Being the maintainer of such a big open-source application as Chrome used to grant dictatorial power: maintaining a fork represented too much work. It only happened in the most awful situations, such as Oracle acquiring OpenOffice.
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.
Smart move: now that they're an established player, and that they have a few billions of investors' money to spend, they comfort a jurisprudence that stealing IP to train your models is a billion dollar offense.
What a formidable moat against newcomers, definitely worth the price!
> it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole.
it depends what's most beneficial: having a few percents of very mathematically experts people in maths-heavy professions? Or having everyone somewhat decent at maths, even when it doesn't affect their productivity in their jobs?
I don't have any hard data about this, but instinctively I'd bet on the former: I'd rather have a few hundreds more Sutskevers, than most of the country's bakers know their way around PDE.
* be completely autonomous from day 1, and progressively increase the number of situations you can drive through;
* or drive through every legal situation from day 1, and increase the % of them handled autonomously.
I believe the 2nd approach, Tesla's, has one key advantage: it collects data about freak situations much faster and more exhaustively. Given how data has become the key resource in AI, that's probably a very strategic asset they've accumulated here.
Also, Waymo's joker (remote operation by humans when the software bails out) is totally replicable by Tesla robotaxis.
the magic power of spreadsheets is that they encourage improvisation, and it probably applies to that one.
you have only one data structure (the 2D table), data types are super-weak, there are no variable names... all of this guarantee a maintenance nightmare, and rightfully scares developers. But it's also a very low barrier to entry. You've got data, you paste them into the grid, and you start toying with them, before having figured anything about them.
That's an amazing superpower, when targeting non-developers, and that's why Excel is the most used programming language over the world, by far: it's probably got an order of magnitude more users than there are trained developers in the world.
Remote has been fantastic, to extend our pool of potential customers/employers. Not working in an open space, not being disturbed by pointless red-tapers and middle managers is a productivity boost. Not losing time and energy in commutes as well.
I can see one serious drawback with pure remote: it's a cumbersome way to mentor junior developpers. In big companies which maintain a balance of junior/senior staff, and try to make the former grow, it's a legitimate issue. In start-ups, which expect you to hit the ground running, and don't have an army of managers to keep busy, remote should be the norm.
That's what better IDEs did to Java codebases indeed: they made layered boilerplates and leaky abstractions somewhat navigable, therefore generations of careless contractors have been able to ship ever nastier messes.
there's a problem between Bob and the bureaucracy. whether it's a Bob problem or a bureaucratic problem is left as an exercise to the reader.
However, I'd be thoroughly unsurprised if Bob happened to be on the autism spectrum. And autistic people are counter-intuitive but very easy to handle: force yourself to be extremely explicit, and to stick to first-degree in your exchanges to a point that seems ridiculous (to you). That's it, really.
I've had a bakfiets for 12+ year in France; I did DIY electrification at the time, as that was the only viable alternative then; both kids have been moved around in it since they're born (now my teenager can use our non-cargo e-bike, a RadExpand 5); I've already taxied two (petite) adult women at once in it; I use it as a wheelbarrow under steroids to bring wood pellets from parking spots to my boat's moorings, 7×15kg at a time; it truly replaces a second car, for a tiny fraction of the running expenses.
They were a niche gadget before electrification went mainstream, but today, I really urge you to give it a try by renting one for a couple of days, it makes life more enjoyable in my experience, beyond the money saved.
I prefer companies which are open about the technologies and languages I'm experienced with. That's a huge green flag, that they consider their software engineers as smart people solving hard problems while continuously learning new skills. It also means they listen to their senior technical staff, which consider that learning new bits of stacks is hardly the most complicated thing they expect you to do.
As opposed to companies which consider them as glorified factory workers, who are insufferably hard to manage and monitor.
I'm currently working with RoR, which I'd never used before, and what matters is that I know algorithms, SQL beyond ORM, how to write code which won't be a nightmare to maintain in a couple of years, etc. All those skills are the same in Rails, in Django, in C++.
I believe the reason they don't post salary ranges isn't to lure new hires into underpaid positions, at least not primarily.
it's in order to avoid renegotiation with current employees, who may have negotiated a less favorable deal, under different circumstances or because they can't haggle.
Another spin to the same story: major employer agrees that forcing people to commute to office deserves substantial extra pay.
Google employees are in a more-than-fair position when it comes to negotiate compensation. If the deal sucks, then Google will revise it and/or lose part of its talents, but the issue will fix itself.
Then again, maybe the issue was they were compensating people so that they accept SV commutes and house prices, and everyone is realizing that most people don't need to live in SV. So the ludicrous compensations aren't needed either.
It needs to be called for what it is in a capitalist framework: a _dividend_, not merely an income.
It is a share of the nation's wealth, which you receive as a legitimate co-owner of that nation. The only difference with a company stock is that you cannot sell it, citizenship is unalterable. This safeguard prevents a lot of extortion schemes.
And when discussing the amount of dividend to grant (a political discussion which must be repeated regularly), the tradeoffs are the same as for a company: you want as much dividend as possible, as long as it's not detrimental to the nation's future wealth.
Many opponents to such schemes wrongly perceive it as communist, it's important to present it in a way that debunks that misconception.
If there's between 100 and 1000 people in a train, getting rid of the driver saves between 1% and 0.1% of an hourly salary by ticket. The economic pressure to do so is very low, compared to the difficulty and legal liabilities.
Automating out a taxi/Über driver saves 50× to 1000× more money per traveler. And the infrastructure for a car ride cost way less than train + track + catenary lines + stations + antiquated ticketing system etc., so salaries represent a higher percentage of total costs.
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.