I'm surprised at how many people are responding negatively to software that improves user experience.
Suppose we had started out with the command UI that gitless has and someone came along and tried to sell us the current git cli UI. It would be completely ridiculed.
The only thing possibly questionable about the gitless interface is that it does away with staging. However, you can always fall back to git for staging functionality if you like, and use gitless for most other commands. I think it is a win.
They are not paying $250k per employee. You have to factor in payroll taxes, paying accountants to keep books and CPAs to do taxes, benefits, and a multitude of other regulation-imposed payroll costs.
All of this is to support salaries of around $125k - $150k.
The same goes for pretty much any employer. If a fast food restaurant hires someone at $8/hr, it actually costs them around $16/hr to hire the employee.
In a free market Let's Encrypt could probably cut its expenses to close to half what it's at now.
It's amazing how many people didn't actually read all 4 parts of the article.
His argument has nothing to do with caching or prefetching, etc.
First, it's about random access. You can't prefetch a random fetch!
Second, he's measuring time, a perfectly valid thing to do. And the reality is when you lay your memory cells out in 2 dimensions it takes order of sqrt(n) time to fetch a random memory cell value, where n is the number of memory cells you're using.
Third, it turns out order of sqrt(n) time is the best you can do even if you had the best technology in the universe.
How would increased taxes and mandatory benefits reduce the cost of employees?
Increased employee costs make an employer less likely to take risks and produce pressure to hire less workers. Then a few workers gain at the expense of others not having a job at all. Why do you hate workers?
This is why there needs to be less taxes and mandatory benefits. Counter-intuitively, these things work together to reduce the number of jobs and reduce worker flexibility and happiness.
It's humorous that they trot out the definition of innovation:
"make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products"
A patent explicitly forbids you to make changes on something already established. Want to make an innovation on a processor that already exists? Sorry, patent! You'll have to wait nearly 2 decades to make your innovation.
Plus it just doesn't pass the smell test. They're basically claiming that if companies spent billions of more dollars on innovation instead of patent litigation we would have less innovation!?
The j-core open processor and RISC-V instruction set are only possible because of patents that expired. Imagine what web development would be like if someone had patented using xmlhttprequest to update the DOM and info in the DOM. Would innovation have increased or lagged?
Patents quite literally create monopolies. If monopolies are so good, why does anti-trust exist? I think it's quite obvious that patents stifle innovation. Oh yes, they may provide a legal method for people to rent-seek, and make lots of money through extraction, but they definitely slow the rate of innovation.
If only people learned history. Look at the comprehensive list of hyperinflations in modern history. Every single one happened under leftist rule of the country [1]. Look at Venezuela, Cuba or any other very leftist state. There's always a rich elite, and a poor underclass.
If only people would learn that its socialistic policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer! Capitalism (voluntary trade and respect for private property) has always improved everyone's lives. What we need is a transition to more capitalism not less of it. If we keep implementing leftist policies that sound nice (like min wage, 'free' education, 'free' healthcare, etc) we'll end up poor like all the other socialist countries before us. It's time to actually have compassion on the poor and create opportunities through capitalism.
The biggest problem is intellectual property. Copyright lasts life + 70 years and patents last 20 years. That's a long time to have a legal monopoly on something, and is partly why companies are so big and can behave so badly.
Innovation comes through competition, not monopoly. Ideally, we'd eliminate patents and copyrights altogether, but as a compromise, I think having terms of 3 years, with no renewals, is fair. That way a business can capitalize on what it creates and get a 3 year head start on competition, but you still get competition fairly soon which benefits consumers.