The intellectual laziness I am seeing here is horrifying. Look I get that many of the HN crowd does not like "woke" ideology, but you should recognize that perhaps a book or some form of free expression you like will be banned in the future when the political winds change. In the US we are eroding constitutional norms due to democratic backsliding. The hard fought freedoms will be hard to get back and you don't know what part of the fence you will be on in the aftermath.
My journey into professional software development was due to the efforts of the GNU organization that provided high quality compilers and tools along with a legal structure to promote the creation of more free software. The innovation was that code is speech and is protected by the first amendment (in the US). I have watched the software community devolve into just corrupt thievery due to the silicon valley "as long as I get rich, I am good" culture. That culture is seeping into every aspect of our social lives leading to deep enshittification. Monopolization of the means of artistic expression due to financialization is ruining everything.
Freedom of speech (in the US) protects book publishing too, or do you think school boards are elected, county and state governments are above the constitution?
Curation is not the issue. The librarians already selected and purchased the books, the state is forcing the librarians to remove them for political reasons. The state could hire qualified activist librarians who only want politically conservative "approved" books who curate only those books, but I will let you guess why they can't find qualified conservative librarians.
Who said curation was the issue? Where is the assumption that libraries don't have political reasons even coming from? The state handpicks librarians? What is with the implication that there are no "qualified conservative librarians"????
What in the world are you talking about? Why are you spouting a bunch of bigotry that isn't relevant to anything?
Librarians actually read the books and are experts in the curation of the books. It is not actually about moral authority it is about expertise.
Special accommodations are made for students. Parents can ask for their child not to participate in activities they deem inappropriate. I see this happen all of the time during Halloween events. It would be nice if Christian conservatives would do the same.
> It is not actually about moral authority it is about expertise.
I sure am glad that there is an Objectively Correct set of books children should be exposed to, unaffected by issues of identity, politics, or morality, and it's just a matter of applying dispassionate expertise to discover it.
And of course, that this is what librarians are doing, and not letting their personal beliefs interfere.
It sounds like you are trying to say there is no such thing as expertise. These people have degrees in education and/or library science. Why bother going to university to learn anything then?
No, I am saying there is no such objectively correct set of books. Hiding behind "expertise" doesn't make educational decisions less political. Children can be indoctrinated more, or less, "expertly".
But then everyone knows this, and I don't for a second believe you or anyone else thinks school librarians make decisions entirely based on universal (i.e. not specific to any country, ethnic group, or political persuasion) dispassionate principles. You're only pretending to to win an argument, then you'll go right back to believing the opposite, and call for libraries to be "decolonized" [1].
I guess we're lucky libraries are expert and objective now, unlike how they were 3 years ago when they were biased and needed decolonizing. Except the ones that haven't decolonized yet, of course. Those librarians' expertise and judgment can still be questioned.
There is a difference between a professional academic librarians managing a collection and political activists suppressing societal critiques and marginalized identities.
The reference you posted is about collection management at libraries London School of Economics in England. England has different history with respect to colonization than the US. A sordid history in-fact. We are also talking books for adults not children under 18.
The US itself is was decolonization project. I hope you know that colonialism is rarely judged a good thing in modern scholarship.
> There is a difference between a professional academic librarians managing a collection and political activists suppressing societal critiques and marginalized identities.
Yes, the difference is the political activism of librarians is institutionalized [0]. You don't view the absence of Jared Taylor's "White Identity", or any similar book, from school libraries, as "suppressing societal critiques", do you? Why, because it's done quietly and tacitly?
It's so funny seeing the same people complaining how every institution is systemically racist or whatever-ist (including math [1,2] - I made sure links are for the US, since apparently that is such a special case that critiques of institutions in even the most closely related countries are completely inapplicable to it), then turn around and claim that "no, this institution that does what I like is beyond politics, driven by pure expertise", even in a field as fuzzy and political as child education.
