Love this analogy. I think most of the arguments above seek to establish that the soft, as your analogy goes, is not the main or the only participant in the whole.
I am somewhat inclined to believe that this statement is aimed entirely at commercial sphere, which, at least in my mind, supports those arguing that this is a marketing ploy by the organizers of this campaign to make sure that their market share is protected. I think so for two reasons:
- a nefarious (or not so nefarious) state actor is not going to be affected by imposition of licensing or export controls. It seems to me rather naive to suppose that every state capable of doing so has not already scooped up all open source models and maybe nicked a few proprietary ones; and
- introduction of licensing or regulatory control will directly affect the small players (say, I wanted to build an AI in my basement) who would not be able to afford the cost of compliance.
I work for a smallish supermarket chain (I assume, by the US standards) - we have about a 1000 stores in 5 countries, about 40-45K tills. At peak trading my teams' services handle a combined 250K tps. We run a bunch of distributed systems in the cloud, across two DCs and some other weird legacy locations (there are even a few mainframes) - the business is really old and went digital before some of my colleagues were born :) (Anyone remember teletext? Yep, we were on that too).
So, Elixir/Erlang combo seems like a perfect fit. Instead, we are having all remaining Elixir and Erlang systems ripped out and re-written in Java.
The reason is simple - readability and hire-ability. The cherries on the cake - Java's "good enough" for what we do, the tooling, the quality and availability of reference resources and subject matter experts - are just that, cherries. But the ability to hire and onboard new engineers is THE thing - it took us 3 years to fully hire out the headcount we were allocated for just our little team and that is in Java. Hiring for Elixir and Erlang has been such a pain that we are having to pay contractors while we re-write the current Elixir and Erlang systems into Java. Our domain is somewhat complicated - most people who have not worked in food retail generally would not imagine it to be so - so onboarding people to the domain knowledge takes 3-6 months and that is without "This is what? Erlang?" barrier. That is where readability of Java and non-FP vs Elixir/Erlang and FP comes in as well.
I guess what I am trying to say is that, yes, the right tool for the job and all that but good enough tool with a significantly higher hiring pool is proving so much better.
As a lawyer with 13 years experience in my previous life, I can tell you that you can't trust a paralegal either. What it does do is give you the "first pass" - if I could automate the first pass over 100,000 pages and the AI highlights say 100 examples of the content I am looking for, of which say 10 are good quality examples of what I am looking for, then we are off to a very good start.
This, more than anything and it doesn't only apply to the "new" languages. I spent the last year picking up basic Common Lisp and Elixir just for the fun of it. As "languages" they are great, but their ecosystems made me realize how spoiled I am working in Java.
I sort of think you just proved the author's point - you are using the AI to increase your productivity. People who cannot adjust in that way will be less productive and loose out.
The problem with this argument is that completely ignores the die-off rate of the population or the demographics. On average, our population is dieing off at about 600k per year - 500k immigrants does not even break even. We have a negative birth rate. We need new blood - ONS projection for population growth between 2020 and 2045 is under 6%. To compare - mid-1995 and mid-2020 it was just over 15%. We are old-age-heavy which is really bad for the economy and taxation. The mindset should align with data.
So, I came to the UK when I was 15, studied for over 10 years, got my citizenship. All legal, privately paid for. Incidentally, I worked as a solicitor for over 10 years, large part of my work was immigration law. There is no such thing as "uncontrolled" immigration outside the EU. When we were within the EU, we __chose__ not to enforce the rules. The arguments about it being non-practical (which is what Home Office told MPs select committee) are rubbish - Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands do so successfully from my personal experience. We could have done that too, __if we wanted to__. We just weren't bothered until the rise of UKIP.
Now about being poor. It took me 13 years, 4 of which working in Saudi Arabia, and a career change into software engineering, to make enough money to pay off my debts from school and start earning enough to live on without worrying about the next bill and looking after my wife and kids. Most immigrants I know do work hard. There is also a large swathe of people (immigrants and natives) who for variety of reasons rely on the welfare state. I do agree that welfare state should be downsized significantly. The reality, perhaps surprisingly, is that such a downsizing will hit the natives the most.
"The UK would face economic collapse without significant immigration."
Demographics of our country guarantee a demographic collapse. Not as bad as say Japan or Germany, but enough of an impact to maintain wage inflation. The level of immigration that would be required to reverse that is currently not acceptable to our electorate (in the main). Which is unfortunate.
You would be surprised, but that was the plan in 50s and 70s, when we got a people from Pakistan and South East Asia to come to work in the factories. They did not go back and settled here. The actual result is that they stay here and bring their families and contribute. Which is great, in my opinion.
This. I am working on a personal project and definitely initial design and dev is easier in a monolith. Microservices, at the stage my project is at, will bring too much overhead to solve a problem I don't have (scale).
I think that this is a very solid point, but perhaps the reasoning underlying this type of issue is somewhat more complex. For example, we run a what is now a v5 of our API as a bunch of microservices and have been running it as microservices since v4, about 4 years now. These are "children" of v3 - our monolith. The monolith is still alive and kicking in a much reduced state but the reason we cannot decom it has nothing to do with design or time or priorities - the monolith is sitting in a data centre and is the only regulatory permitted way (in our case) to access the mainframe. So, it sits there as a gatekeeper and will do so for the foreseeable future...
I used kinesis advantage for about two months. Ended switching to Ultimate Hacking Keyboard and have never been happier - haven't switched the keyboard since - about 4 years now. Coding on Kinesis was just such a pain in terms of usual keys - braces et all: weird, up down arrows: weird. I thought I would adjust after two months, but did not happen for me. YMMV