you because all the Zuck worshipers and meta stockholders downvoted you for speaking the truth.
The guy is worth a quarter trillion dollars and doesn't seem intent on calling it a day, and insists on destroying society's youth so he can make more money. Intelligent or not, that's a mental disease.
Imagine having that sort of money where if 99% was taken away, you'd still have over 2 billion dollars to your name....and you refuse to just walk away and focus on things like your family, making the world a better place, or just enjoying your life. Tom took the money for MySpace and actually seems to enjoy time with his family, traveling, doing photography, etc.
For all his (many) faults, Gates took a look at the polio virus and said "I'm bigger than you" and pretty much spent until it was wiped out. Doesn't counteract the bad or the Epstein stuff at all, but wiping out polio has helped people.
Mark's done jack shit to genuinely help people besides his shareholders and his immediate family. One might argue that his whole bunker thing is an indicator that he's realized he's done tremendous damage to society, but instead of fixing it, he's insulating himself for when the proverbial bomb goes off.
The only point is that all the time that you and other selfless maintainers are spending on their projects is not something that anyone is entitled to; it's a gift, not a duty.
To actually conflict witht the essay you would need to hold that any developer that ever publishes a piece of software is not only duty-bound to maintain it forever, but also to engage with every potential (crackpot) user or collaborator, and that's simply not a defensible perspective to me.
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