I like the idea of not buying disposable furnitures, especially when there are alternatives at the same price. I can stand on my current desk (the ikea kitchen table) with my full weight and probably jump on it, the previous one was bowing if I did as little as resting my elbows on it
Some people defend it because they are nondualists. They think the moral value of human life rounds to zero against the existence of something which can effortlessly outclass them in all domains. This is obviously confused, but they can't bring themselves to say "Very cool, and also I think humans are inherently special and deserve to continue existing even if all we do is lie around all day and watch the Hallmark channel."
Happy Valentine's day to those who celebrate btw <3
>Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision.
"An informed decision" is not a black or white category, and it definitely isn't when we're talking about risk pricing for B2B services and goods, like what MinIO largely was for those who paid.
Any business with financial modelling worth their salt knows that very few things which are good and free today will stay that way tomorrow. The leadership of a firm you transact with may or may not state this in words, but there are many other ways to infer the likelihood of this covertly by paying close attention.
And, if you're not paying close attention, it's probably just not that important to your own product. What risks you consider worth tailing are a direct extension of how you view the world. The primary selling point of MinIO for many businesses was, "it's cheaper than AWS for our needs". That's probably still true for many businesses and so there's money to be made at least in the short term.
"Informed decisions" mean you need to have the information.
Like with software development, we often lack the information on which we have to decide architectural, technical or business decisions.
The common solution for that is to embrace this. Defer decisions. Make changing easy once you do receive the information. And build "getting information" into the fabric. We call this "Agile", "Lean", "data driven" and so on.
I think this applies here too.
Very big chance that MinIO team honestly thought that they'd keep it open source but only now gathered enough "information" to make this "informed decision".
I wonder how many guys who have have written or significantly maintained "household name" level FOSS products just earn a corporate sinecure somewhere as hypercompetent remote sysadmins or ICs or something. Folks who don't necessarily care to earn top dollar, with all the headaches that entails, but also almost never have to actually work more than 2 hours in a given day to keep the ship going, and the arrangement is just so cozy and gives them enough time to themselves to work on their actual passion that they accept the arrangement.
I know of at least one recruiter who does something like this and specializes in greybeard hiring, and it seems like a steady niche if you have the network to pull it off.
Yes. Absolutely. The biggest data point pushing the affirmative is less Anki itself but the success of products at the forefront of the second wave of spaced repetition apps [1] like Khan Academy. Duolingo, too, but Duolingo gets flak from people for being too Goodhearted by retention for its own good; Khan Academy actually does force feed you enough actual problems to learn some math.
Writing the cards is engaging with the cards for some small subset of the population. I am part of that audience. But most people are terrible at it, and it's not an easy skill to build.
Ther majority of people who are interested in Anki -- and the vast majority of normal human beings with nonzero willingness to pay, which is a very unique subset of the population with goals that tend to look like "Pass X exam by Y date so I can [get a job|earn my citizenship in a better country|...] -- just want good pedagogical material wrapped in some control harness so they can treat some fraction of their learning the same way they treat going to the gym. Show up, put in the reps, get results.
Oh dude, no. The instant I could start using something like https://www.wolframalpha.com/ in college over a decade ago, I did. I've never, not once in my life, had any desire to use a physical calculator when I could use a full blown computer instead. I think it's inferior even for pedagogy purposes - I can't screenshot and make Anki cards out of a TI-84.
I tried using my WolframAlpha in high school but I had no idea what I was doing and it felt way too complicated, but in college it is a game changer and I still use it to do school work. Totally agree!
>This is a practical policy allowing me to maintain my own professional standards and remain employable in a difficult economy.
I'm interested to hear more about the rationale behind the "remain employable" part of this line.
All things equal, we would normally expect someone deliberately saying they won't use a certain tool to perform a certain job as limiting their employment opportunities, not expanding it. The classic example is people who refuse to drive for work; there are good non-employment reasons for this (driving is the most dangerous thing many people do on a daily basis) but it's hard to argue that it doesn't restrict where one can work.
I think the most likely rationale is that the author thinks that posting a no-AI policy for professional work is itself seen as a signal of certain things about them, their skill level, etc., and that wins out for the kinds of clients they wish to take on. This doesn't have to be a long- or even medium-run bet to make, given that it's cheap to backtrack on such a policy down the line. Either way it's clear from reading the measured prose that there's an iceberg of thinking behind what's visible here and they are probably smarter than I am.
>if you’re an executive [...] you get the big bucks for a reason
In Finland? Notably wage-compressed Finland?
No comment on the specifics of this case, I agree with you that the executive should be where the buck stops. But you would be surprised how many various execs I have met here over the years who admit behind closed doors they really do treat it as a fancy job title that barely pays above their last position, but comes with 3x the stress, and they do it simply because, well, someone has to. You can't really be surprised that most of the folks here who you might want to be in the C-suite decide it's just not worth it, that remaining a middle manager or even an IC is simply a far better value proposition.
Posting anonymously here. I was on the leadership team of a Nordic public company, reporting to the CEO, presenting to the board and representing the company at the AGM. Total comp a little under $200k.
The compensation really didn’t match what you take on in terms of responsibility and legal liability. The stress was significant too. That said, as you point out, the work needs doing.
Recommended if you have an over-active sense of duty, not otherwise.
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