Absolutely not. GPL is freedom for the authors. The end users have conditions they must meet to use the software. Those conditions are restrictions. That is precisely the opposite of freedom for end users.
To anticipate objections, the conditions keep the software "free for everyone", which is true. But that's still explicitly freedom for the authors. The conditions preemptively eliminate end users who would otherwise find the software valuable. Because it is not freedom for end users.
GPL is not for you to make money. It is for the end-users to have freedom with their hardware.
If you want to make money, use a proper license.
To expand on this, GPL is not against capitalism neither. Sometimes, end-users' freedom with their hardware is good to make money on (they buy your support, to have confidence they can migrate from one hardware to another, or use their hardware way longer than the original manufacturer can stay in business). But it is also not an automated license to say "give me your money" neither.
That's not a reasonable option, it's a bear-trap. Once troops are on the ground it will be another decades-long slog, and one that ends like Afghanistan at best. At worst, this looks like America's version of Ukraine.
I can argue both sides but under the assumption (which I think is true) that 80%-90% of Iranians want to remove the regime there's some possibility of success. That said there's also the possibility of screwing things up completely and getting the entire population to fight you as an invader.
One thing for sure, it's not going to look like Russia invading Ukraine. The Iranians don't have the resolve or the support or the capabilities that Ukraine had and has. It will look more like Iraq in terms of the ability of the military to put up any resistance.
The problem with "boots on the ground" isn't that it can't succeed. The problem is it has zero support from the American public. People feel about this a lot more strongly than the other topics dividing the public.
Iranian polls show that 20-25%
Iranians living in Iran support the IRGC, but due to how the questions were formulated, you can't know who would support a regime change.
Polls after the 12 day bombing campaign in 2025 showed that 60% disapproved the bombing. That means you probably have at least a 40% base of support for active overthroing, growing, to change the regime, which is larger than the current supporters. Maybe you could have done something with it. Wait until the previous Komenei died of his cancer instead of martyring him, and wait for the new nomination and the protests that would follow to strike (decapitation of the morality police, species to open the prisons, etc).
The way it was done just feels like the US wanted chaos and death, not meaningful change.
Trump, the neo-cons, and much of the Republican party might as well hang up their hats if they put boots on the ground (beyond special forces which is often ignored for some reason).
The US will be bogged down for years at a minimum if we entered Iran on the ground, or we would lose quickly and tuck tail.
This isn't a fight to be won in a conventional war, the administration put every chip they had on a gamble that regime change was possible with air superiority alone. I don't know of any historical example of that working, but I guess we'll see what happens.
Everyone says there's no historical examples but there is no exact parallel either. I wouldn't argue based on historical precedence here.
The challenge is that regime is large and armed and they can hide and weather the storm. They'll hide in hospitals, and mosques, and schools and amongst civilians.
Getting them and disrupting their organization to a point where a popular revolt can take over seems ... lessay hard.
What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides. The probability of that is very hard to gauge. There are stories of some defecting but hard to know if it's true or not.
> What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides.
Then they need to drive the rest out of the country, and then keep them out forever, regardless of whatever chaos, instability, and misery arise within the country.
Not really. Most people will just switch sides. There aren't that many people for whom fighting to the death with other Iranians is a goal. If the 10% can control the 90% today then the 90% will have no problem controlling the 10%.
I know you said to ignore historical precedent but I don't think what you're describing has happened anywhere, ever.
You can't build a stable, prosperous country with remnants of a former regime periodically showing up at people's doors holding guns and telling them that they're now part of a resistance movement.
Do you know many people that live in Iran today? You're making bold claims about their loyalty and aspirations, though if that's first or second hand I'd be very interested to hear more.
Historical precedent is important with regards to predictability. We have no idea if simply bombing them to hell will be enough for regime change, while we do know that there is some lower bound of military involvement on the ground that would have likely success with that goal.
Personally I don't see how an air campaign alone can lead to any regime change we'd actually want to see. We are all being told the Iranian public is a cohesive unit with a strong majority wanting to go back to 1978, I don't buy it.
The only likely outcomes I see, if the regime is changed at all, is a military coup with even worse people coming in, a very bloody civil war, or a faction in the country we never hear about taking over quickly by promising the world to the public. For the last one, I'd expect that to be a group more akin to the Nazis than some group that actually means well for Iranians.
