> Biology doesn't work like that most of the time, it's squishy and weird and unpredictable, and the models we have of biology (including genomics!) are faulty at best, misleading at worst.
interesting. i came to tech from a molecular biology background and my impression was the opposite. biology is predictable most of the time, but sometimes random and squishy. the trick is that we’re trying to learn why things work predictably and what causes the variations, and that why/how unknown is what is most uncomfortable for people outside of the disciplines.
i’m not fully disagreeing with you because it sounds like you have experiences that inform your perspective. i find it interesting because my own experiences bring me in from the inverse perspective.
IP theft may only be part of the story though. it’s a question of priorities. US optimizes for profit which can place limits reinvestment. China seems to optimize for ubiquity and dominance, and has the capital to throw at those goals. when you’re beholden to the shareholder/ceo/investor, you make concessions to stay within their will. when you’re beholden to the state, you do the same.
there is no logic - just fallacy. it is a red herring, wrapped up in equivocation. he commits appeal to emotion, non sequitur, false equivalence along the way.
this is how i took it as well. he’s creating a false equivalency between AI and immigrants, and attempting to justify it with “diversity of perspectives” and trying to tell you that to remain intellectually consistent you must embrace or reject both.
You know, I am usually one to immediately jump to "to hell with that" when someone brings up Hanlon's razor, but I think it may apply here.
He certainly is creating a false equivalency between AI and immigrants, but with how tone-deaf this speech is, it may not be deliberate. He likely already has this association.
So then the question would be: why would he have this association?
My only guess is he has a fairly shallow view of both as cheap labor. Which is pretty malicious after all.
It's important to realize that those people are sociopaths. They delight in the suffering of the common man through their complete lack of empathy.
Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them being particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.
Also something I noticed: whenever you see them talking about AI, they all seem to have the same smirk on their faces: that “we’re making you a permanent underclass and you just have to deal with it” smirk. They all have it.
> It's important to realize that those people are sociopaths. They delight in the suffering of the common man.
> Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.
I couldn't agree more. Thank you for your comment!
agreed. i’m no aws apologist but if you’re going to try to monetize open source and then complain when someone else does it more efficiently/effectively, it really feels disingenuous. “we were going to do that, but they got there first. it’s not fair.”
i’m only familiar with the postgres side, but it seems like a more nuanced view of this debate would be to discuss aws monetizing open source relative to their upstream, community-beneficial contributions.
Sure. CFOs optimise for fewer vendor relationships; fewer invoices, fewer things to talk about during compliance, less reconciliation overhead. Consolidated spend also improves their negotiating position. So when AWS offers good-enough Elasticsearch bundled into an existing relationship, it wins regardless of whether the original is better supported or better value.
"More efficiently" means procurement efficiency, not operational efficiency. They're not the same thing.
As someone who has had to deal with vendor management at a financial services company, I couldn't agree more.
We were going through a process to make vendor management more standardised and it reached a point where we couldn't even consider adding new vendors.
Adding new services to an existing vendor had minimal paperwork and approvals. As long as you had budget for it, you're unlikely to get any push back.
New vendors required tons of back and forth with legal. Infosec reviews. Additional costboards. Having to justify the vendor to multiple groups. Working out how you get them onboarded into the finance system. Once they're onboarded, we would then have additional paperwork to do periodic reviews to rate the vendor and make sure they're not a critical dependency that will bite us in the ass.
I've only worked with AWS and GCP, but they also throw training and credits at us, too. This could be personalised 2-day classroom events just for our company. There's a huge amount of perceived value for funnelling money through a cloud provider.
interesting. i came to tech from a molecular biology background and my impression was the opposite. biology is predictable most of the time, but sometimes random and squishy. the trick is that we’re trying to learn why things work predictably and what causes the variations, and that why/how unknown is what is most uncomfortable for people outside of the disciplines.
i’m not fully disagreeing with you because it sounds like you have experiences that inform your perspective. i find it interesting because my own experiences bring me in from the inverse perspective.
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