dcss_gardener

Yes exactly this is my standard for everything now. You can spend an unbelievable amount of tokens doing all kinds of things that are interesting as processes in their own right.

But is the outcome good? Is the game fun?

I'm both fascinated and appalled by the metagaming implications. Can I guide fable into subtly rebalancing a game in favor of my preferred play style?

Right but the dream and promise of devops was that early-to-mid career line engineers could do these things, that these weren't rare skills and combining them wasn't particularly challenging. This turned out not to be the case, these skills are the requirement not the outcome.

But if you have the budget and connections to hire a department of people with these skills and experience, and a problem interesting enough to keep them engaged in the day to day building, and a leader capable and charismatic enough to align them all into the business's goals... you should do that.

IMO it was a worthwhile experiment that probably went too far before being rejected.

Having the maintenance/ops requirements directly feed back into the design and engineering of the product is genuinely powerful. Especially for certain kinds of products, if executed with discipline you can get really good engineering reaction time with no degradation of quality, and often with much cheaper infra costs.

The problem is what you said though. People with both skillsets are rare, and combining them is legitimately a third skill on its own. And even "both" skillsets is a simplification once you start accounting for data, security, compliance, large scaling DB work etc.

It was mostly a dead end for these reasons but it was worth exploring for its potential. And some genuinely good engineering techniques went mainstream out of it, not a total waste.

A good part of it is simply license costs and obligations makes it attractive for certain kinds and sizes of businesses. But there are plenty good open source fonts now that could be used as a basis so that's not all of it.

The other is that people with an eye for design like fonts the way mushrooms like decaying wood. If you leave a designer unattended for too long fonts appear as if from nowhere.

So in this case it may not be that people haven't "figured out" that this is possible but that they don't have $20k lying around to experiment with.

I like it. I'm not generally that enthusiastic about these corporate fonts (though I know why they do it) but it's good to see some strong opinions in the serifs. It's so much better than the exaggerated anachronistic ink traps that has become such a visual cliche of the 2020s internet.

No I get it, I didn't mean to be dismissive sorry.

It really is ultimately a labor relations problem. A lot of people thought they were guaranteed to not face penury and now they're realizing they may have been wrong about that. The issue is that it's ultimately not under your control whether you can sell your labor, and there's no universal fallback if you can't. Solidarity and concrete power for workers are the answer to this and I don't think there's another one.

For the rest, yes, certainly. The vast majority of people do not enjoy their work, are not valued or rewarded for the skills they apply to it. Again, if you thought your job was writing code this sucks. But you're merely one of the billions now. I understand the grief for what people are losing but very very few people ever had that rare privilege.

This is an interesting corollary to a thing I'm seeing where "devs who thought their job was writing code" are in like existential danger.

Technical skills aren't worth shit and never were, except as far as they enable you to engage with other people in ways you and they find valuable. This used to be really far! It made it easy to believe that the technical skills on their own were what was valuable.

But the engagement was always the valuable thing, generating technical insight was a necessary prerequisite for it. Now anyone with a $20 claude sub can generate technical insight into niche problems, so what's left is everything else. Everything of value.

Gotta also remember that all these devoted segregationists didn't get removed from positions of power or influence, nor did they change their minds about the value of segregation.

You had a generation of people making legal, hiring, sentencing, admission, loan decisions that smoothly transitioned from enforcing the law to being very concerned about standards or however they personally decided was the best way to publicly approach it within their little political sphere.

Then they selected and trained the next generation of administrators, bureaucrats, and enforcers about the "right" way to do this work. A lot of things have changed but at no point did this process end in any meaningful way.

I've also heard it used to describe projects that are open source by anyone's measure but have contribution or project governance requirements like for example sqlite.

"Source available" is definitely in much wider use than "weights available" but it's not that common and it's not used consistently at all in my experience.

Weights are different enough from source code I don't find the metaphor useful or compelling. I don't see any value in trying to apply it to a novel subdomain of software engineering, frankly.

Where did you get this definition of open weight and who else uses it? The weights are published. Open source is already its own more restrictive category. What would you prefer we call this kind of release?

"Weights available" does not seem to be in wide use and doesn't, to me, communicate anything different than "open weights."

Suddenly very curious what the llm roleplay people think about this one lol. Fortunately I've already learned to stifle my curiosity on that specific subject.

You're going to get a ton of affirmatives but remember this is also the forum that considers removable batteries one of the most important smartphone features. Our opinions about consumer tech are outliers.