Oh man, talk about a walk down memory lane: a polite disagreement about the intersection of the public and private sectors in which commercial control of source

Oh man, talk about a walk down memory lane: a polite disagreement about the intersection of the public and private sectors in which commercial control of source code written by a founder who is also a researcher is being sold because the researcher found that to be more effective than opening the code (which he tried and didn’t get much attention as a result). Both reasonable arguments, I can see both sides. I remember when the software business wasn’t a dystopian nightmare. Today a weird, scary splinter faction of the already terrifying Effective Altruism religion/cult is talking about building digital gods they can’t control and saying with a straight face that this is imminent (absurdly extravagant claim with no evidence more convincing than a logarithmic scale and a ruler) and using this as an argument to redefine everything from the definition of science to the very epistemology of factuality and getting the public to directly or indirectly subsidize it into the bargain. People who make Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity magical thinking look flat fucking normal and frankly sound like L Ron Hubbard more every day are unilaterally deciding that all research into, ya know, what they claim is the most important event in human history is totally black box propriety because, ya know, for our own good. I’ll take the polite Swiss functional programming folks over Anthropic’s Mechanical Interpretability people seven days a week and twice on Sunday. Can we go back to this please? The new thing sucks.