> LLVM and Linux get more cash than they can spend. GNU stuff is comparatively impoverished because everyone assumes they'd do it for free anyway. Stuff that ships on a Canonical desktop or RHEL default install gets lots of cash but community favorites like KDE need to make their own way, etc... Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.
This is often the problem with charity in general. It's hard to find good organizations that actually need your money. Great ones self-sustain on their own revenue. Good ones are saturated with donations from their own users. There's just a small sliver of projects that are awesome, and could productively use financial support. From personal experience, identifying these is often far more costly than the act of writing a check.
The author, Jeff Geerling, is a very intelligent person. He has more experience with using niche hardware than almost anyone on earth. If he does something, there's usually a good a priori rationale for it.
I was just at VCF Midwest this past weekend, and I can assure you I am on some of the lower echelons of people who know about niche hardware.
I do get to see and play with a lot of interesting systems, but for most of them, I only get to go just under surface-level. It's a lot different seeing someone who's reverse engineered every aspect of an IBM PC110, or someone who's restored an entire old mainframe that was in storage for years... or the group of people who built an entire functional telephone exchange with equipment spread over 50 years (including a cell network, a billing system, etc.).
Youtubers have armies of sycophants (check their video comments if you dare). Not saying they even court them, something to do with video building a stronger parasocial relationship than a text blog I think.
> If he does something, there's usually a good a priori rationale for it.
I greatly respect Jeff's work, but he's a professional YouTuber, so his projects will necessarily lean towards clickbait and riding trends (Jeff, I don't mean this as criticism!) He's been a great advocate for doing interesting things with RasPis, but "interesting" != "rational"
Nearly all people value good articulation over intelligence. This is why people who interview well get jobs over people who do good work. It's why Steve Jobs makes billions while Woz doesn't. And why Trevor Milton can bilk investors of claims about HTML5 supercomputers while nerds get brushed off talking about tensor-chip accelerated attention models.
The truly great founders, CEOs, and investors of our generation have generally been people who could see the difference between articulate and intelligent, and valued intelligence as the driving characteristic of people who built their products.
> It's why Steve Jobs makes billions while Woz doesn't.
I'm going to have to disagree. There are many things that make the two Steves different. Woz was just never interested in the same things Jobs was. Woz wanted to make cool shit. Jobs wanted to have his products rule the world.
He didn't. First, he gave away a good chunk to early employees who didn't have stock when the IPO happened. Then, he liquidated his Apple in the mid-1980s.
He certainly could have made billions if he had been greedy (not given any away) and lazy (just lived off the dividends and never sold) and never done another thing in his life - more billions than Bezos.
Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire. Irreparable harm also includes things like injury to reputation, goodwill, professional practice.
The impending harm here is explicit, immediate, and as demonstrated previously serious for these labs and research fields. It's unfortunate that Judge Cobb didn't find this to be sufficient, but hopefully on appeals some relief may be offered.
Temporary loss of income is I think not generally a basis for irreparable harm for more or less the argument you hint at.
> Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire.
Experiments expiring seems like a more compelling argument than knowledge moving elsewhere. The theory behind irreparable seems to be "it can't be fixed with money," not "you don't have enough money to fix it." If someone goes to a competitor then presumably there is an amount of money that would bring them back - it just might be out of your reach.
The problem with this approach is that so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck that job interruptions quickly become irreparable even with infinite money as the eventual solution.
It’s not that extreme for someone to go from job loss to losing most everything else over the course of 6 to 12 months because there’s little to no safety net.
It's a bit odd that we have such a huge personal injury lawsuit industry then? As "pain and suffering" or wrongful death cannot be fixed with money either.
I don't necessarily disagree with your logic, but that's not what the legal term is referring to. Too many people on HN think law is what they want it to be--not what it is. That term is generally reserved for things that are totally irreparable. Nothing you mentioned can't be made up for later.
It is 100% clear that, yes, there is harm being done. It's not at all clear that the harm is irreparable. They usually apply the term to things that are actually irreparable like the death penalty (can't resuscitate the dead person).
When entire labs are shut down, work halted, experiments frozen, people move on because they need to eat, this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to those specific people and programs, as well as science in the United States. (Edited to reflect that the harm is both specific and general)
My wife works in science and is seeing some of the effects of all this, and it's going to be a generational hit to research and development in this country.
If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
> this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to science in the United States
Science isn't the plaintiff.
> If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
Science often requires a lot of money, and generally Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed.
> Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
And so now we’re not spending the money on discoveries and also cutting back on the social “niceties” we had spent whatever little amount of money on?
The US has been spending the most globally, in real terms per capita[0] and a percentage of GDP[1] on healthcare for a long time. How on earth can you justify the phrase "little amount of money"?
The problem wasn't the amount spent. The problem was the terrible hybrid of regulations that let the private sector down crazy rabbit-holes of false value to chase and be paid for, instead of just direct exposure to the real health market's needs.
Reading comprehension is important. Correct. The US as a country spends a lot more on health care than if there was a government-run single-payer system. I'm responding to this:
> while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
The US government doesn't pay for the "social nicety" of health care & in fact makes more money since that dues to private insurance industry generates even more tax revenue.
You can claim it's the regulations but all evidence I've read suggests it's the lack of single-payer system which removes the ability to negotiate + increases the complexity of the system because as a provider you have to pay more people to manage insurance payments with all the different providers vs 1 central provider.
> But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed
But the law doesn’t afford scientists any right to sue on the basis that they think the administration’s policy is bad for science writ large. That’s a policy determination outside the power of the courts to second guess. (Read *Marbury v. Madison and specifically the parts talking about ministerial actions. Courts can only enjoin executive officials to take ministerial actions the law clearly requires, not second guess the executive’s discretionary decisions.)
The actual legal rights the scientists can exercise are similar to those of any government contractor. If you have a contract to run a hotdog stand on a military base, the government has certain limitations on what it can and can’t do.
Europe spends more on academic research than the US, both in absolute terms and as a fraction of GDP. The US is ahead in business R&D.
But research funding is mostly used for hiring early-career researchers for fixed-term positions. If Europe wants to attract foreign academic talent, its universities need permanent increases in core funding for hiring additional faculty. And that's something European politicians largely don't support.
The rest of the world gets to benefit from the american brain drain, already in progress. The US is essentially going to turn into a similar shape as russia, a country with nukes but a shadow of its former prestige and soft power.
Do you have any reason to believe you have a good algorithm to predict who these privileged few will be? Anecdotally, I've seen little evidence that being a good student at age X is reason to invest more heavily in that person going forward.
Re: reliable energy. Even in low earth orbit, isn't sunlight plentiful? My layman's guess says it's in direct sun 80-95% of the time, with deterministic shade.
It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems brought up
Exactly this. It's not that it's a difficult problem, but it is a high mass-budget problem. Which makes it an expensive problem. Which makes it a difficult problem.
That would make communicating with bits on Earth kind of painful though; I suppose that would work for a server that serves other sun-synchronous objects, but that seems like a rather small market.
If starcloud integrated with something like starlink, using the laser inter satellite links to distribute ground comms across a network of satellites, then the datacenter maintaining a direct link to a base station is probably a non-issue for most purposes.
It depends on what you're doing. If your system is a linear regression on 30 features, you should probably use floating point. My recollection is fixed is prohibitively slower and with far less FOSS support.
This is often the problem with charity in general. It's hard to find good organizations that actually need your money. Great ones self-sustain on their own revenue. Good ones are saturated with donations from their own users. There's just a small sliver of projects that are awesome, and could productively use financial support. From personal experience, identifying these is often far more costly than the act of writing a check.
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