At the beginning of the article, Guy says "And this is a table I want you to make by cutting up the board with the saw. I'm going to paint squares on it."
Okay, so the dad built the table. A table is a bit more work than just cutting the top. The farmer legs need a skirt to anchor and all four legs need to be the same length for the top to sit level.
The legal framework was a big part of the puzzle. Britain's lawyers and legal system were head and shoulders above their peers. Colonies and companies in charge were controlled by complex legal contracts guaranteeing profits to those in charge, from the Crown down.
In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the companies subsequently used force to enforce their contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on mecenaries who could only be sourced from the local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.
It will be the exact opposite: In a short period of time, many people will be able to prove or disprove a theorem. The mastery that used to require a decade of extensive study can now be had just by grabbing and applying an llm to the problem.
If that's what academia has become, then maybe the forces trying to tear it down are right in doing so. We're wasting a tremendous amount of money just to stroke a few egos.
As a thpught experiment, consider that if only one person has all of the assets then those assets are not worth anything. Furthermore, as a lone person, they cannot prevent other people from using their assets without their permission.
> Is the core the database(the filesystem) and the apps roam around in it, or is the core the apps each with their own database.
The first option is evidently better for the user. The filesystem is a neutral entity with a well-defined interface, whereas each app is on its own journey. For a period of time that journey may align with the user's workflow, and both are happy. But there inevitably comes a time where the app and the user diverge, and for the user, it is imperative that they be able to switch to another app without losing access to their data.
To a user, the data matters most, and the filesystem, because of its neutrality, is the best model for access.
But that leads to a thing where an app has a file format that contains a bunch of its data, and it acts like a mini-database anyway, except now the user needs to remember where it is located. Then if there's data that links between multiple files and doesn't belong to a particular one, it is blurred again.
Yup it's not perfect, but in the filesystem model, the file continues to exist until an alternative solution emerges. In the app model, the file (and associated data) may be locked away forever.
reply