A more rigorous definition of software quality can be found in ISO 25010.
> The quality of a system is the degree to which the system satisfies the stated and implied needs of its various stakeholders, and thus provides value. Those stakeholders' needs (functionality, performance, security, maintainability, etc.) are precisely what is represented in the quality model...
The money isn't really for the researchers personally, but for doing the research. They are merely offered a job at a time where their jobs are on the line in the USA. And not even that, they still have to apply and compete with top researchers from other parts of the world. Really hard to call that a bribe, even in a morally neutral way. At most you could say the Netherlands - and other European countries - are taking advantages of the situation where the USA is abandoning their top researchers.
But for years it has been the other way around. Top talent from the Netherlands has been moving to the US in order to get funding (and a bigger salary).
> figuring out exactly how to work it into our particular business
This is the most crucial bit. Neither ramming it down developers throats nor rejecting it wholesale is particularly productive. You need the conservative people onboard as well, to discover critical edges and failure modes. Including their criticism in the adoption process instead of bluntly banning it is the smarter move. Of course, there will be a few people who just don't play, they will fold eventually or be let go.
And not few of those 'productivity improvements' for farmers have had disastrous consequences, even though what I think you are referring to has been implemented with far greater discernment and empirical basis than the current AI revolution.
People are stubborn, but sometimes for good reason. Let the stubborn people hold on to their practices, if the innovators are right they will eventually fold anyway.
I have a different mental model because I live in a high trust society. Well, at least higher than the US. In my model, the government is basically a virtual contract between all people to take care of each other. One side of the bargain is tax and following the law, the other is what you should get out of it: protection against criminals (police) and hostile countries (defense), universal healthcare, education, roads and stuff, consumer rights, the rule of law, etc.
I think that is a pretty good deal and I see no inherent reason for why 'the gov is out there to steal from us' (makes no sense), because it basically IS us. Corps on the other hand, they are explicitly there to get your money.
So in my model the only reason the government is bad is because it is influenced by corporations (and because people vote for rightwing parties), and the only reason corporations are good is because the government makes them so. This is a bit black and white to make it very explicit, but basically that is the idea.
And there are some flaws here of course and a lot of nuances, but I don't think this is wrong or biased at all. In fact, I think everybody else is wrong or biased and am ready to argue why, but that should come at no surprise.
That's the worst thing. You need to take a job to have money. You need to buy food to eat, pay housing, clothing, insurance, etc. Yet you don't get to determine these prices. The 'free market' story is just a way to make it look like being poor is your own choice, because you agreed to these transactions. You are just being gaslit into blaming yourself for your conditions, while the rich extract every last penny out of society without even working for it.
You don't need no guarantee nor even trust if you have openweights, that's the beauty of it.
The real question is: what guarantee do we have from Trump that he won't pull away the software (and hardware) our society is built on?
Previously we could pretend to rely on the international order as shaped by the US itself, and as an extension on the guarantees of the US president. But with Trump, even Xi sounds like a standup guy.
So as Europe, we must scramble to disentangle the core of our societies from AWS, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. etc.
No doubt there are some feelings involved in geopolitics. However, if your mental model of global trade and politics doesn't go beyond comparing Europe to a toddler having tantrum, then you just might miss some important nuances.
In a way, nothing is complex at the point where you have untangled it, by definition. Software development is, after all, the art of untangling complexity. The real challenge is (re-)imagining something in the simplest way that fits the goal you are given. When you have arrived there, everything seems obvious and simple. But not everybody could have done it.
> Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money.
And what happens when your money is gone? What happens when the government has no money anymore because the super rich took it all? Your life turns to shit real fast when you can't afford housing, healthcare and food.
I get when you are in an authoritarian country, or one on the path to becoming so like the US, that the government looks to be the most dangerous actor. But in the west that is still free, its the corps that I worry about the most.
When people say they prefer 'the syntax', I think they usually mean a bit more than just that: at least a fair bit of this is semantics. Python provides a lot of features out of the box, and if you work superficially along the happy path, it is very easy to understand how these work and read code using them.
Take list comprehensions for example. It is mostly syntax: you can do virtually all list comprehensions with just a map and filter function. But the way that it is integrated and presents the code, makes is vastly easier to follow for most developers, which tilts the balancer in favor of doing away with loops and mutable state. Is it syntax that made them do so? Yes, maybe. But its the actual semantics that provide the value.
We all tend to assume AI will only ever be good at the execute part, but what if AI will also be good at decide-deliver? What if some day, we could put AI in charge of not only running a company, but coming up with a business idea, getting funded, driving sales, pivoting until product-market fit and then scaling?
Humans make mistakes too, does it mean humans are unusable? We accept as empirical fast that most production quality code has 2 - 10 bugs per 1k LoC. According to your premise, virtually all existing software is therefor unusable.
What if an LLM overall starts to make less mistakes than a medium developer, costs less than its salary and is 100 x faster? For sure, the companies that will leverage these with just a few senior devs doing prompting, testing and requirements analysis, will outcompete other organizations.
The 'vote' is real. But it is 'darwinian'. It's not that animals develop a certain adaptation on purpose in order to survive. Instead, out of many random changes an adaptation emerges by selection: those that are the most advantageous get the chance to pass on their genes.
If everybody stops using meta apps and starts using signal, bluesky, mastodon, etc., meta would instantly transform their business (if they still can make a profit).
The problem is, subtly harvesting data from and even shoveling ads into paid subscriptions actually doesn't make consumers immediately and massively cancel their subs. So you can make a profit from subscriptions alone, or make an even larger profit by also collecting and monetizing your customers data. Guess who will win?
And we still let tobacco companies spread their products, which are practically speaking as harmful as they ever were, maybe even more so considering their environmental impact as well.
Surely you mean the laws of shareholder capitalism. There are many things you can do with money, and only some of them are legally backed by rules that ensure absolute shareholder power.
Really depends on the domain. I've been in jobs where the domain was much harder than my job as a software engineer, but I've also been in jobs where I quickly got to understand the domain better than the domain experts, or at least parts of it. I believe this is not because I'm smart (I'm not), but because software engineering requires precise requirements, which requires unrelenting questioning and attention to details.
The ability to acquire domain knowledge quickly however, isn't exactly the same as the ability to develop complex software.
The source of truth in fascism is not popular support or inquiry, thus they always need to channel some privileged connection to reality, or claim to voice the true will of the people and authentically represents the pure will of the nation.
Its a farce, of course, but one that can sometimes muster enough support to keep the signs in the shop with just a bit of intimidation and violence to back it up.
Neither is 'real'. The power of might depends on belief just as much as the power of rules. You need a whole lot of compliance, even when forced by fear and terror, to just keep up a police state. The belief consists of where people think other people assign authority to, at large. But that can be just as brittle as a meme stock if the time is right.
Social reality is always constructed. No single construction is more real than any other.
> The quality of a system is the degree to which the system satisfies the stated and implied needs of its various stakeholders, and thus provides value. Those stakeholders' needs (functionality, performance, security, maintainability, etc.) are precisely what is represented in the quality model...
Here is a decent summary: https://iso25000.com/en/iso-25000-standards/iso-25010
Not exactly software quality, but adjacent, is the capability catalog of dora: https://dora.dev/capabilities/
Dora is about 'software delivery and operations performance' and has a vast body of empirical research underpinning it.