I don't know what "ready for prime time desktop use" means. I suspect it means different things for different people.
But with Linux being mostly hobbyist-friendly a number of folks have custom setups and do not want to be forced into the standardized mold for the sake of making it super smooth to transition from Windows.
I have such a setup (using FVWM with customized key bindings and virtual layout that I like, which cannot work under Wayland), so can I donate some money to Microsoft to keep Windows users less grumpy and not bringing yet another eternal September to Linux. I like my xorg, thank you very much :).
> No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/
Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.
Perhaps time for a revival - text mode only, please, to keep out those that I don't want on there (the platform appearing too unattractive might be the way forward to avoid the TikTokers).
> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
That view is about 18 years old and HN was very different then.
As with any communication platform it risks turning into an echo chamber, and I am pretty sure that particular PG view has been rejected for many years (I think dang wrote on this more than once). HN works very hard to avoid becoming politicized and not discouraging minority views is a large part of that.
For example, I now seldom bother to write anything that I expect to rub the left coast folks the wrong way: I don't care about karma, but downvoted posts are effectively hidden. There is little point of writing things that few will see. It is not too bad at HN yet, but the acceptance of the downvote for disagreement is the strongest thing that pushes HN from discussions of curious individuals towards the blah-quality of "who gets more supporters" goals of the modern social media. My 2c.
> HN works very hard to avoid becoming politicized and not discouraging minority views is a large part of that.
> For example, I now seldom bother to write anything that I expect to rub the left coast folks the wrong way: I don't care about karma, but downvoted posts are effectively hidden. There is little point of writing things that few will see.
These two statements don't seem to agree with each other.
HN policies and algorithms slow the slide, and keep it better than reddit, but the set of topics that allow one to take a minority opinion without downvoting keeps shrinking. At least compared to the time 10-15 years ago.
> “this other thing is also bad” is not an exoneration
No, but it puts some perspective on things. IMO Google, after abandoning its early "don't be evil" motto is directly responsible for a significant chunk of the current evil in the developed world, from screen addiction to kids' mental health and social polarization.
Working for Google and drawing an extravagant salary for many, many years was a choice that does affect the way we perceive other issues being discussed by the same source. To clarify: I am not claiming that Rob is evil; on the contrary. His books and open source work were an inspiration to many, myself included. But I am going to view his opinions on social good and evil through the prism of his personal employment choices. My 2c.
This is a purity test that cannot be passed. Give me your career history and I’ll tell you why you aren’t allowed to make any moral judgments on anything as well.
Point is he is criticizing Google but still collecting checks from them. That's hypocritical. He would have a little sympathy if he never worked for them. He had decades to resign. He didn't. He stayed there until retirement. He's even using gmail in that post.
I still don't see the problem. You can criticize things you're part of. Probably being part of something is what informs a person enough, and makes it matter enough to them, to criticize in the first place.
> I still don't see the problem. You can criticize things you're part of.
Certainly. But this, IMO, is not the reason for the criticism in the comments. If Rob ranted about AI, about spam, slop, whatever, most of those criticizing his take would nod instead.
However, the one and only thing that Rob says in his post is "fuck you people who build datacenters, you rape the planet". And this coming from someone who worked at Google from 2004 to 2021 and instead could have picked any job anywhere. He knew full well what Google was doing; those youtube videos and ad machines were not hosted in a parallel universe.
I have no problem with someone working at Google on whatever with full knowledge that Google is pushing ads, hosting videos, working on next gen compute, LLM, AGI, whatever. I also have no problem with someone who rails against cloud compute, AI, etc. and fights it as a colossal waste or misallocation of resources or whatever. But not when one person does both. Just my 2c, not pushing my worldview on anyone else.
If rob pike was asked about these issues of systemic addiction and others where we can find things google was bad at. I am sure that he wouldn't defend google about these things.
