ska

I presume you meant one way NDA, your overall point is a really good one. Contracts are very useful as a leading indicator of how the counterparty thinks about the relationship.

FWIW professional liability insurance absolutely can make sense, even be necessary when writing software, depending on the nature of the contract and your overall responsibilities.

FWIW in my experience building both, hardware is always finished first because it’s cheaper to change the software later in the cycle. Much like drywallers patching over electrical/plumbing sins, software fills gaps …

>>> In fact, in certain cases it can increase the size instead of compressing.

Fwiw, all (lossless) compression algorithms will increase the size of some inputs.

But also yes. There may be some loss as you describe , but they’ll taste better brought back till room temperature than straight from the fridge .

"On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service."

I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.

I think the problem runs deeper than that. What you’ve done is an interesting tool for finding out more about a relatively small slice of developers.

Didn’t they just release a small-ish one ?

May have been the wrong time too. 1999 was chock full of companies that failed to get traction and died during the dot-com collapse, but variants became much more successful 20 years later. Much of this was mostly waiting in infrastructure I suspect.

This is something Common Lisp got really right.

Sure, there are also cases where it is not needed. But some called out in GP were not typically correct. And often it is opaque to the researchers only because someone did an IRB in an earlier step with usage that covers sharing it with you.

This is correct. IRB will be simple is not the same as not needing one.