I like the NLnet/German Sovereign Tech fund model that has emerged in the last few years. Maintainers go and apply for funds from these disbursers. The disbursers are not a software registry, instead their role is to provide accountability and traceability for taxpayer money to fund public internet infrastructure. My experience working with NLnet has been very positive.
I agree with the fine article's criticism that most companies don't pay, but also I think that's not as pressing of problem so long as tax-based funding is in place.
I think this article presents a good rebuttal to this model — foundations will never pay the long tail, and sometimes the payout may not even be all that substantial for them to bother. The model in the article has the benefit of being automatic and applies to all packages that actually get used by for-profit companies
This is the first time I've read an AI-heavy piece and stayed engaged with it all the way through. I think the author's sharing the prompts was key to that experience.
Author here. I didn't realize folks had found this, LOL. As some have noted, yes, large chunks of this article were AI-written. Whether or not it's truly justifiable, I was busy enough that I saw it as the best way to complete the capstone writing on my experience. Again, I'm mildly surprised folks came across it!
In case you are interested in hearing a reader's opinion: the AI writing was noticeable and detracting. The most significant cues for me were the sensational tone and the prolific "clever" one-liners. I think that while it is difficult to make the judgment with any degree of accuracy based on a single suspicious sentence, but given the length of the article, all the individual cues eventually add up to a near certainty.
I think that the sorry thing about the article is that, even though I've read through an article of yours, I have learned nothing about what kind of person you are. I think that there's more to blogging than just showing the work. It's also a stage for you. The displays of character in the article ("I had a feeling", "I sat with that for a minute") written in first person are not actually yours, and are instead, in a way, a performance of the LLM that you used. So in my opinion (and you're free to disagree) you've robbed yourself of the attention you deserved.
However, I assume that the contents of the investigation were true, and if so, they are quite damning (in fact, my SO has just surprised me with a cheap Chinese projector. Nice timing!). It was also great that you've shared the prompts and results at each stage.
Writing unit tests is futile exercise without a specification.
The software under test is always modeling something -- business logic, a communications protocol, a control algorithm, a standard, etc. Behind each of those things is a specification. If a specification doesn't exist then the software is called a prototype. For sustained long term incremental development a specification must exist.
The purpose of unit tests is to assert specification-defined invariants at the module interface level.
Unit tests are durable iff the specification they uphold is explicit and accessible to developers and the scope of the test is small. It's futile to write good tests for a module which has ambiguous utility.
priors: I worked in embedded SW and am now a PhD student.
This and the Meta post seem too crazy to be true... Feels uncomfortable that these are the daily lives of sine tech workers compared to my relatively 'relaxed' (but lower paying) tech job.
I found the linked article to be difficult to follow. Vacliv Smil wrote a book called Energy and Civilization (2017) in which he argues that the ability to harness energy is what makes civilizations thrive and enables the production of culture.
Start with the question: what is the problem that you want to solve? Next, find codebases that solve that problem and study how they do it.
Good design is so deeply tied to the domain details. Wonham's Internal Model Principle applies to code.
Example: I wanted to solve the problem of unit testing for embedded targets. I found open source projects that do this and read the code critically to see how and why it is written. As I build my own approach, I revisit theirs to learn more as my understanding of the domain deepens.
I like the NLnet/German Sovereign Tech fund model that has emerged in the last few years. Maintainers go and apply for funds from these disbursers. The disbursers are not a software registry, instead their role is to provide accountability and traceability for taxpayer money to fund public internet infrastructure. My experience working with NLnet has been very positive.
I agree with the fine article's criticism that most companies don't pay, but also I think that's not as pressing of problem so long as tax-based funding is in place.