Maybe someone can mail a real message asking Rob pike genuinely (without any snarkiness that I feel from some comments here) about some questionable google things and I am almost certain that if those questions are reasonable, rob pike will agree that some actions done by google were wrong.
I think its just that rob pike got pissed off because an AI messaged him so he got the opportunity to talk about these issues and I doubt that he got the opportunity to talk / someone asking him about some other flaws of google / systemic issues related to it.
Its like, Okay, I feel like there is an issue in the world so I talk about it. Now does that mean that I have to talk about every issue in the world, no not really. I can have priorities in what issues I wish to talk about.
But that being said, if someone then asks me respectfully about issues which are reasonable, Being moral, I can agree about that yes those are issues as well which needs work upon.
And some people like rob pike who left google because of (ideological reasons perhaps, not sure?) wouldn't really care about the fallback and like you say, its okay to collect checks from organization even if they critize
Honestly Google's lucky that they got rob pike instead of vice versa from my limited knowledge.
Golang is such a brilliant language and ken thompson and rob pike are consistently some of the best coders and their contributions to golang and so many other projects is unparalleled.
I don't know much about rob pike as compared to Ken thompson but I assume he is really great too! Mostly I am just a huge golang fan.
>But that being said, if someone then asks me respectfully about issues which are reasonable, Being moral, I can agree about that yes those are issues as well which needs work upon.
With all due respect, being moral isn't an opinion or agreement about an opinion, it's the logic that directs your actions. Being moral isn't saying "I believe eating meat is bad for the planet", it's the behaviour that abstains from eating meat. Your moral is the set of statements that explains your behaviour. That is why you cannot say "I agree that domestic violence is bad" while at the same time you are beating up your spouse.
If your actions contradict your stated views, you are being a hypocrite. This is the point that people in here are making. Rob Pike was happy working at Google while Google was environmentally wasteful (e-waste, carbon footprint and data center related nastiness) to track users and mine their personal and private data for profit. He didn't resign then nor did he seem to have caused a fuss about it. He likely wasn't interested in "pointless politics" and just wanted to "do some engineering" (just a reference to techies dismissing or critising folks discussing social justices issues in relation to big tech). I am shocked I am having to explain this in here. I understand this guy is an idol of many here but I would expect people to be more rational on this website.
I know this will probably not come off very well in this community. But there is something to be said about criticizing the very thing you are supporting. I know in this day and age, its not easy to survive without contributing to the problem in some degree.
Im not saying nobody has the right to criticize something they are supporting, but it does say something about our choices and how far we let this problem go before it became too much to solve. And not saying the problem isn't solvable. Just saying its become astronomically more difficult now then ever before.
I think at the very least, there is a little bit of cringe in me every time I criticize the very thing I support in some way.
The problem is that everyone on HN treats "You are criticizing something you benefit from" as somehow invalidating the arguments themselves rather than impeaching the person making the arguments.
Being a hypocrite makes you a bad person sometimes. It doesn't actually change anything factual or logical about your arguments. Hypocrisy affects the pathos of your argument, but not the logos or ethos! A person who built every single datacenter would still be well qualified to speak about how bad datacenters are for the environment. Maybe their argument is less convincing because you question their motives, but that doesn't make it wrong or invalid.
Unless HNers believe he is making this argument to help Google in some way, it doesn't fucking matter that google was also bad and he worked for them. Yes he worked for google while they built out datacenters and now he says AI datacenters are eating up resources, but is he wrong?. If he's not wrong, then talk about hypocrisy is a distraction.
HNers love arguing to distract.
"Don't hate the player, hate the game" is also wrong. You hate both.
Criticizing something you benefit from and hypocrisy are two different things. It is absurd to try to conflate them.
Hypocrisy is when you criticise others for doing a thing you yourself secretly do. It is massively different then criticising a compant you work or worked for. You can even ve part of something, change opinion and then criticise it without being hypocryte.
