Your house and the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage on it is a financial product too, and a fairly complex and risky one at that. This fact is just well-hidden from you by nested layers of government subsidies.
There is basically no way for real estate to not be a complex financial product, because almost no one can pay cash-up-front for it. If it wasn't financialized, nobody could ever afford to own anything and we'd all be feudal serfs renting from a couple landlords.
You can commission people to make custom avatars for you if you don't know how to make one yourself. This is a fairly complex process, at least if you want a nice one that has full rigging and mocap support using external cameras and body tracking. I met someone at a party who does this as a side gig and brings in about $15K/year from it.
I don't really buy it. IMO, the biggest reason formal verification isn't used much in software development right now is that formal verification needs requirements to be fixed in stone, and in the real world requirements are changing constantly: from customer requests, from changes in libraries or external systems, and competitive market pressures. AI and vibe coding will probably accelerate this trend: when people know you can vibe code something, they will feel permitted to demand even faster changes (and your upstream libraries and external systems will change faster too), so formal verification will be less useful than ever.
Yes, it's necessary, and getting more so all the time: lately I've been seeing more and more commentary trying to tie happiness measurements to some political stance: "conservatives are happier than liberals", "women are happier after divorce", etc. And increasingly it's not coming just from random commenters, but from people with real power.
In such an environment it's vital to know if the methodology for measuring happiness is good or bunk.
This argument has been had thousands of times across thousands of forums and mailing lists in the preceding decades and we're unlikely to settle it here on the N + 1th iteration, but the short version of my own argument is that the entire point of Free Software is to allow end users to modify the software in the ways it serves them best. That's how it got started in the first place (see the origin story about Stallman and the Printer).
Stallman's insistence that gcc needed to be deliberately made worse to keep evil things from happening ran completely counter to his own supposed raison d'etre. Which you could maybe defend if it had actually worked, but it didn't: it just made everyone pack up and leave for LLVM instead, which easily could've been predicted and reduced gcc's leverage over the software ecosystem. So it was user-hostile, anti-freedom behavior for no benefit.
> the entire point of Free Software is to allow end users to modify the software in the ways it serves them best
Yes?
> completely counter to his own supposed raison d'etre
I can't follow your argument. You said yourself, that his point is the freedom of the *end user*, not the compiler vendor. He has no leverage on the random middle man between him and the end user other than adjusting his release conditions (aka. license).
I'm speaking here as an end user of gcc, who might want e.g. to make a nice code formatting plugin which has to parse the AST to work properly. For a long time, Stallman's demand was that gcc's codebase be as difficult, impenetrable, and non-modular as possible, to prevent companies from bolting a closed-source frontend to the backend, and he specifically opposed exporting the AST, which makes a whole bunch of useful programming tools difficult or impossible.
Whatever his motivations were, I don't see a practical difference between "making the code deliberately bad to prevent a user from modifying it" and something like Tivoization enforced by code signing. Either way, I as a gcc user can't modify the code if I find it unfit for purpose.
> Either way, I as a gcc user can't modify the code if I find it unfit for purpose.
...What? It's licensed under the GPL, of course you can modify the code if you find it unfit for purpose. If it weren't Free Software you might not have been able to do so as the source code might be kept from you.
I have no idea what you think "gcc's leverage" would be if it were a useless GPL'd core whose only actively updated front and back ends are proprietary. Turning gcc into Android would be no victory for software freedom.
It's interesting that this is pretty much identical to the WHATWG/W3C situation: there is theoretically a standards body, but in practice it's defunct; the browsers announce what they will ship, and the "standards body" can do nothing but meekly comply.
The difference being that there's at least a little bit of popular dissatisfaction with the status quo of browsers unilaterally dictating web standards, whereas no one came to the defense of CAs, since everybody hated them. A useful lesson that you need to do reputation management even if you're running a successful racket, since if people hate you enough they might not stick up for you even if someone comes for you "illegally".
Uber is a morally bankrupt company that built its market position through criminal conduct, but everyone looked the other way because they hated the taxi industry even more.
I'm guessing you're on the younger side and don't remember: there was an enormous moral panic about music in the 90s. There were ostensibly serious, sober Congressional hearings about it. Multiple people (e.g. Tipper Gore) made it their specific political hobbyhorse. It was the thing corrupting the youth, before the pivot to video games after Columbine. It's why we still have those black-and-white stickers on CDs (to the extent anyone buys CDs anymore).
I'd like to like that won't come back, but voting rights for women are back on the table, apparently, and SoundCloud is apparently worth age-gating, so I guess not.
He's being downvoted because it's a dumb, knee-jerk comment. This has nothing to do with RAM, the thing getting really expensive at the moment, and Samsung isn't even stopping SSD production (which would be worth getting really mad about). It's about stopping production for a specific interface which has long since been saturated by even the cheapest, crummiest SSDs.
SATA SSDs don't really have much of a reason to exist anymore (and to the extent they do, certainly not by Samsung, who specializes in the biggest, baddest, fastest drives you can buy and is probably happy to leave the low end of the market to others).
What’s the alternative, if AI does turn out to be able to replace large swathes of the workforce? Just kill everyone?
You could ban it and then turn all existing employment into a makework jobs program, but this doesn’t seem sustainable: work you know is pointless is just as psychically corrosive, and in any event companies will just leave for less-regulated shores where AI is allowed.
Is she actually considered an expert, by other experts? I watched a couple clips of her which were recommended to me on YouTube, and she just came across as a self-congratulatory booster for the inevitable triumph of Western liberal democracy, the sort of end-of-history talk we all now mock when it comes from e.g. Fukuyama.
>she just came across as a self-congratulatory booster for the inevitable triumph of Western liberal democracy
I've watched 2 or 3 hours of videos and that isn't what I took away. She does argue that a rules based international order, free trade, democracy and liberalism is a superior system to authoritarianism, but I don't think too many people (in the West, at least) would disagree with that.
There is basically no way for real estate to not be a complex financial product, because almost no one can pay cash-up-front for it. If it wasn't financialized, nobody could ever afford to own anything and we'd all be feudal serfs renting from a couple landlords.
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