I would expect that a lot of the decisions to avoid it at this point are more focused on how much they can count on the organisations behind the software to maintain it reliably and without becoming hostile than a moral judgement on their actions, though for many it might be both weighing in.
(OTOH, wordpress has quite a lot of lock-in power, and the risk to a smaller user would seem to be smaller, so I could see why a lot of users decide to stick with it for now).
Since security isn’t a concern, why not use $100 in AI tokens to build your own solution? Could then market it as a replacement to VikBooking and sell it yourself to other amateur clubs.
Because the problem is more complicated than that.
I'll give the example case from my real life.
My wife and one of my best friends want to start a blog. My wife has some wordpress experience from her last job.
There isn't a big expectation for revenue, this is a hobby project.
At least when I did my 'shopping', a managed wordpress instance as far as cost, was somewhere between 'as cheap as just doing self-maintained custom solution hosted' and 'a little bit more but the extra 3-10$ a month versus my time to actually maintain it' stopped me dead in my tracks of Vibe coding an alternative.
IOW, the 'long tail' of wordpress, is the ecosystem of managed providers that exist where the user (at least as long as they are careful about plugins?) doesn't have to worry about updating the core bits, the provider takes care of that for them and can do it at a volume that makes it palatable.
A lot of people use Wordpress for multi-user or business sites and there isn't a replacement that will meet their needs that also doesn't require a higher degree of technical knowledge than they have. Any alternative more complex than Wordpress's install or that doesn't have feature parity with Wordpress' plugins is going to be a no-go for most of them.
People who study STEM for the enrichment of their intellect are privileged. Most of us had to study STEM (or whatever else) because we had bills to pay.
I feel like so many people here are part of that crowd. going on about how it's like humanities and how it's super valuable and those who are seeking to get paid are just missing the point
how is it even possible to think like that? or maybe it's some kind of coping mechanism
Lots of people don't need to work, or are relatively insulated such that they have the "leisure capacity" to study for personal fulfillment.
Remember, the top 1% of households have $12M+ in assets. That's over a million households for whom work is somewhat or completely optional for them and their children. They can live a good quality life off capital returns without any hardship.
This logic still holds down the wealth gradient. Households at the 95th percentile still have to work, but the need is more flexible. The buffer of need could be years long.
So you have millions of people who genuinely don't need to worry about getting paid that much.
I recorded a video harassing the employees of a company, I uploaded it to the servers of said company, and they removed it. Who could have imagined this would happen?
Mostly vast amounts of sexism, but I also see racism, antisemitism and islamophobia waaay too much. The 'isms' tend to glom onto certain posts and go nuts. Algorithmic feeds at their finest, I guess.
This "ban all kids" kind of take is bananas to me. It implies you either A) believe we should trust famously secure and benevolent tech companies with government ID or B) believe parents have the time or technical know-how to exhaustively monitor the internet access of kids. Even as a software engineer, I've found it insanely tiresome to try operating half-assed parental controls across devices.
Russia was widely blamed for blowing up the Nord Stream pipe. You would get your comments removed from here if you said otherwise. Then it turns out they didn't do it. Oooops.
We still do not know who did it as several experts in diving have claimed that the story published by the journalists is not possible and the German police investigation seems to have stalled.
Still seems like any of Russia, Ukraine or Ukrainian citizens on their own initiative could have dove it.
If the Ukrainian military did it, I think they would have taken credit. They've taken credit for lots of major assaults, so I don't think they would hide this specific one. As for the other two options, I'm not willing to speculate.
That's just plain lying. And when people actually tasted the meat they'd call your bluff. In fact I have to assume that many have tasted it and have noped out.
More than just calling your bluff they would be rightfully upset with you and also with what you represent. Activisits often fail to understand this and think that their "noble" goal justifies the means.
> So far, however, the law has done little to spur the construction of new semiconductor factories in Europe. The European Court of Auditors concluded last year that the EU is unlikely to achieve its goal of doubling Europe’s share of the global chip market by 2030.
They should make another law and probably a few more commissions of auditors.
I get the sarcasm, but its not like e.g. TSMC popped up in a environment of pure libertarian free market capitalism. It was, from the beginning, a project of the Taiwanese state, and without significant public influence there is no way it would have become what it is. Are the EU laws what's needed? IDK. But without a proper public industrial policy besides "low taxes and few regulations" there is no way Europe will be able to get significant semiconductor-production up, the rich-get-richer phenomenon is just to strong.
I think the point is that laws alone mean nothing. As you note, Taiwan was more active than just having commissions and signing papers.
Airbus proves the EU can do this. It remains to be seen if they still have the ability to take constructive action, or if “add more bureaucracy” is the only tool remaining in the toolbox.
Airbus has been grandfathered into the current legal situation. Today a future Airbus would not be able to even start collecting data for its initial Environmental Impact Study.
And Boeing's rampant carelessness proves European laws can be beneficial. "Hurr durr, how about them European laws" is a low-effort comment that adds nothing to the discussions.
The argument that a slack regulatory environment is sufficient was disproven when the US government subsidized new fabs via the CHIPS Act (a new law!), and then went further and partially nationalized a failing Intel to prop it up.
I’ve seen someone explaining why it’s not as easy with semiconductors: Airbus can spread several different factories for different components around the EU. For semiconductors that’s not as feasible.
Thus countries would fight which one would have the semiconductors factory.
I think it was more or less this argument, which seems to make sense.