The UK population was _very_ weary of Churchill and his decision to involve the UK in WW2. You had the UK nazi party that was lobbying the industrialists, and the moscow-aligned communist party that was putting pressure on the laborers. Churchill would have lasted at most half a year after Dunkerque, and and much more pro-nazi PM could have been named. But the German airstrike campaign radicalised the UK population. Because the fucking Nazis couldn't bear to have decisions like 'who to bomb' taken by non-nazi, they replaced all the capable men with idiots yesmen.
So 90% of British wanted were being brutally oppressed on the eve of WW2 and called on the Nazis to bomb the UK so they can overthrow the government? Not only that but weeks before the Nazi attacks the UK government mowed down protestors with machine guns on the streets?
Got it.
I'm not seeing any parallels.
There can be some "rally to the flag" effect but the Iranian population by large is not going to suddenly like their government.
But to turn the story around a little. Do you see Americans rallying around Trump if the Iranians attack some high profile US targets?
No. 80% of the British wanted to avoid war with Germany, for different reasons, and 15% even voted for someone whose main campaign idea was an alliance with them. The bombing campaign radicalised the vast majority of British voters, even those in less affected areas.
(Btw, the only recent documented instance of machine gun mowing down people is Saudi police mowing down Somali workers).
60% of the Iranian population polled were against the bombing during the 12 day war, bombing that, unlike this one, didn't break too much civilian infrastructure (targeting desalination plants is something I thought even Russia wouldn't do, but well, I shouldn't hold US army and Tsahal to the same standards). And that's with most observers saying that only 20-25% of the population support the regime in 'normal' time.
You had thousands dead, 50k people in prison waiting for the death penalty, a leader on his deathbed, and rather than waiting for the internal tensions between army branches to break the regime, the US chose to martyr the almost dead, suffering leader, consolidating his successor power, and eliminating and opposition in the more laical army. Nice fucking job. Now the army and the clerical police are aligned.
Even when you organize and plan correctly a regime change, a few unlucky breaks and you create a Lybia. Going there gung-ho was truly a spectacular choice, and managed to put Komenei son in place without any power struggles that could have been instrumentalized.
The ground deployment to the mountains on Iran's side of the strait will have to be absolutely insane to actually eliminate the threat (if it's even possible to) of Iran launching drones or suicide boats at tankers.
Respectfully, the benchmarks show it is different.
MetalRT and mlx-lm use the exact same model files, identical 4-bit MLX weights. That makes it a pure engine-to-engine comparison:
LLM decode: MetalRT is 1.10-1.19x faster across all models tested
STT: 70s audio in 101ms vs 463ms (4.6x faster)
TTS: 178ms vs 493ms (2.8x faster)
mlx-lm is a general-purpose array computation framework that also supports inference. MetalRT is purpose-built for inference only. That focus is where the performance gap comes from.
> It'd be nice if Python std lib had more thread safe primitives/structures (compared to something like Java where there's tons of thread safe data structures)
Hence why basic Python structures under free-threaded Python are all thread-safe structures, and explains why they are slower than GIL-variant.
This seems unlikely. My company is in competition with a number of other startups. If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
> If AI removes one of my co-workers, our competitors will keep the co-worker and out-compete us.
This assumes that the companies' business growth is a function of the amount of code written, but that would not make much sense for a software company.
Many companies (including mine) are building our product with an engineering team 1/4 the size of what would have been required a few years ago. The whole idea is that we can build the machine to scale our business with far fewer workers.
How many companies have you worked at in the past where the backlog dried up and the engineering team sat around doing nothing?
Even in companies that are no longer growing I've always seen the roadmap only ever get larger (at that point you get desperate to try to catch back up, or expand into new markets, while also laying people off to cut costs).
Will we finally out-write the backlog of ideas to try and of feature requests? Or will the market get more fragmented as more smaller competitors can carve out different niches in different markets, each with more-complex offerings than they could've offered 5 years ago?
This is already happening. Fewer people are getting hired. Companies are quietly (sometimes not, like Block) letting people go. At a personal level all the leaders in my company are sounding the “catch up or you’ll be left behind” alarm. People are going to be let go at an accelerated pace in the future (1-3 years).