> The reference you posted is about collection management at libraries London School of Economics in England.
Thank you for this uselessly reductive interpretation. While yes of course libraries in those other, lesser countries are politicized and in need of correction, libraries in the US are objective and beyond reproach - unless [3] that [4] reproach [5] comes [6] from [7] the [8] left [9,10,11].
When activists lobby to change institutions how I like, this is good and necessary - those institutions are systemically racist, colonialist, and biased!
When activists lobby to change institutions how you like [12], this is bad and political - those institutions are dispassionate, apolitical, objective experts!
[12] I don't actually like it, I just don't fool myself into thinking what librarians are doing is any different. If anything, it is worse, since it is invisible and unchallenged.
The president of the US struggles to stay awake in his brief detours from the golf course. It’s a perfect metaphor for the country. All seriousness has left the building.
My hypothesis is that when Siri does processing on the phone its abilities are severely diminished. Perhaps there is some heuristic it uses to pick if it processes voice to text on the phone vs on the server (e.g. possibly based on server load). That might be why you see inconsistencies day to day.
MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL).
https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
Isn't that standard protective boilerplate so that they cant get rugpulled themselves on a contribution, 2 years later? I thought the ASF had something similar.
Requiring AGPL on the contribution would also prevent a rugpull. MinIO went beyond that.
The wording gives an Apache license only to MinIO, not to people who use it. So MinIO can relicense the the contributor code under a commercially viable license, but no one else can. Everyone else will only have access to the contribution under AGPL as part of the whole project.
Presumably they've either gotten explicit permission after the fact, rewritten in the commerical product, or the contribution was too minor to be a concern. I don't think they could have put the amount of though needed to ensure they benefit from contributions in a way no one else can, and then also be unaware of license issues with any possible AGPL only contributions.
Except... the FSF is actually on the extreme opposite end of this issue. They do formal copyright assignment from the GNU contributors to the FSF. This way, they have a centralized final say on enforcement that is resistant to copyleft trolls, but it ultimately allows the theoretical possibility of a rugpull.
I feel that for long time people coming into the industry did not really care about code as a craft, but more of code as easy money.
This was first salient to me when I saw posts about opensource developers who make critical infrastructure living hand to mouth. Then the day in the life of a software engineer working in a coffee shop. Then the bootcamps or just learn to code movement. Then the leetcode grinders. Then developers living in cars in SF due to lack of affordable housing. Now it is about developers vibe coding themselves out of a job.
The issue is and will always be that developers are not true professionals. The standards are loosely enforced and we do a poor job of controlling who comes in and out of the industry. There are no ethics codes, skillsets are arbitrary, and we don't have any representation. Worst yet we bought into this egocentric mindset where abuses to workers and customers are overlooked.
This makes no sense to me. Lawyers have bar associations, doctors have medical associations, coders have existential angst.
Now the bosses are like automate your way out of a job or you will lose your job.
I always ask myself, in what other "profession" would its members be so hostile to their own interests?
Because there's a difference between a "coder" and a software engineer.
Someone who finished a bootcamp might be able to write a simple program in Python, but that doesn't make them a software engineer.
I've said this out loud before and have gotten told I'm an elitist, that my degree doesn't make me better at software than those without one. That majoring in computer science teaches you only esoteric knowledge that can't be applied in a "real job".
On the other hand, the industry being less strict about degrees can be considered a positive. There definitely do exist extremely talented self-taught software engineers that have made a great career for themselves.
But I definitely agree with the need of some sort of standard. I don't care if some bootcamper gets a job at the latest "AI on the blockchain as a service" unicorn startup, good for them. I'd rather have people with formal degrees work on something like a Therac-25, though.
As one of the “self taught software engineers that made a great career for myself”, I think you are correct. Maybe not so much in the “better or worse” sense, but there are definitely moments in my “real job” where I can recognize that the thing we’re talking about or working on is something that my colleagues had formal instruction on and I didn’t, and usually in cases like this they’re better suited to talk about and work though the problem.
