isaacd

Same. I use Kagi because search is an essential function of my job and I can’t extract decent results from Google anymore, but if there were another engine with equally good results and a better ethical track record I’d switch.

(There isn’t. I’ve tried Qwant, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and a handful of others. Was not impressed.)

Clearly LLMs are useful to software engineers.

Citation needed. I don’t use one. If my coworkers do, they’re very quiet about it. More than half the posts I see promoting them, even as “just a tool,” are from people with obvious conflicts of interest. What’s “clear” to me is that the Overton window has been dragged kicking and screaming to the extreme end of the scale by five years of constant press releases masquerading as news and billions of dollars of market speculation.

I’m not going to delegate the easiest part of my job to something that’s undeniably worse at it. I’m not going to pass up opportunities to understand a system better in hopes of getting 30-minute tasks done in 10. And I’m definitely not going to pay for the privilege.

As a professional dev (okay, okay, forgot where I was, aren’t we all) I approve of this reasoning

For anyone on the “invest in the complete opposite of whatever Don Jr. is doing” plan, there are lots of good ESG’s you can put your money in. Firms like Calvert are gonna perform slightly worse than VTSAX, but it’s typically not more than “slightly,” and at least your money isn’t funding oil cartels, Meta, Amazon et al.

The Microsoft store app that nobody uses? Oh god, anything but that

It’s all hallucinations. It’s just that some of them happen to be right

Or!—hear me out—one woman whose 8 co-gestators were just laid off by someone who doesn’t understand what their job was

There’s a handful of us that do 50 for FOSS: https://50forFOSS.org

tl;dr: on the first Friday of the month we each pick a FOSS (free/open-source) project and give the maintainer $50.

Thanks and encouragement is great too. As a small-time open source maintainer, it seems awareness has been spreading over the last few years and people are going out of their way to be kind and respectful when they raise issues; it really makes a difference. But financial sustainability and community ownership are separate and arguably more essential issues if we want FOSS to survive over the long term.

I did have one maintainer turn down the $50 and ask me to donate it to UNICEF. It’s all the same to me as long as it makes the work more sustainable for them.

“If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less

Wow, what a surprise. I’ll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.

Mosquito baiting

That would be Edward Jenner. He saved more lives than anyone else in history, and that number increases by the day. If it were up to me, his birthday would be an international holiday and kids would learn his name in elementary school.

“If you knew what it was, you’d be using it already.”

This is a great concept. I hope it catches on.

I participate in a pledge called #50forFOSS. On the first Friday of every month, I choose an open source project and give the maintainer $50, no strings attached. It lets me target small projects that may not have a lot of users, but are valuable to me, as well as bigger ones with more expenses. My mindset these days is that I need to insist on paying for the software I use, because if I don’t, someone else will (i.e. advertisers and venture capitalists, which is bad) or no one else will (i.e. abandonware, which is worse).

Disclaimer: I started #50forFOSS and there’s a very small group of us who are doing it.

Tap-to-pay on credit card chips, too.

I’m with you there. The only explanation that makes sense to me is if they’re really hurting for cash. And if they are, I honestly don’t have a solution that falls between “go bankrupt” and “sell out our users in the least noxious way we can come up with.”

Do we think anyone would actually opt in?

I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that making it opt-in is probably seen in this case as equivalent to throwing the entire feature in the trash.

“I’m not owned! I’m not owned!” I continue to insist as I slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob