People are seeing that that version of "success" isn't worth your whole life. They're deciding to not chase it. That may not fit with the WSJ's version of the world, but from where I sit, it looks more like wisdom.
Absence of work-life balance can burn you out to the point where mediocre would be a step up.
But even if it doesn't... "Money is like gasoline while driving across country on a road trip. You never want to run out, but the point of life is not to go on a tour of gas stations." - Tim O’Reilly.
1. Work tends to be work, that is, not fun. If you take your "fun" and make it your job, it often ruins it as "fun". You sound like you're looking for fun, and you should really be looking for fulfilling work, which is a different beast altogether.
2. Are you good at networking? Are you growing in competence there? Can you actually fix things? Is the work not too horrible? Are the people reasonable, and not in too great a need of debugging? If so, think well before you leave it.
3. Niches aren't forever. I've spent all my career in embedded systems, except for a five-year detour in the middle into network security software. Niches, like jobs, often are only good until they're not; there's nothing wrong with riding them out as long as they're still good.
Or is Python just growing that rapidly? (There was a time when computer programming as a whole was growing that fast. Is Python there now?)
Or is Python picking up lots of people whose job isn't actually programming? They want to do data science, or biology, or whatever, and they need to do something with some data, and it's too complicated for an Excel spreadsheet, so they reach for Python. But when they get the data mangling part done (or at least working so that they don't have to keep fiddling with it), they quit being a programmer of any kind, and go back to doing whatever it is that they actually do. If people like that were, say, half of the Python programmers, and they only did that for a couple of years each, you'd see exactly this result.
> is Python picking up lots of people whose job isn't actually programming? They want to do data science, or biology, or whatever
Important figures in the community seem to believe this is the case. Which explains a lot about why the packaging discourse goes the way it does; there's a fair bit of emphasis on serving the needs of people who are just not going to be interested in contributing packages that work with the existing packaging system, and just want their friends to be able to run their code using existing third-party packages, and don't necessarily want their friends to even have to know what Python is. And then there's the concern for people who do everything in "notebooks" and have never created a .py file from scratch. And so on and so forth. And there's a looming sense that we don't even have a good idea of what the most common existing workflows look like, outside of the ones that were explicitly designed for the needs of "traditional" developers.
If you're familiar with the official Discourse forums at discuss.python.org, I recommend rummaging around the posts of Paul Moore (one of the main devs for pip) a bit. You'll get a feeling for it pretty quickly.
Interesting. But it would depend on how much of model X is salvaged in creating model X+1.
I suspect that the answer is almost all of the training data, and none of the weights (because the new model has a different architecture, rather than some new pieces bolted on to the existing architecture).
So then the question becomes, what is the relative cost of the training data vs. actually training to derive the weights? I don't know the answer to that; can anyone give a definitive answer?
There are some transferable assets but the challenge is the commoditization of everything that means others have easy access to “good enough” assets to build upon. There’s very little moat to build in this business and that’s making all the money dumped into it looking a bit froth and ready to implode.
GPT-5 is a bellwether there. OpenAI had a huge head start and basically access to whatever money and resources they needed and after a ton of hype released a pile of underwhelming meh. With the pace of advances slowing rapidly the pressure will be on to make money from what’s there now (which is well short of what the hype had promised).
In the language of Gartner’s hype curve, we’re about to rapidly fall into the “trough of disillusionment.”
The people who say "everything is political" always seems to mean "you have to agree with my politics, and you aren't allowed to ignore it". Such people can get lost; I'll ignore politics to the degree I choose, and I'll ignore you.
Now, they do have something of a point, namely that politics does affect (almost) everything. If you remain uninvolved in politics, politics will still be done to you. That is true. I'd be more inclined to listen to them on that point, though, if I didn't get this vibe that they were really saying "everything is political, so you must join the battle on my side of it."
Isn't what you described said in reply to people who claim someone is irrationally obsessed with politics as a shield against having to say they dislike that person's politics?
Alice: something political
Bob: "You're obsessed with politics. Just don't talk about politics. Stop talking about politics."
Alice: "Everything is politics. It's impossible not to talk about politics because everything is politics."
> The people who say "everything is political" always seems to mean "you have to agree with my politics, and you aren't allowed to ignore it".
Nope. When I say it I just mean, everything's political. There is no part of human life that is untouched by some kind of politics.
