> Reflecting on the importance of self-care and recalibrating after a high-impact day. It’s essential to prioritize mental well-being to maintain peak professional performance. Cheers to finding that work-life integration! #SelfCare #Leadership #WorkLifeBalance
> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code.
> Please be aware that GitHub and GitLab are exceptions to this Policy because they are subject to explicit licensing arrangements that pre-date, and thus take precedence, over this Policy.
That seems pretty normal to me. Try this thought experiment. Suppose I make an accessory that adds an ironing board to the back of F150 trucks[1] and I call my company “Fordboard”? Do you think that portmanteau is a trademark violation or not? I think Ford probably would fight and win against me if I did such a thing, in particular because I am using the registered mark (Ford) to refer to the actual thing so I can’t pretend that’s just a coincidence. That is also the case here with gitclassic. If I called my guitar shop that I might have more of a leg to stand on.
Well you aren't referring to a truck or even a vehicle. However I agree that your example product is intimately related to the trademarked item just as it is in this case. That's exactly why I'm wondering about precedent. It seems overly broad to me, a layman, but could well be the established status quo.
I would naively expect it to depend on whether the mark could reasonably be confused by a customer with the name in question. To that end fordboard and gitclassic seem problematic since they read like two separate words, one of which is the protected mark. In contrast, something like gitea seems like it ought to be in the clear - no one is ever going to think "git [space] ea huh wonder what ea by git is". (Ford should totally release a vehicle under the name Board that would be hilarious.)
> it is better when there is an overlap in the distinctive sound of the two words.
From the article you linked - this matches my intuition and is largely why I feel like gitea ought to be in the clear. Unfortunately it seems to be about trademarking portmanteaus as opposed to the creation of portmanteaus using one or more trademarks. (More is better - my next terrible idea is gitzurite.)
> What percentage of Meta's users are paying? Google's?
The advertiser based business model for those companies makes your question/thought process here problematic for me. Historically speaking Google and "Meta" (Facebook) were primarily advertising provider companies. They provided billboards (space and time on the web page in front of an end-user) to people who were willing to buy tht space and time on the billboard. The "free access" end-users would always end up seeing said billboards, which is how they ended up "paying" for the service.
So most of Meta/Google end-users were "paying" users. They were being subsidised by the advertising customers paying for the end-users (who were forced to view adverts). The end-users paid with interruption to the service by an advert. [0]
In that context it feels a little like you're comparing apples to dave's left foot, as OpenAI hasn't had that with advertising ............ historically [1].
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[0]: yes ad-blockers, yes more diverse revenue income streams over the years like with phones, yes this is simplified yadayada
[1]: excluding government etc. ~bailouts~ investments as not the same as advertising subsidies, but you could argue it's doing the same thing
Yes -- but both Google and Meta didn't start off as an advertising company - they started off providing a service a lot of people liked, and then eventually added ads to it. My assumption (somewhat implicit, admittedly) is that there's no reason OpenAI couldn't do the same. I can understand why that might be controversial, though.
But honestly, if OpenAI can't figure out ads given all their data and ability, they deserve to fail. :P
I agree that OpenAI could and most likely will execute quite well on ads.
What I'm uncertain about is how much the ability of Google to set defaults matters.
Setting Gemini as the "AI" on phones, automatically integrated with all "daily" services could matter a lot. They have a platform ready to go and are pushing hard to make themselves really attractive. All while being very profitable.
Apple on the other hand will be in a strong position to negotiate a good deal with competitors to OAI and my suspicion is that "good enough AI" is all most people need.
And of course there is the financial reality that OpenAI does not only need profits, but profits on an enormous scale. Just being successful would mean they missed the mark.
My personal guess is that Microsoft will fully buy them at some point in the future but I'm not, confidence enough to bet any money on it.
But OpenAI has more serious competition than those others did when they were coming up. That puts pressure on them to figure out ads and they dragged their feet getting started
> Can you say that about any project that was done before GenAI?
yes. the linux kernel and it's extensive mailing lists come to mind. in fact, any decent project which was/is built in a remote-only scenario tends to have extensive documentation along these lines, something like gitlab comes to mind there.
personally i've included design documents with extensive notes, contracts, meeting summaries etc etc in our docs area / repo hosting at $PREVIOUS_COMPANY. only thing from your list we didn't have was transcripts because they're often less useful than a summary of "this is what we actually decided and why". edit -- there were some video/meeting audio recordings we kept around though. at least one was a tutoring session i did.
maybe this is the first time you've felt able to do something like this in a short amount of time because of these GenAI tools? i don't know your story. but i was doing a lot of this by hand before GenAI. it took time, energy and effort to do. but your project is definitely not the first to have this level of detailed contextual information associated with it. i will, however, concede that these tools can make it it easier/faster to get there.