Well said. Thank you. I just wanted to point out that there is some truth behind the negative effects of criticizing what you helped create. IMHO not everything is about facts and logic, but also about the spirit that's behind our choices. I know that kind of perspective is not very welcome here, but wanted to say it anyway.
Sometimes facts and logic can only get you so far.
I think everyone, including myself, should be extremely hesitant to respond to marketing emails with profanity-laden moralism. It’s not about purity testing, it’s about having the level of introspection to understand that people do lots of things for lots of reasons. “Just fuck you. Fuck you all.” is not an appropriate response to presumptively good people trying to do cool things, even if the cool things are harmful and you desperately want to stop them.
Yes, I'm trying to marginalize the author's view. I think that “Just fuck you. Fuck you all.” is a bad view which does not help us see problems for what they are nor analyze negative impacts on society.
For example, Rob seems not to realize that the people who instructed an AI agent to send this email are a handful of random folks (https://theaidigest.org/about) not affiliated with any AI lab. They aren't themselves "spending trillions" nor "training your monster". And I suspect the AI labs would agree with both Rob and me that this was a bad email they should not have sent.
It's a smarmy sycophantic email addressing him personally and co-opting his personal achievements written by something he dislikes. This would feel really fucked up. It's true that anger is not always a great response but this is one of those occasions where it fits exactly.
My take on the above, and I might be taking it out of context is that I think what is being said here is that the exploitation and grift needs to stop. And if you are working for a company that does this, you are part of the problem. I know that pretty much every modern company does this, but it has to stop somewhere.
We need to find a way to stop contributing to the destruction of the planet soon.
I don't work for any of these companies, but I do purchase things from Amazon and I have an apple phone. I think the best we can do is minimize our contribution to it. I try to limit what services I use from this companies, and I know it doesnt make much of a differnce, but I am doing what I can.
I'm hoping more people that need to be employed by tech companies can find a way to be more selective on who they employ with.
I would use your software skills to get in the door as a software engineer, then weasel into a sciencey position. That is:
1. Find a company that has non-software jobs that you like. Look at what companies advertise on their web sites; go to a few conferences (or watch talks) to see if some talks strike you with "ah, I can and want to do this" vibe; reach out to folks you went to grad school with, etc.
2. Apply and join as a software engineer. Don't try to sit on both chairs (software and science) during the application. You can apply to a science role, but this is likely much harder after 8 years of software focus.
3. Once in, chat with folks working on what you want to work on. Talk to folks you saw give talks. Go to internal presentations, post cool plots in slack, etc. In most companies it is pretty easy to move within roles. Plus, HR is no longer in the filtering pipeline and is not tossing resumes of anyone they think does not have the chops for the position.
Good luck!
As a personal data point -- I decided, late in my math PhD, to switch from academia to the industry after completion. A few times I switched jobs I went in as a software engineer, but within a few months moved to working on things I wanted to do beyond software (algorithms for tracking, perception, signal processing, sensor fusion, etc.).
This is the way. I've seen this successfully done many times. The barrier to entry is much lower once you already work at a company and just about everybody needs more software engineers than they can find.
Good point, get into the right company and move to a place you like. I did that way back moving from lab to customer service (right company and right country) to get into the R&D I wanted. Easier to execute in a company that is rapidly expanding.
This is a good suggestion and probably the most realistic path. The only trouble is that I'm in a small-ish city in Europe and have to work remotely, which makes networking hard. I worked at a company where I sort of tried to do this before but it was really hard to have casual connections with science people.
What you describe is a job that requires a lot of thoughtful, or at least meaningful, answers to a lot of people. If each answer leads to a context switch, this lands hard on any other work you do. On the comms side, this may well be a full time job; or more.
But the problem has nothing to do with email. The problem is with combining what sounds like a full time management job with a full time teaching job. In fact email makes it possible to batch those requests instead of always being interrupted at an external schedule.
