Being the maintainer of such a big open-source application as Chrome used to grant dictatorial power: maintaining a fork represented too much work. It only happened in the most awful situations, such as Oracle acquiring OpenOffice.
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.
Smart move: now that they're an established player, and that they have a few billions of investors' money to spend, they comfort a jurisprudence that stealing IP to train your models is a billion dollar offense.
What a formidable moat against newcomers, definitely worth the price!
> it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole.
it depends what's most beneficial: having a few percents of very mathematically experts people in maths-heavy professions? Or having everyone somewhat decent at maths, even when it doesn't affect their productivity in their jobs?
I don't have any hard data about this, but instinctively I'd bet on the former: I'd rather have a few hundreds more Sutskevers, than most of the country's bakers know their way around PDE.
* be completely autonomous from day 1, and progressively increase the number of situations you can drive through;
* or drive through every legal situation from day 1, and increase the % of them handled autonomously.
I believe the 2nd approach, Tesla's, has one key advantage: it collects data about freak situations much faster and more exhaustively. Given how data has become the key resource in AI, that's probably a very strategic asset they've accumulated here.
Also, Waymo's joker (remote operation by humans when the software bails out) is totally replicable by Tesla robotaxis.
the magic power of spreadsheets is that they encourage improvisation, and it probably applies to that one.
you have only one data structure (the 2D table), data types are super-weak, there are no variable names... all of this guarantee a maintenance nightmare, and rightfully scares developers. But it's also a very low barrier to entry. You've got data, you paste them into the grid, and you start toying with them, before having figured anything about them.
That's an amazing superpower, when targeting non-developers, and that's why Excel is the most used programming language over the world, by far: it's probably got an order of magnitude more users than there are trained developers in the world.
Remote has been fantastic, to extend our pool of potential customers/employers. Not working in an open space, not being disturbed by pointless red-tapers and middle managers is a productivity boost. Not losing time and energy in commutes as well.
I can see one serious drawback with pure remote: it's a cumbersome way to mentor junior developpers. In big companies which maintain a balance of junior/senior staff, and try to make the former grow, it's a legitimate issue. In start-ups, which expect you to hit the ground running, and don't have an army of managers to keep busy, remote should be the norm.
That's what better IDEs did to Java codebases indeed: they made layered boilerplates and leaky abstractions somewhat navigable, therefore generations of careless contractors have been able to ship ever nastier messes.
But that was before LLM-driven development, I think that now the game has changed, and maybe Google hasn't got the leverage it thinks it has.