I don't give a shit whether you agree with me or not. I just don't think we can talk about politics if you don't see that politics isn't a narrow profession that people who don't have proper jobs do for a living; it's one of the great flows of human social energy.
(Politics and sport: two interlocking alternatives to violence and war. 2026 is going to be a very interesting year because of this)
To pick something at random: Five Guys hamburgers. Are they political? Sure, they're affected somewhat by politics. It affects the price of their meat, and the wage they have to pay their workers, and therefore the price of their products. So, yes, they are affected to a degree by politics.
But I have no idea whether they lean left or right, blue or red - as an organization, or the owners of an individual restaurant, or any individual employee. Nor do I care. I just really like their fries.
That's not political at all. And I claim that much of life is similarly not political.
Now, you could say that the owner has some political stance, and you could find out, and use that to decide whether you want to eat there or not. You could, but that's you making political something that wasn't inherently political on its own.
Or you could say that the roads I drove there on are the result of political choices. That's also true, but neither Five Guys nor I care. If the city were built differently, I could take a tram there, and they'd feed me just the same.
> That's not political at all. And I claim that much of life is similarly not political.
Of course it's political -- affected by and affecting organisation, governance, rules etc.
You have just temporarily re-defined "political" to mean "the differences between or positions of political parties".
It is a particularly US thing that nothing that is political escapes being reduced to party politics; school boards increasingly divide up red and blue, even.
But politics is vastly bigger than political parties. Most political issues are independent of party politics until the parties choose their stances on those issues, which they usually do by selecting the position that alienates the least of their base. But the politics exists regardless of the alignment.
Politics is how entities with equal power and individual objectives resolve disputes, ultimately. Everything is political.
As Bismarck said, "politics is the art of the possible".
I wouldn't be so sure that Five Guys don't care about transport policy; I don't know either way. But I would say with certainty that if they do, they donate to whoever says they will fix them in a way that align with their own needs. That too is politics, even if they don't pick a colour.
The alternative to police is not that you get to do what you want. The alternative is that people who have fewer rules than the police are the ones who throw you out.
No, the alternative is whatever we say it is. Presumably something better. You might even call them "police", but to make them better, they'd have to be a brand new system from the ground up with no overlap in personnel or plans.
No, the alternative is whatever we do. We can say it will be unicorns and rainbows, but unless you have a unicorn-and-rainbow factory, saying that won't change the reality that it will be... something else.
We might be able to abolish or defund the police. The result won't be paradise, though, it will be Vigilance Committees. (Even "abolish and replace" is, I think, too much of a reach to be actually implemented.)
I don't. I just know that there's a lot more to making something actually better than just saying that it's going to be better.
But, in fairness, I may have misread how you meant "whatever we say it is". If you meant that we get to make choices that determine the future, I agree. I would just caution that it takes far more effort, persistence, and political capital than you expect in order to make a positive change.
I was there at her interview. I've done several interviews before - you ask questions to find out how much the candidate knows. She was different. Halfway through the interview, we, the interviewers started asking questions because we wanted to learn things.
Her name is Jalaja Ramanadham. She became my manager.
The hacker news guidelines haven’t been enforced for at least a year at this point, but as personal attacks on somebody that wrote that there were was a successful coup in America it’s pretty tame.
Saying someone has "severe brain trauma" is never tame. Particularly for someone who never said "there were was a successful coup in America". The person you responded to said that "the coup leaders won" and they absolutely did. Republicans blocked any meaningful investigation of the attack or significant punishments, and what meager punishments were handed out to a handful of participants were all pardoned, with one of the most egregious participants being placed to a senior position in the Department of Justice while qualified DoJ staff who merely were assigned to investigate were fired. The coup leaders ABSOLUTELY won.
> Particularly for someone who never said "there were was a successful coup in America". The person you responded to said that "the coup leaders won" and they absolutely did.
No they didn’t and nothing you said supports the argument they did. Winning a coup has a meaning, you don’t get to make one up.
After I called you out for that personal attack, but before your above attempted defense of your comment, we got a phone call. My nephew was in a bad car accident. He has several broken bones, and also bleeding in his brain.
Really bad day for your trying to defend that line, bro. Really bad day.
In fact, because it's on topic, here's the full lyrics: https://www.streetdirectory.com/lyricadvisor/song/ucoowl/wha...
People are seeing that that version of "success" isn't worth your whole life. They're deciding to not chase it. That may not fit with the WSJ's version of the world, but from where I sit, it looks more like wisdom.
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