I think Ruby would be a counterpoint - although it's the only one I know of.
I worked for a Japanese company although in a local office with local management. Through all those layers of protection I got the impression that they suffer from what all corporates suffer from - no software engineers that have made it to the top. Software companies run by people who have no clue.
In the US, for example, I think some people who have a clue or a partial clue have made it up the ladder in some places and therefore although everyone there has their horror stories of idiotic behavior it is probably somewhat better.
I had a go at making an Ubuntu package recently - and to setup a PPA for it. That was a nightmare from hell that I gave up on (from ambiguous documentation, to 100s of how-tos that don't quite work for my case to making a package build in their system). To me it seems odd that coreutils is worth footling with when other problems seem to stand out to me.
"Look, the technology is just getting better all the time. Evetually we won't need a company to have any Managers or other employees or even an owner and that's just the way it is...."
I am joking obviously but I would like those management types who are so "sucks for you but I'm ok" about it to start arguing why they're special for a change :-)
Would be awesome if instead of trying to replace managers and employees, those people tried to replace customers. They could sell to themselves, amongst themselves, and leave the rest of us out of it.
They're already doing that, which is why you can't buy any fucking RAM. The semiconductor companies have already fallen past the event horizon of their commercial black hole.
I think that is what they are actually looking for. Imagine: You have capital, you invest in a business that is run entirely by computers. You want to scale? Just provision more agents / cores. It's completely autonomous. It's a money printing machine that extracts revenue from customers, with no work required by the owner.
Frankly, the finance world has already achieved this -- they just lend money to make money, with no work involved. Regular businesses are jealous so now they feel they can use computers to do the same thing but in non-finance areas.
It's like Electric Insight, which was a fantastic if proprietary tool.
There's an enormous amount of analysis you can do with tools like this from estimating how much faster the build would be with more cores (i.e. is it worth adding more) to things like a diff of one build against another: why is one build bad and the other good - what tasks had different parameters or weren't in both builds?
It's quite odd how everything gets re-invented isn't it? N years ago I didn't think that javascript would ever have a "build time" problem but I've already been asked if I can write a "filesystem" for one well known web platform and I wondered if they wanted something like EFS. I obviously said no because I didn't feel like trying to pretend that I write filesystems three times a year.
Programming is fun but it's also about learning to do things and trying out ideas that you have about how to organise something and make it work well - becoming a master of some craft.
If you don't care about programming but just problem solving...or you think all of this is irrelevant to "the customer" then AI might make you happy.
Can you imagine, for example, if Tolkien (insert favorite writer here) had to get AI to write Lord of the Rings for him: what would happen? How would he get it to express his idea? In order to make money he could just describe a few ways of expressing things and outline his plot and ..... wham. He could then make it write an Icosology (series of 20 books - I had to look it up) and we'd all be so happy right?
The fantasy genre that followed LoTR is almost like that! :-)
I don't love control so much that I want to write in assembler and I don't like it so little that I want to make everything by effectively trying to tell someone else how to do it for me and finding that they just don't understand. I think the expression of the idea matters sometimes much more than even the idea and since words are not 100% effective at communicating ideas any language based description is going to be a lot of effort.
So like everyone else I use it but for things I don't care about - things which are a stepping stone to something else. I also use it for things I don't understand and I feel delightfully empowered at how something super hard turned out easy....until it doesn't work properly.
There was a time (sigh) when everything that's happening now was science fiction. I dreamed of having a computer that could even store a video let alone stream one off the internet.
It must be a bit like living through the invention of the aeroplane - from crazy glider enthusiasts running down the sides of hills to London-Sydney in only 19 hours with a couple of hundred other people.
Reading old versions of Byte Magazine reminds me of the tremendous excitement I felt about the amazing things that were happening and going to happen. It's difficult now to feel like that as almost every one of those things has come true and at the same time it all turned to **t.
There were bad times when IBM dominated and then bad times when Microsoft seemed to be in a position to crush every idea and bend everything to itself.
One of the better times was when Google and others essentially sidestepped Microsoft making it irrelevant. That was a time of some hope.
We're back in an era of dominant players with impossible advantages who are extending that dominance and strongly impacting the world outside computing. Old dragons were defeated and bigger ones have risen to replace them.
What do we really have to look forward to? A new technology that cannot really be exploited by undergraduates in their garage to defeat monsters because they're paying them for it? Trying to do each other out of a job by more frenzied use of AI? Huge corporations locking themselves into positions of such power that politicians don't have the security to challenge them? Space travel, communications etc being gated by trillionaires? The Microsoft strategy but progressively levered till it is applied to everything?
But here we are on a YC related website. We've created this world.
Sometimes, yes, but obviously not everyone. I suspect that it depends what you're doing and how. Perhaps the AI has more difficulty understanding what some people want than what others want. I certainly have had a milder version of this and it neutralises the value of the tool because it keeps trying to do things you don't want in a way you don't want it to do them. I get annoyed at having to write huge explanations of how to do something and end up doing it myself sometimes.
Yes, there should be some limit on the amount of IP that can be accumulated. I don't know how one would do it in a way that couldn't be perverted/abused though.
I'd rather give it to individuals than corporations at least. It's useful as a lever to protect the weak from the powerful. Perhaps it should simply not be transferable? Another alternative would be for its power to weaken over time in some way.
In a recent one of these threads someone suggested that a short term starts when the work changes hands (or, I'd also say when a contract/instrument is made including it, or a payment is made allowing control).
So, you could keep it to get your full X years (I like 20), or lease/sell and the work would enter the public domain sooner.
I worked for a Japanese company although in a local office with local management. Through all those layers of protection I got the impression that they suffer from what all corporates suffer from - no software engineers that have made it to the top. Software companies run by people who have no clue.
In the US, for example, I think some people who have a clue or a partial clue have made it up the ladder in some places and therefore although everyone there has their horror stories of idiotic behavior it is probably somewhat better.
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