And sorry -- I am not trying to tell you how to live your life, what comes next is just an engineering observation. But if one is overloaded the solution is almost always to ... reduce load. Transfer some duties and/or delegate more tasks and/or hire someone to help, etc. This is usually not easy, but IME most folks under overload who say they cannot reduce it either (1) did not try to reduce it in earnest or (2) are micromanagers who are willing to delegate only partway while maintaining the role in final decisions. My 2c.
You're not wrong, but university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants. And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.
Then they have to use what power they have and simply partition the workload into what must be done that is actually doable and the rest. The rest gets done if there is time, otherwise it just gets dropped.
If the institution wants more work done that there is time for in a normal working day then they simply have to hire more people like any normal company would do. If the institution cannot afford to hire more people then it simply has to admit that there are limits to what it can commit to doing.
That's not how it works in any sort of job with significant individual responsibility. The institution isn't forcing them to do more work. They take it on voluntarily because they're ambitious or competitive or want to advance a worthy cause. Doing the bare minimum is possible: some people make that choice, and even without a union it usually won't get you fired. But those people usually don't accomplish much. You can't have it both ways.
But if they are ambitiously overloading their schedule with task they can’t handle on their own, they don’t get to complain about the workload they voluntarily signed up for.
And that’s even beside the point as email in not to blame. They would still be voluntarily overloaded in the era of snail mail with letters stacking up on their table.
> university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants.
Agreed, hiring in academia is both painful and tricky. But someone running a grad program for the department and who is as overloaded as the author with other duties is well placed to advocate for a secretary or a grad assistant to lighten his non-core duties.
> And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.
More than for a bus driver, nurse, cook, physical therapist, etc., etc., etc.? The world is full of people who volunteer and self-assign tasks to their breaking point; then burn themselves out. They feel that they can do X best, so they convince themselves that they must. With very few exceptions, this is BS and a non-productive path to burnout. Don't be like that.
My mom simply did not respond to emails from students. Or even her faculty. It worked fine for her, except many people considered it rude, but nothing bad happened otherwise. She had an office, an actual one, and whenever it was important enough, people went to the office.
The school should have fired your mom. Students don't always have free time that aligns with instructor office hours, and some issues are best addressed in writing. Whether they like it or not, communicating with students through a variety of channels is absolutely part of a teacher's job. Those who don't want to do it should find another line of work.
This is a misunderstanding of the job of a professor. (I have some experience here.)
Our job is to teach well enough, to research well enough, and to handle administrative stuff well enough, in a context where any one of those could easily be a full time job and it's impossible to do all of them perfectly.
Having a work pattern in which the less important stuff falls through the cracks while making sure the important stuff gets handled is necessary and common. As long as people understand your pattern and can work within it it's generally ok.
There are a lot of college professors who are just barely good enough at teaching and administration to not get fired. Regardless of how important they think their research is, letting other things slide is disrespectful to their peers and students. We shouldn't make excuses for them.
One of my favorite professors put it in a different way. The classic approach is that they are lecturers first, and not teachers.
The professor is the master in their field. They go into class. They lecture on things based on their experience, answer questions, then leave. Students are there to make use of the faculty and the department to achieve their goals. If someone wanted to invent YouTube, they would go to university to study under someone who had invented some complex video compression & streaming algorithm etc. This is where universities output the outstanding individuals.
But in the 21st century, many universities are simply teaching institutions. They make sure the student understands and guide the poor ones. They make mediocre engineers, but dams and highways are built and maintained by mediocre engineers. The government unis were funded per head; literally the goal is to fill the lecture hall with as many heads as possible.
So I don't entirely disagree. In the end, my mom was not promoted to the level everyone expected of her, probably due to things like this. I do believe she actually replied to the important or thoughtful emails and just built this image of inaccessibility to seem fair to everyone.
Agree with you but would add that even on the professional managerial side it is indeed a luxury - yes for many people it would be possible, but there's also many people (in startups, or small businesses, or not small but struggling businesses) whose options are as limited as teachers.
