The buffer is the UI, rendered by Emacs's extremely optimised text display machinery
The author is known in the community as a mere packager whose knowledge of the nitty-gritty derives entirely from hearsay. Perhaps he read the long-winded preamble to xdisp.c written in 1995 boasting of all manner of optimisations. But they were written so long ago, almost no one believes most of them matter anymore, what with thirty years of bitrot.
Anthropic, like most frontier companies, have more money than they know
what to do with. When the prize is world domination, turning a profit
isn't high on their todo list. Twenty dollars per month is the bare
minimum hurdle to prevent DoS bots from ruining it for the rest of us.
That's right, but HN clapback derangement syndrome compels me to state another obvious fact of life.
Profit motive is the singlemost powerful motivator for the pharmaceutical industry. Take that away, and let's see how many smart, hard-working people work their butts off to rescue sick children.
"Tremendous societal cost" is putting it uncharitably. My country was
built on the financial incentivization of patents. I can think of
several economies with an open disregard for patents, even some where
the state assumes ownership of all innovation, and I'm happy I live in
one where IP hoarders like The Walt Disney Company continue to thrive.
Your generalizing about the fungibility of labor yields nothing. Every
successful hire is a unique mix of right place, right time, right man.
You control what you can.
1. Internet has made distribution frictionless. So unlike giving out Uber trips,
giving out code costs you nothing.
2. You have a real job. The "80% time" for which you're paid subsidizes
the self-promotional work you do for free, and let's not kid ourselves:
most of us write open-source not out of altruism but for the
recognition.
3. Software is immediately useful. Lawyering is a lot like programming
in that both involve putting pen to paper in just the right way. But
pro bono legal work is a lot more painful than whipping up some code.
Lawyers have to deal with people and all their bs.
4. Software is easy. I don't know why but the return on capital blows
away the return on labor. Whereas Microsoft may have once derived most
of their profit from software, they've now come around to the rest of
the tech industry which is selling hardware and compute -- the software
that comes with it is included.