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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

    As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

    We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

    In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.


  • You’re not seeing the whole picture: I’m paid by the government to do research, and in doing that research my group develops several libraries that can benefit not only other research groups, but also industry. We license these libraries under MIT, because otherwise industry would be far more hesitant to integrate our libraries with their proprietary production code.

    I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus. Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

    Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.


  • I do exactly this: Write code/frameworks that are used in academic research, which is useful to industry. Once we publish an article, we publish our models open-source under the MIT license. That is because companies that want to use it can then embed our models into their proprietary software, with essentially no strings attached. This gives them an incentive to support our research in terms of collaborative projects, because they see that our research results in stuff they can use.

    If we had used the GPL, our main collaborators would probably not have been interested.




  • It seems like you’ve misunderstood what I’m trying to say. I’m saying that

    A) There are legitimate reasons for a country to want to have some degree of self-sufficiency.

    B) The environmental impact of producing meat is hugely different depending on how the livestock gets its food, and the environmental impact of transporting goods cannot be neglected.

    C) There are countries with terrain suitable for livestock that cannot be used for farming.

    Of course: Almost no countries are, or need to be, 100% self-sufficient, because we have trade, but there is a huge difference between 10% and 50% self-sufficiency. If we are to cut out meat entirely, many places would be incapable of maintaining any notable degree of self-sufficiency.

    With you third paragraph, it seems like you actually agree with me. I don’t know how you got from me saying “there are legitimate reasons to produce meat”, to me saying this is a black and white issue. I’m explicitly trying to say that it’s not black and white, both because of self-sufficiency arguments, and because of the environmental cost of transportation. Thus, we need a nuanced approach. This means that we should minimise (or eliminate) the use of farmland for livestock production, without condemning livestock production as a whole, because there are legitimate reasons to have livestock, as argued above.




  • I’m not bringing up the state of access to agricultural land as some historical trivia. It’s just as true today as ever before.

    The point is that plenty of countries/regions cannot be self-sufficient regarding food production without resorting to livestock. There are several reasons to be, at least in part, self-sufficient. From environmental considerations arising from the transport of food from other places, to food security in the case that conflict or crisis strikes the region supplying you with food, a region which you don’t control.

    Stop acting like this is black and white, and that there’s absolutely no reason a country would want the capability of providing for its own people, as if that’s a thing of the past.



  • I’m just assuming that you are, in fact, aware that the likely primary advantage of inventing cooking was that the food is partially broken down before we consume it, meaning we need much less time and energy digesting it, which leaves us with more time to do other things, which is a huge evolutionary advantage. Right? Of course, every child knows that most animals spend a significant amount of time just digesting food, far more than humans.

    Well, since you’re clearly a well educated person that knows these things, I can’t find any other reasoning behind what you posted here than that you’re arguing in bad faith, or trolling. Please either read a book or stop trolling. In any case, don’t post about shit you know nothing about.







  • Yeah, the famous fascists that are actively working hard to join the EU, which we’ve seen so clearly the past decade just loves having fascist states in its ranks. You know, the fascist government that had an actual election as late as 2019 where southern and eastern regions largely voted for the person that won.

    Notice how there was actually a change of power in that election - a known hallmark of fascist states.


  • Yup, who would have though that Russia invading their neighbour suddenly caused the entirety of western Europe to start the largest investments in military and weapons manufacturing since the cold war?

    Looking at the results of this war so far (major expansion of NATO in the North, massively increased military spending in all of NATO, massively increased size of the Ukrainian military), you would almost think Putins goal was something completely different than preventing NATO expansion and “de-militarizing” Ukraine.

    It’s almost like the best way of preventing your neighbours from building huge militaries and joining alliances is by cooperating with them and helping them feel safe, rather than threatening, coercing and bombing them.



  • It’s sad, but countries like Russia show us very clearly why nations that want peace need to prepare for war.

    I would love to not need to spend a cent on our military, or weapons manufacturing, but the hard reality is very clearly that if we aren’t capable of mass producing weapons, we’ll likely be invaded and killed.

    That’s a major part of the issue Europe is facing now: We’ve scaled down weapons production since the 90’s, and now that we suddenly need millions of artillery shells it takes time to rebuild production capacity.

    Hopefully Russia gets the picture soon, that we’ll keep scaling up until every Russian invader is gone, and we can go back to not spending money on war…