It depends on the problem, language, framework and what the options are. If at all possible, write stuff without touching upstream code. If you’re working in a modular, pluggable system, there’s a lot you can do this way. In Android specifically, you can do a lot by writing components that plug into the Intent framework. When it comes to modifying upstream code, you use whatever facilities the programming language offers to minimize the lines of code changes. Ideally only modify upstream code by adding a single line in a module. E.g. write a separate Java module, import it into the upstream code and call it in a single new line in the appropriate block. Then do your work in your module, import and call additional things as needed. Surround the added line with consistent labels in comments. Enforce this in code review and ideally automation. When a code drop comes, git can often automerge such additions. When it can’t, the merge tools make it very clear where your changes are as they aren’t intermixed all over the upstream code, making the merge work easier. There were some clever tricks with branching that I don’t recall. You could even write your own tooling to help with any of this. There’s clever things you can do with the build systems too. None of this is too complicated that a competent software team can’t figure out if given the direction and time to do it.

“We’re under attack from the front left and front right. Respond accordingly”

slow-clap

There’s also difference in how much work the maintenance of forks is depending on how they implement new features. There are many ways and the easiest ones are typically the least maintainable. Designing those features in order to minimize maintenance work when new code drops from upstream can dramatically change the equation and therefore the fork viability. I’ve worked at an Android mobile OEM and dealt with code drops from Google and Qualcomm. Every OEM essentially maintains a fork of Android and deals with a massive set of changes with every Android release. Implementing stuff by straight modifying Android source files lead to huge maintenance workload. After going through a few code drop cycles we devised a set of strategies that drastically decreased the effort needed.

Absolutely true.

Users often have no idea what they actually want.

This is really important and often underemphasized. People don’t reflect on why they feel they want X or Y. We don’t know if it’s some objective reason or a product of an arbitrary decision some other software maker taught us. Famous example for this is pinch-to-zoom. The first people who tried it on the iPhone found it seriously unintuitive and even difficult. Apple spent a lot of effort teaching people to pinch-to-zoom. Then you have the case where we don’t even know what we might like if we haven’t experienced it. The do-what-people-want mantra runs into these and other rrlated problems and projects that live by it often aren’t the best things out there. Good projects typically do a mix of both. Human-computer interaction / UX are legitimate research disciplines for a reason and they’ve yielded very useful heuristics to produce better software.

Yes

They don’t need the very best to make profit for a very long time, especially in a friendly regulatory regime. Check IBM for reference.

They own the social media market and have enough capital to acquire any plausible competitor, as have done in the past.

Losing top talent is only a significant price to pay if the firm or its competitors are still building new stuff that affects their bottom line. Meta is happy raking in the social media-ad profits. Google is happy raking in the search-ad profits. They’re all busy getting more money out of the markets they’ve monopolized, not competing.

LMAO, employees are about to find out why a union would be a good idea. Gotta speedrun growing class consciousness.

On a related note, what do you think is his motivation for releasing source available LLMs?

More or less. Now the mask has fallen off.

Zuck himself has made some noises about being “misled” by progressives into … being more progressive? A charitable interpretation would be that he was clueless and didn’t understood the reasons behind what he was told or thought.

This sounds like a solution looking for a problem. We know how to build green infrastructure. Many countries have done it. China has shown how it’s done, many other countries have done a lot too, albeit using Chinese inputs.

Also if your solution does not allow for debt, it will be unnecessarily slow in the rate of growth. Building green infrastructure is a great example for positive use of debt.

Weird. I thought XPS was a pretty well known brand.

This is brilliantly dystopian They can create hyper-specific profiles to target specific eyeballs and feed ads from the profile itself. They no longer have to rely on users posting things others would react to. They can just write what they know will generate reactions.

If the price for people coming on H1B visas is not hiring or eliminating a domestic job which commands a higher salary then we have a problem. As far as I’m aware H1B typically make less than domestic. It could be 7 figures and it’s still a problem because domestic might be 8 figures. The problem is that workers generate this value and a significant chunk goes towards the top when H1B gets less than domestic. In fact this effect is more significant in higher paying jobs than lower. It should cost the same or more than domestic to hire H1B and an H1B employee should be able to have the same worker rights as domestic. Then H1B doesn’t drive domestic salaries and hiring down.

Now they have prez Elon to deal with who’s threatening them financially.

The informant went to the farm wearing a wire in October, authorities say. Spafford, at some point, then allegedly admitted to possessing the short-barrel rifle, saying it wasn’t registered it because “he does not believe in registration.”

If I were the informant, I’d be a bit nervous if and when Brad’s released.

So if people who support Israel’s war immigrate to Israel and people who don’t support it emigrate from Israel, we’d expect Israelis to get more violent while Jews outside of Israel to get less supportive of Israelis. This doesn’t bode well for Israel long term. This would decrease the number of people who advocate for Israel’s violence in the countries who provide weapons and political cover, all the while the violence gets worse.

Huyexit

They’re about to drive the van off the bridge aren’t they.

There was some discussion I saw that alleged those polls never reached him. Instead ended at the inner staffers.

Not excusing his current opinion.