To me the biggest difference is that they had the time/opportunity to work on a huge breadth of different problems and develop their pattern matching ability, whereas I only get to work on problems specific to my role/employer, so anything extra I have to learn on my own time. But they already know it.
Well... most people who get degrees, get CS degrees, which is not the same as Software Engineering.
Think about chemistry and chemical engineering. Chemistry is "where do the outer shell electrons go, how strong are the bonds between the atoms". Chemical engineering is "how do we make the stuff in multi-ton quantities without blowing up downtown". Those are not the same discipline.
I mean, sure, a software engineer had better know some about big O, and about how to use locks without getting in trouble. But they also need to know how to find their way around a decade-old million-line codebase, and what things they do today that are likely to turn into maintenance headaches a decade from now, and how to figure out what the code is doing (and why) when there's no documentation. I'm not sure that a CS degree teaches you those things. (For that matter, designing a Software Engineering degree so that it actually teaches you those things isn't easy...)
Unfortunately there is absolutely no incentive structure in place anywhere to reward someone for writing code that lasts a decade or more without major maintenance. How would you do that? Send a check a decade later?
Even setting aside the impossibility of knowing whether the choices you're making will stand the test of time, how do you convince your boss, PM, director etc that it's worth spending extra time now rather than accepting some tech debt?
When I look back at the code I've written which has lasted the longest --- was not yet made obsolete by some product or technical redesign --- it is generally not the code that I was proudest of at the time I wrote it.
And to the original point, yeah, my CS degree is fairly useless at this point but it did prepare me for constantly wrapping my head around new abstract concepts I guess.
> Well... most people who get degrees, get CS degrees, which is not the same as Software Engineering.
Despite the name of the degree, most computer science students go on to become software engineers, so software engineering is a required part of many CS programs these days, whereas chemical engineering isn't really required (to the same extent) in chemistry programs. Depending on the program it can vary how much though. At my current place it's 3 semesters but others might have more or less. One course is a sort of simulation of a working software firm, and the other is a sort of 1 year internship with a real company or a research lab. This has not always been the case, as when I was in school I graduated without knowing version control. Today, git is taught to freshmen.
Although, we don't have many decade-old million-line codebases lying around to hand the students, we still try to give them the necessary skills they might need to work with one. But we can't teach everything in 4 years, some things have to be learned in the field on the job and from seniors engineers.
You don't need a degree to learn CS theory, though. Many of us who are self-taught, have learned about that as well (yes, there are people reading SCIP as a hobby).
And conversely, a CS degree doesn't necessarily mean that the person has actually learned what they were taught.
Professions that have "associations" are limited by physical geography. The "association" is a political power play although I concede that it offers certain guarantees about the people working in the profession.
Programming can't be constrained in that fashion. Having a "Software Developer" association will 1. not solve the problem; and maybe make it worse and 2. move all of the industry outside of the US.
I think the profession of teacher comes close. There are extremely good and extremely bad teachers and everything in between. Knowing the subject you teach very well does not guarantee you can teach it well, often on the contrary.
Maybe coders can see themselves as teachers to the machine. Either they teach character by character, or vibe idea by vibe idea, or anything in between.
> Now the bosses are like automate your way out of a job or you will lose your job.
That is and always has been part of the job. Automating away labor is what we do, and there's no form of labor we understand better or have more opportunity to automate than our own.
My journey into professional software development was due to the efforts of the GNU organization that provided high quality compilers and tools along with a legal structure to promote the creation of more free software. The innovation was that code is speech and is protected by the first amendment (in the US). I have watched the software community devolve into just corrupt thievery due to the silicon valley "as long as I get rich, I am good" culture. That culture is seeping into every aspect of our social lives leading to deep enshittification. Monopolization of the means of artistic expression due to financialization is ruining everything.
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