Well, I was developing as a hobby for 10 years starting with an Apple //e in 65C02 assembly language before graduating from college…if that gives you a clue to my age and I am old enough that I am eligible to put catch up contributions in my 401K…
If I had to scope this project before GenAI it would have taken two other developers to do the work I mentioned not to mention make changes to a web front end that another developer did for another client on a project I was leading - I haven’t touched front end code for over a decade
> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
then they get angry. very angry.
just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future.
edit — these are the hidden requirements.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects.
now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.
> nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
> then they get angry. very angry.
Yes, this has a lot of overlap with how humans differ from "Homo Economicus" [0].
Humans generally can't find out, don't know, care to know, have the time to research, or are expert enough to understand the ramifications of decisions perfectly (or adequately to some definition of adequate).
However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.
This, also, has been true for a long long time. Humans are far more likely to choose the cheap option if they don't believe or understand the expensive one.
Incidentally, this is somewhat rational given that marketing half-truths are rampant.
I've noticed this is leading to less high quality products being produced in general. If the only real axis people understand is price then products can't compete on quality/durability/maintability/etc, and so they're pushed aside to lower the cost.
A recent example: I've bought many articles of clothing from Eddie Bauer over the years because they have been generally high quality and durable, and even so are only a bit more expensive than other brands. However just last week they filed for bankruptcy. Sure, the company could have been mismanaged, but I'm sure competition from fast fashion brands with rock bottom prices didn't help.
Haven’t followed the recent history of Eddie Bauer, but seems they’ve sullied their brand for a while.
Sam’s Club has been selling Eddie Bauer stuff for years. I don’t think a $37 pair of Eddie Bauer hiking boots are going to be quality.
The more or less inevitable trend of "outdoor stores/brands" is to become increasingly sort of "outdoorsy casual" stores of some sort with--maybe--some camping/hiking gear at some level.
It's been a hugely popular PE play - any time a brand has a reputation for being very well made buy it for life level of stuff, that people pay a high price for, you can buy it and start reducing the quality for a few years, selling cheaper lower quality goods for the same price, hoping no one notices.
For the first few years, there aren't enough product issues for most of the hardcore enthusiasts to notice - maybe your tent ripping was just bad luck, or it may take two years for even a mediocre tent to weaken and fail for all but the people taking their tent to Denali or something.
Eventually the people who know move on and stop paying for the poorly made crap, but it's still seen as an exclusive brand by people who care about showing off they can afford something expensive vs. those for whom the quality was worth paying more for.
For boots, at least, there's an easy solution: buy the same stuff that the military gets (there are many options there). It might not be the best, but at least there are known standards other than minimum price that apply.
I have a pair of Belleville "hot weather mountain hybrid boots" (TR550) that I got back in 2014, heavily used, still in one piece.
There is an interesting counter balance to this consumer tendency: the business.
Businesses/organizations in a lot of ways act much more "rationally" than the individual consumer. So you'll see generally better car/truck maintenance in fleets than by consumers.
Then there is a cool feedback/blowoff valve where more expensive + higher quality "pro" tools get discovered by consumers, drive up demand, the price falls, and then the features become common.
Don't forget the second half of that feedback loop: other manufacturers come out with their poor approximations of those features at lower prices, consumption shifts to that because quality isn't clear from the labels, the quality manufacturers don't move enough volume to hit similar prices, so they end up either killing them or cutting corners.
So then it becomes a cycle. It's risky to make a high quality initial product that's expensive because it requires the buyer to understand and trust why they should pay more.
Eventually the market demands the higher quality and the pro series gains adoption, only for the the cheap stuff to come in again.
I've never heard of Eddie Bauer, and if I did see that in a store, there's no way to know the clothing is of higher quality, or how much higher. In a market for lemons, lemons win.
> However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.
I think people generally do understand that. What they can't do is tell which of the more expensive options is actually of higher quality and which just has higher margins. That requires expert knowledge and we can't each be an expert in everything.
In other cases it can also actually be better to get the cheaper crap option. E.g. if you are not sure if something will actually work for you the best option is no longer just the one with the lowest cost/lifetime.
It’s the externalized costs that bite society in the end.
The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.
A slightly higher quality boot could reduce their expenditure (monetary and time) and collectively allow society to devote the time and resources saved to higher goals.
However the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
> The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.
And the environment, which now gets polluted with discarded short life boots, and all the waste byproducts required for their production/transportation
And the social fabric inevitably changes for one reflecting the priorities of a world of cheap disposable boots made far away
Data breaches are so common they don't even register any more, and people share far more personal information now (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now every service demands your phone number to register, and those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware, and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error.
Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in business.
If that was the case then TOTP would be available as an alternative but often enough it isn't even though SMS are less secure and more costly to implement.
This is essentially the literacy component of a Lennon market (which the parent essentially described). Where the consumer can't differentiate a lemon from a peach, only a tad more abstract. The customer has an implicit assumption that it's all equivalent so it gets removed from the decision process.
Which that's probably why we're in a lemon economy. To figure out the answers to these things is incredibly time consuming, even if one does have expertise in a specific domain. Fatigue leads to the same result, oversimplification of assumptions
but you can only have two of them at the same time.
and we’re talking about FOSS here, so cheap kinda has to be one of them.
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