morning-coffee

Almost 60-yo programmer here... been doing it since the '80s. It used to be predominantly people interested in how computers work and making them do neat things. (Not HN, but just generally any gathering place for programmers.) Now its predominantly those who answered the call of the dinner bell rung over the last 20 years or so of how "easy" it is to make money with software... and grifters gonna grift... en masse.

This! Since it became easier for people to post their thoughts on a problem vs. research and learn from past work, we're now in the era where its harder to find the seminal and really-well-explained material for having to wade through years and years of people's rediscovery blogs.

(Don't get me wrong; I too think the article is great; just wish all the folks who went to JS bootcamp and are amazed by this would have cracked any CS or OS text book written since the late 60's and browsed a few chapters.)

> Otherwise corporations choose what gets funded, and they only fund narratives and experiments they think will be profitable for them.

Well, that's the incentive mechanism that keeps the accountability for the results whether we like it or not. The government doesn't immediately go out of business if the research they fund is full of fraud or goes nowhere useful. Moral outrage at all the fraud in research associated with these Universities and government funded studies isn't a powerful enough incentive mechanism to correct that fraud, apparently.

"established standards" - now who has the incentive to run shitty services? those big enough to control the "established standards".

It's somewhat ironic... if a University's CS department was charged with developing and maintaining the system, what an awesome learning tool it would be. CS students would maybe even be invested in the outcome by having to eat their own dogfood and then really appreciate it what it's like in the real world.

Study history. Tractor businesses have operated successfully from the 1930's through the 1990's using this model. Those tractors are still running and still serviceable. (I've run a Farmall Model H from the 50's and IH-576 from the '70s as recently as five years ago... they are built to last and parts are plentiful or easily reproduced... and International Harvester is still in business (maybe under the Case name now.)

These subscription-based and planned-obsolescence fads are experiments that will run their course. In the end, business will thrive where they meet consumer demands, not because their business model was proposed in some boardroom.

Good. Simplicity should win out over enshittification in the end.

This is (yet another reason) why we can't have nice things on the Internet anymore. Sigh.

The F-35 was specified when the Joint Strike Fighter program began in 1995, with the development contract awarded in 2001, and the first flight in 2006 or thereabouts.

Of course it was built for a different war... the use of drones didn't proliferate until after the 2010s and really more since the 2020s with Russia/Ukraine.

So, thanks Captain Obvious and arm-chair quarterback, for the insightful article.

Right. But the copyright was violated when you used 'a' to begin with.

The Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter missions would beg to differ.

(And "absolute" or other adjectives don't qualify "correctness"... it simply is or isn't.)

In my engineering job of over 30 years, I've noticed that the heroes that get rewarded for fixing the problems are usually the same ones who created the problems in the first place.

I've only been a paid-on-call firefighter for 10 years, but I have yet to work with any who are also arsonists. ;)

I don't know who is dumber now... the AI, or the humans who keep interacting with them thinking that they actually possess some form of intelligence and are not just stochastically regurgitating a token stream.

If the premise contributing to the conclusion to run their own chat service is:

> But Signal is still one company running one service. If they shut down tomorrow or change direction, I’m back to square one.

Aren't they in the same boat now with Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt?