These companies are scum. I don't want to be part of this march to the bottom of caring for your customer. Big companies are also different because of the firmness with which they are locked in to the purchasing infrastructure (among other reasons).
Sure, all major US cellular carriers are scum and abuse customers in similar ways. So you'll be part of the march to the bottom whether you want it or not.
It is possible to switch to a smaller VNO with better customer policies. But then your cellular data gets dropped during heavy network congestion, which is probably worse for most of us.
Ephemeral in the same way the electrical wiring in an old house is ephemeral.
Which is to say, not at all.
Original wiring done by a professional, later changes by “vibe electrician” homeowners.
Every circuit might be a custom job, but they all accumulate into something a SWE calls “technical debt”.
Don’t like how the toaster and the microwave are on the same circuit even though they are in different parts of the kitchen? You’re lucky if you can even follow the wiring back to the circuit box to see how it was done. The electrical box is so much of a mess where would you even run a new circuit?
No ephemeral as in: I'll ask the AI to check my email, and it'll create a bespoke table UI on the fly right inside my AI assistant, and populate it with relevant email data. And I'll use it, and then it will disappear. Software created and destroyed in a moment.
Not all software is meant to be some permanent building block upon which other software sits.
When new technology arrives that makes earlier ways of doing things obsolete, the consistent pattern throughout history has been that existing experts and professionals significantly underestimate the changes to come, in large part because (a) they don't like those changes, and (b) they're too used to various constraints and priorities that used to be important but no longer are. In other words, they're judging the new tech the lens of an older world, rather than through the lens of a newer world created by the new tech.
And a smart agent will eventually notice that it's doing that single operation 5 times a day and creates a more permanent skill/tool for itself instead of reinventing the wheel every time.
Ephemeral like a table quickly hacked together for a specific purpose.
It can hold a single flower pot, will fall over if a kid tries to climb on it, is made from wood that's delicious to dogs and most likely won't last 25 years because it wasn't finished properly.
But the person who made it needed a table for a flower pot, doesn't have kids or pets and will happily build a new one in 10 years when the old one breaks down from bad joins.
Not every piece of shitty software has a massive attack surface the will immediately kill people if it operates wrong.
Is my personal cheap imitation of Hazel[0] I vibe-coded in two evenings perfectly bug free and does it replicate every feature of Hazel perfectly? Of course not, but it does the exact 5 things I need it to do and saved be the upgrade price to Hazel 6.
I don’t think LibreOffice ever really took over the mindspace of OpenOffice anyway. Maybe they can a more distinct split will give it a more independent identity.
Since Collabora already has an online version, maybe they should fork completely and call this offline version something that implies independence. So, I suggest: SolOffice. Haha.
I checked the numbers. OpenOffice reports about 230,000 downloads a week. LibreOffice, in contrast, reports about 1,000,000 downloads a week. Those are both direct downloads from their respective websites, thus not counting Linux distributions, in which the default office suite is LibreOffice. AFAIK, no distribution comes with OpenOffice as its default; it's always LibreOffice.
I also checked Google Trends for the last 3 months, comparing LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. The first is searched on average 4.7 times more than the latter, which tracks with weekly download numbers.
From those numbers, I'd say it's pretty clear the name "LibreOffice" won quite decisively over "OpenOffice". OpenOffice is still used a lot, but nowhere close to LibreOffice, especially when we add Linux distributions counts.
> I don’t think LibreOffice ever really took over the mindspace of OpenOffice anyway.
It was really a terrible name if you're going after normie office workers. Nobody outside of open source people knows what "Libre" means or even how to pronounce it.
The author takes the 4 operations below and discusses some 3-operation thing from category theory. Not worth it, and not as clear as dplyr.
> But I kept looking at the relational operators in that table (PROJECTION, RENAME, GROUPBY, JOIN) and thinking: these feel related. They all change the schema of the dataframe. Is there a deeper relationship?
I don't disagree that very numerical tasks like revenue forecasting are not a good fit for LLMs. But neither did a lot of data scientist concerns themselves with such things (compared to business analysts and the like). Software to achieve this has been commoditized.
Your community is still going to be paying whatever the cable company wants to charge for the service. There's definitely a reason to run it yourself.
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