The author's about page reports that he is a former physicist with experience in automotives and law enforcement. It also contains the statement "I have a particular dislike of self-anointed 'experts';" with no apparent irony.
And my personal favourite: "People may think I’m fighting above my weight class, because many of the people I label as clowns are on television and in important newspapers, much like the stars of 'The Bachelor.' "
If they're so easy and obvious, why hasn't the author done it, at least as a demo? The article also reeks of "this doesn't work for me, therefore it won't work for anyone" I doubt I'm the only one who absolutely does not concede that everything should have a GUI interface.
"Why does shit like DPDK exist?" I don't know, but I bet you could find out with a little investigation, which might make this sound more like a well-researched position and less like a tantrum.
"people who absolutely insist that the Church Turing thesis means muh computer is all-powerful simulator of everything". Yeaaah...we're done here.
It would be less useful than you’d think. Pilots are trained to articulate what they are doing and generally follow very well-practiced procedures. Another pilot can quite accurately reproduce what a pilot is doing just from the transcript, and the warning horns and other indicators are quite expressive of other things. The audio is good enough to hear breakers opening. Anything a video camera could see out the window that would be relevant will be remarked upon by pilots.
There’s an interesting aside in that neither a CVR nor a FDR would have been helpful in figuring out the cause of the Comet disasters. The way they did was brilliant.
The article is interesting, but that lede is incoherent. Many mathematicians accept computer proofs the way chess grand masters accept computer players. Computer “assistants” that generate proofs that humans cannot follow or understand will always be controversial, and the proofs they generate, even though accepted as valid, will always be decorated with an asterisk.
When I teach coding, I used to have a similar lesson around commenting code: "don't tell me you're creating a variable. I can read the code. Tell me what the variable is for."
I still mostly abide by that, but I've had an opportunity to write some larger programs for the first time in a few years (a hazard of teaching programming is you find yourself working with pretty small programs), and noticed that the comments started become a part of my conversation with myself. I'd drop in quick reminders for what I intended to do in a function before going moving on to something else. When I came back and then wrote the code corresponding to the comments: well now it's redundant, but it wasn't. I stopped cleaning that stuff up (I'd clean it if I had to present or publish it, of course). The comments kept some context of my thinking when I wrote it, what order I did things in, etc. It would be gibberish for another, but it wasn't for me, especially after a few days, or even longer. (Note: I'm a pretty fast touch-typist, so muttering to myself doesn't invoke much of a productivity cost. I also note that commit messages are another great place to capture that sort of context for yourself, and not using that opportunity is a sin.)
So, I've changed some of my greybeard aphorisms around commenting: "When commenting code, consider the needs of the person who will be maintaining this code. Who will probably be you. Be nice to future you."
Felleisen is an ACM Fellow with a senior tenured position at Rice. American, white, middle-aged. Doesn't have a presence in social media. He'll be fine.
That seemed like an awful lot of words to describe the entirely predictable fact that the job market will pick up significantly as we shed pandemic restrictions and that workers in low-wage service jobs tend to quit a lot. A few anecdotes about people liking WFH doesn’t make the trend any more mysterious or novel.
I always liked the way he responded when asked (many years later) why he did it. Paraphrased, it was along the lines of "It was so obviously the right thing to do, but it would have been nearly impossible to push through the bureaucracy, so I just went ahead and did it myself." He did something so profoundly good that we are compelled to wish we could live up to such an example, and the reason he did it? He didn't really have one. It just never occurred to him not to do it. Which is as good a definition of "hero" as you're likely to run across. "Righteous among nations" indeed.
The only problem here is that the author perceives a need to apologize, or to even feel regret. If the only compensation for starting and maintaining an open source project is the work itself or personal use of the product, then you are your only customer. The moment it stops being fun or worth the effort, you have every right to just stop without feeling a tiny bit of guilt or remorse.
You have a bug they want to fix or a feature they want to add and the author/maintainer is not doing it fast enough? Fork away! Submit a pull request! Oh, you don't have the skills/time to do that? Wow, that's too bad. Offer to pay the author! Post a message to the project list or bug reporting tool offering to pay someone to do it for you. Oh, you want it for free? Immediately? You built critical infrastructure around a tool you don't understand and don't have the skills or resources to maintain? You're a parasite, and can be safely muted and ignored.
This is the important bit: If you're afraid the person maintaining your key infrastructure for free might suddenly stop doing that, just take some time to send them a nice note thanking them. Periodically getting one of those in your inbox is remarkably effective in maintaining passion for a project. Find a way to give them a gift. Do they have Venmo/Patreon/Amazon wish list? Use it. Are you a developer or do you employ some? Fix a bug. Say nice things about them in social media. Offer to help pay for the resources to host the project. Send them an effing Starbuck's card with your sincere thanks.
"No one would go to a restaurant where each dish requires a paragraph of text to really appreciate the taste and texture..." One assumes that you've never eaten with a 'foodie' or attended a wine tasting.
The author has a pretty good CV, but as his Wikipedia entry notes, there is a concerning history to some of his publications. The WP entry cites several expressions of concern, which are worth a read. See, in particular, the note at the link below from Retraction Watch (one of the better sources for checking a researcher's bona fides):
The argument made in the article seems well-supported, but I'm not competent to evaluate it. Given that this is an un-reviewed letter to the editor from a single (albeit apparently quite well-qualified) researcher, I'm going to wait for more (peer-reviewed) evidence before trying to form an opinion.
I bet you hate Elizabeth Holmes. I wish your sex wasn't relevant, but unfortunately it still is. I genuinely wish you well. We've seriously needed more (hell, any) diversity in our leaders and decision makers for a very long time.
The part I found interesting was that the author notes that it is well-known that the quality of the work has little to do with its odds of acceptance even when the system is 'functioning' as designed. Is it cheating to game a system that is already fundamentally broken? If the quality of your work is inadequate to secure publication and your career depends on it, it wouldn't be very hard to convince yourself that you can't cheat a rigged game. What 'integrity' is actually being threatened? Perhaps some of the energy devoted to identifying these collusion rings would be better spent developing a review process that is at least somewhat biased in favour of good research rather than the density of the authors' professional network. Or at least in mitigating the poisonous 'publish or perish' rules that lead to this sort of phenomena.