Some of whom might have good options for changing jobs, or good hopes of things improving in the near future, but for many it would be the lesser evil compared to trying to find a different job with the same positives (whether salary or other motivation) but without those negatives.
> As for reducing: research, grad programs, journals, media inquiries - these are not optional for profs
For a tenured professor (and someone who runs the department's grad program and teaches many classes almost certainly has a tenure) all of those are optional. During my PhD I have seen all sorts of arrangements, including tenured profs who taught minimum load and did nothing else. No grad students, no special courses, no seminars, nada. I am not advocating this. It is, in my book, not a good approach unless you spending all other time to solve Riemannian Hypothesis or something like this. But tenure gives a prof a lot of leeway on how much to work and what to work on. My 2c.
I'm the author of the original article, I'm a tenured professor, and none of these things is optional for me. Indeed, I wrote this article several years into being a full professor, because my obligations had only grown, not reduced, by virtue of all the promotions. Of course different people have different senses of how "obliged" they are or should be.
It is important to clarify what we mean by "obligated / not optional", as I think there is a terminology mismatch.
When I said that a particular job task is not optional I mean that not doing this task will lead to a disciplinary action from the employer (being fired, put on a performance improvement clock with the HR, etc.). Reducing those tasks brings in one set of considerations.
Your definition of "obliged", if I understand it correctly, is primarily a self-assigned or a community-expected one: "if I stop running this seminar or remove myself from that editorial board, I will feel I am not doing all I can / my colleagues will look at me askance". But it will not trigger retaliation from the employer. Reducing overload from those tasks brings a completely different set of considerations.
Which is fine. Goals shift and can even completely disappear, forcing you to pick another one. But having and pursuing long term goals at most times is still the ticket for success. My 2c.
Nothing wrong in rationalizing content sharing; as in rationalizing copyright. But IMO the current form of the copyright for both the technical and the creative works is a cure that is worse than the disease.
Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.
> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos
That is a totally reasonable view. But others have different preferences. I, for example, do not want to share all my photos with Google, govvies and anyone else they leak them to.
So I self host, back up and share my files with the family. I can always dump what I want to insta, etc. but it is my choice what to share, picture by picture, with default "off". And have no dark patterns trying to catch a finger accidentally hitting a "back up to cloud" for the full album.
That, to me, is a big deal, worth dealing with occasional IT hassles for. Which is just a personal preference.
>> Immich solves the wrong problem. I just want the household to share photos
pixelfed may be what the parent want then. I don't like that it is PHP, but as long as they adhere to the ActPub protocal, we can roll our own in whatever flavor.
Just a personal opinion, but as an occasional job seeker here, I prefer the current system, seeing "no complaints in replies" policy as efficiency, not censorship. Were it not the case I suspect many job postings would become discussion battlegrounds and people looking for brief summaries would have to scroll through pages of discussions.
It is a painful process for both the seekers (who feel they are being ghosted) and the employers (who feel they are being spammed by AI bots); IMO the best approach is to follow the general HN guidance of "be kind" and "assume good intentions". And if a company ghosted you, downvote their post. My 2c.
> "I suspect many job postings would become discussion battlegrounds"
I suspect they wouldn't. I suspect companies that ghost and post fake jobs wouldn't even reply. And companies that have real job posts would reply and have a chance to convince the job is real.
People already have to scroll a ton of job posts that are not for them (due to stack, location, seniority, whatever) and the [-] button is pretty efficient in hiding long discussions.
But with Linux being mostly hobbyist-friendly a number of folks have custom setups and do not want to be forced into the standardized mold for the sake of making it super smooth to transition from Windows.
I have such a setup (using FVWM with customized key bindings and virtual layout that I like, which cannot work under Wayland), so can I donate some money to Microsoft to keep Windows users less grumpy and not bringing yet another eternal September to Linux. I like my xorg, thank you very much :).
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