I think these people do have our interests at heart, but that's largely irrelevant. Their point is that capitalist free markets don't let them act on that.
Capitalism and democracy are becoming obsolete. It's not clear what's next.
Neither existence nor nonexistence is obvious. Ergo, differences of opinion. Militants on both sides are problematic. I strongly dislike Dawkins, in the same way as I do people knocking on my door trying to convert me to any other religion.
At least the zealots who knockon my door. I've had a few good conversations.
Ditto for LLM sentience. We have no evidence either way.
In 2026, I don't want to do numerical programming in C. That was fine 30 years ago, but today, I expect to have garbage collection or to be able to multiply a matrix as A×B.
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.
Capitalism and democracy are becoming obsolete. It's not clear what's next.
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