It was, from the beginning, a project of the Taiwanese state, and without significant public influence there is no way it would have become what it is.
Fun fact in this context: (Dutch) Philips was a major initial investor in TSMC (both in money and IP):
Only Philips was willing to sign a joint venture contract with Taiwan to put up $58 million, transfer its production technology, and license intellectual property in exchange for a 27.6 percent stake in TSMC.
Another interesting fact is that Che-Chia Wei (the man who made TSMC what it is) received zero equity. Everything he has he bought himself at the market rate.
Don't you mean Morris Chang/張忠謀? He was the founder. Also, this near-meme level phrase "received zero equity" is meaningless when you are paying senior executives millions per year. They just buy shares with their earnings. He was one of the highest (if not highest) paid executive in Taiwan for more than a decade.
I get its sarcasm but TSMC has done so much to try to get the Americans getting some decent yields in their new factories and it's failing so hard, there's real questions about whether they can ever meet their targets. They've sent thousands of existing Taiwanese workers to help at this point and from anecdotal things I hear it's not going well. (I live in Taiwan)
This stuff is all blood, sweat and tears to get it done, and to be honest a culture.
You can't just buy it off the shelf. If that was possible everyone would have gone paid for it like an Ikea product years ago.
Investment is risky and uncertain. If you did not do anything because it might fail, you would do nothing at all.
The inability to cope with failure is a culture that is common in Europe. Failure is so personally devastating, so destructive to social and cultural standing that not only must you not take risks but other people must be actively prevented from taking risk.
Maybe the US investment doesn't work, but the US will have tried at least. Taiwan is, ironically, the perfect example of where the initial impetus came from the government because there was no culture of risk-taking. Parts of Europe have a savings culture that is very similar to Taiwan and led to very poor growth and very high inequality.
If the US keeps trying, they will succeed. On here, the view was that China could never build out this capacity, they did. The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.
That's part of the culture OP was referencing. Another part is not having ad tech jobs easily available paying 5-10x as much for easier work. A big part of Asian success at hard tech fields is just not having better options.
> They've got huge monetary losses, if you're ok with that
USA passed the CHIPS Act and is spending close to a trillion dollars to strategically re-home all of TSMC's most advanced fab technology to Arizona as a matter of national security. Monetary losses don't matter when the point is to not be reliant or China in the event of South China Sea conflict.
I think the point of this article, and the warnings from ASML, is that Europe is not making the same effort.
But that's sorta of hits to the heart of my comment, it's not particularly working well. TSMC has 2 fabs in China and yields+costs are a fraction of whats coming out of Arizona, let alone in Hsinchu.
Like are you really going to buy a chip that costs 70% more out of national pride? Might work on some but think that very few else will sign up for that.
70% extra on top of a trillion or two in investment is a relatively small price to pay when faced with the possibility of that being your only option at some point in the future.
I don't want to speak bad about them but it's just general demand for semiconductors at this point, everyone is just buying it all up because they can. The Arizona plant still doesn't seem to be pumping out and the self-sufficiency target for the US doesn't seem all there. Im sorry to be the bearer of bad news but honestly it's a culture that's hard to replicate and its how it somehow gets done in one country on Earth. The 2030 target for the states surely isn't happening, it's way too ambitious.
People really don't understand how this stuff is borderline magic turning silicon into these things. There's so much that can go wrong at every step, it's the most advanced manufacturing process on Earth.
Once upon a time chips went down in value but I don't think that's happening anymore, lot of other people seem aware of that. Not to mention the semiconductor talent is getting eaten up like pancakes everywhere.
Well, we're stuck between a left-wing party and a left-wing party, both of whom, despite what they say, hate economic growth and try to restrict it at every opportunity.
And that's largely because the average Brit has terrible beliefs that actively make them poorer. A shockingly high percentage of people believe that building more houses won't lower costs.
I live in amerifatland. They're building new houses all the time, everywhere I look, entire complexes of them. "McMansions," we call them.
I make average US wages, have my entire adult life. I cannot afford a house in my city unless I buy a literal ruin in the ghetto. The suburbs are far more expensive, and that's where the McMansion complexes are. I don't know who's buying them, but it isn't me and likely never will be.
Do you want a strip club or a dispensary to open up next door to where you live? Or maybe a glue factory down the street? There are reasons zoning laws exist, and it isn’t to regulate growth in the sense you’re implying.
For left-wing governments in Britain, building houses is putting yourself out of a job.
Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).
The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.
I believe the problem is worse in Scotland because the growth in council housing in the 60/70s was organised in order to create this permanent bloc vote. The same has happened in London where you have whole constituencies where 70% of the effective vote is void.
> every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences
This doesn’t add up. Promising to get more housing built is getting these people elected, but they can’t make good on this promise because then they will lose their election?
> The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
That's a conspiracy theory and a half!
A lot of the new student accommodation being built is privately owned. They're chasing the (pre-Brexit/pandemic) overheating market for student accommodation that resulted from the universities targeting international students for the inflated tuition fees they can charge, and in some cases have features explicitly advertised to international students as positives (e.g. some of the ones in Nottingham have built in rice cookers as standard).
However, some of the properties are at risk of becoming unviable (i.e., lying empty or having to be turned over to housing non students [0]) because of a combination of Brexit and tightened immigration rules reducing international student numbers.
If they're being built as some kind of social engineering it would be a really convoluted way of going about it.
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