License is a big deal, and not just for cost and openness, but also for practical use in pages like docker, ci/cd pipeline, cloud deployments, or other places licenses need to be dynamic.
Scmutils from MIT does a very good -- arguably better -- job for correctness. No symbolic integration by ideology and not identical. Sussman and Terman. Amazing attention to detailand correctness. Claude could probably bridge Scheme to Wolfram.
I'm not sure how important but- for-bug identical output really is.
Reality shows that the outcome are centers with a television on 24/7, or where kids are given drugs to sleep. That's not the exception but the rule. That's why inspections and licensing came in.
The longterm costs of that -- crime, mental health, etc. -- explain why subsidies make sense. Every rich country has universal public education for a good reason.
Market forces, as you point out, will drive your enterprising person making 72k out-of-business very quickly, and the market becomes a cesspool.
The key question is about why they want to you to use the CLI. If you're not the customer, you're the product.
There's also a monopolistic aspect to this. Having the best model isn't something over can legally exploit to gain advantage in adjacent markets.
It reeks of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run," Windows showing spurious error messages for DR-DOS, and Borland C++ losing to the then-inferior Visual C++ due to late support of new Windows features. And Internet Explorer bundling versus Netscape.
Yes, Microsoft badly wanted you to use Office, Visual C++, MS-DOS, and IE, but using Windows to get that was illegal.
Microsoft lost in court, paid a nominal fine, and executives were crying all the way to the bank.
It seems appropriate for a site that also uses 12% of my screen's vertical space for a fixed one-line navigation header containing only four links. Getting in the way of the content seems to be a theme.
Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed. I wouldn't want a spiteful employer.
The flip side is that a lot of government jobs lead to pretty good private sector opportunities working with those same agencies. If you want to contact to DOE, knowing how it works in the inside and knowing people there definitely helps.
A lot of military contractors are former military. Who better to design something for a soldier than a soldier?
Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed.
It's not always that black and white. In spite of appearances, many many companies make hiring decisions based on things other than what's in a resume.
For example, a company may have $mm contracts with another company whose owners/operators/shareholders/etc. favor one particular view, political party, or social construct. That company will most certainly look down upon the other company hiring people of a particular background.
Or the pressure could be internal. A couple of times in my life I've worked for companies where certain departments were unionized. Even if you weren't in one of those departments, if the company hired you and you had a particular background, the union would object.
I have hired people to work under me. Generally, if someone can pass the interview and do the job, I don't care that much about your views unless you are very outwardly with them. The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.
That being said, having interviewed plenty of ex government or government adjacent people, not a single one can pass even a mediocre interview problem. Most people who work for the government show up expecting to be told what to do, then do it - very few can independently think for themselves.
For example, my interview problems are designed to be solved most efficiently with implementing parallelization, but they sound like regular interview problems, so even with LLMs a lot of candidates usually can't solve it unless they give the LLM specific instructions to implement threads, which requires understanding of the problem.
Im all for it. Software job markets are inflated. Id be 100% willing to take a lower salary if that meant a reduction of all salaries across the board. Younger people need to be going into things like EE or MechE instead of CS in hopes of getting a six figure job out of college, living in downtown highrises, while working on something that is essentially funded by ads.
> The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.
Sounds like a place I wouldn't want to work (and filtering for the reverse stance would be equally problematic).
Do you think things will work better if we have pro-Israel and pro-Palestine companies with the two groups never talking?
I would suspect that the previous poster means something along the lines of: The kind of posts that are so extreme that they're a significant reputational/PR risk to hire. No company wants to be flipping on the news and see their name associated with someone who's openly advocating for atrocities.
Or that create significant concern that they're unwilling to do their job responsibilities if it means working with/interacting with people who don't share their political views. More than a few people openly state things like that online as well.
You're assuming everyone is one side or the other and there aren't people who think both sides are awful and they love making their problems with each other the world's problems.
I think it would be best to work with people that I could trust to be civil and not to scream at or enact physical violence on another person, while wearing the hoodie with my companies name on it.
Or at the least, I don't want to have to wonder if I hire a Jewish coworker if there are gonna be any issues.
Even before LLMs, most coding problems really are a test of efficient pointer manipulation. You either move a pointer to character in words, pointer to data in array, or traverse n-node linked lists.
This level of pointer manipulation is rarely ever needed these days, as things like sorting, searching, and parsing are all handled by functions. An LRU cache is literally a function decorator in Python.
What I care more is if someone can understand that network calls take time, that data processing is fast, and how to optimize that pipeline. Threading is not a requirement, they can do it with async as well, or even without async with just smart scheduling.
The core of the problem that makes it LLM proof is that the problem doesn't disclose anything about network latencies or data structure. So standard iterative solutions from LLM usually end up taking longer because they get stuck waiting on a single network response. And so you can clearly tell who understand the core operations at hand, versus someone who just memorized a bunch of patterns and/or using LLMs.
> Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed
I disagree. If a persons resume contains description of blatantly harmful work how else can I interpret it but negatively? At best you’d have to chalk it up to “just following orders” but I don’t want blind obedience in a prospective employee either.
The destruction caused by DOGE is evident to anyone with eyes, as is the agency’s complete lack of achievement. I would absolutely be asking questions about why someone remained there.
These employees will be hired by the companies they helped integrate. Not a single one will look on them poorly. They will have domain knowledge, turf knowledge, and they won't argue about working with MAGA for money.
Embracing MAGA on your resume can pay dividends when they’re in power. Perhaps less so once the tide (inevitably) turns. There’s a reason a lot of gov tech folks deliberately paint themselves as non partisan.
Even that might be changing. I follow some defense industry folks and I've never seen a time when they were less pro-republican. The gross incompetence and maliciousness by this administration is deeply concerning to most people in the industry. The idiocy we're seeing regarding Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, alienating every single ally, fumbling on China, and more are putting the US in a much much weaker position going forward. Everyone who's paying attention and not happily in on some graft knows to be worried.
You seem to be assuming that someone who remained working for DOGE would even want to work for a company who would pass them over for having worked for DOGE.
Do not worry, I do not work with databases in professional life as my main aspect. But I was not given a comprehensive education, and not even once there was a focus on anything more in depth. I came out without even knowing how databases work inside.
Naturally, I know what I could do - read a good book or go through open source projects, like Sqlite. But that knowledge was not was my uni gave me...
I am jealous of American/Canadian unis in this aspect.
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