I don’t think that addresses my point. I understand a lot of companies are firing under the guise of AI, but it’s unclear to me whether AI is actually driving this - especially when the article we are both responding to says:
> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022
It depends on the "shape" of the company. Larger companies have a lot more of what I call "Conway Overhead", basically a mix of legit coordination overhead and bureaucracy. Startups by necessity have a lot less of that, and so are better "shaped" to fully harness AI.
That's not necessarily a result of AI, you also have to consider the broader economic environment. I mean, it was also difficult to get a job as a graduate in 2008, whereas it's typically been easier to get a job when credit is cheap.
Isn't it, for something like 70-80% of families? Just in slow-motion?
How long have we been hearing about crushing affordability problems for property? And how long ago did that start moving into essentials? The COVID-era bullwhip-effect inflation waves triggered a lot of price ratcheting that has slowed but never really reversed. Asset prices are doing great, as people with money continue to need somewhere to put it, and have been very effective at capturing greater and greater shares of productivity increases. But how's the average waiter, cleaning-business sole-proprietor, uber driver, schoolteacher, or pet supply shopowner doing? How's their debt load trending? How's their savings trending?
There’s a difference between a collapse and a slowdown. We don’t need a collapse for hiring to slow down [1,2]. I think we’re finally just seeing the maturation of software development. Software is increasingly a commodity, so maybe the era of crazy growth and hiring is over. I don’t think that we need AI to explain this either, although possibly AI will simply commodify more kinds of software.
FAANG realizing that they can't make infinite money by expanding into every possible market while paying FAANG salaries for low-scale-CRUD-prototyping roles has a lot to do with this, and that started a bit earlier than the AI wave.
Lots going on right now in the market, but IMO that retreat is the biggest one still.
Many companies were basically on a path of infinite hiring between ~2011 and ~2022 until the rapid COVID-era whiplash really drove home "maybe we've been overhiring" and caused the reaction and slowdown that many had been predicting annually since, oh, 2015.
Manager gigs at FAANG are pretty rough right now in my network, you can't be a manager when the higher-ups notice your group isn't a big revenue generator and so doesn't justify new hires and bigger org charts, and cutting the middlemen is the easiest way to juice the ROI numbers. If the ICs that now have 1/3 the managerial structure and have to wear more hats don't turn things around, oh well, it's not a critical area anyway, just nuke it.
You can be an exec with 10-20% fewer random products/departments in your company, and maybe 40% fewer middle managers in the rest of them. You might even get a nice bonus for cutting all that cost! Bonuses for growth, bonuses for "efficiency" when the macro vibe shifts. Trim sails and carry on.
Erm its been fucked for many years across many professions, it was just less so for software engineering in particular. Now entry into the S-E profession is taking a hit.
Also dont forget theres only so many viable revenue-generating and cost-saving projects to take. And said above - overhiring in COVID.
There's definitely tone deaf statements from managers/leaders like "AI will allow us to do more with less headcount!" As if the end worker is supposed to be excited about that, knuckleheads, lol.
Yeah I’ve been scratching my head about this too. Like, if my boss said this, I would basically start looking for a new job right then and there. Seems like a good way to drive off your own talent.
In a bear market in a bloated company, maybe. We’re still actively hiring at my startup, even with going all-in on AI across the company. My PM is currently shipping major features (with my review) faster and with higher-quality code than any engineer did last year.
It’s hard to compare, honestly. Last year, my PM didn’t have the AI tools to do any of this, and engineers were spread thin. Now, the PM (with a specialized Claude Code environment) has the enthusiasm of a new software engineer and the product instincts of a senior PM.
This is how it will go at least in the near term. Engineers will be phased out slowly by product/project management that will prompt the tool instead of the tech lead for the changes they want.
And in the longer term those people will also get deprecated.
Then any company that was staffed at levels needed prior to the arrival of current-level LLM coding assistants is bloated.
If the company was person-hour starved before, a significant amount of that demand is being satisfied by LLMs now.
It all depends on where the company is in the arc of its technology and business development, and where it was when powerful coding agents became viable.
apples v.s. oranges. The later is true, Emad did get sabotaged (for not being able to raise money in time, about 8-month before he's leaving). Junyang didn't have that long arc of incidents.
As much as I wish, it is going the other way. Caring about the 3 requires literacy, which in the world of LLM, is one thing that going to be reduced as a whole for human-kind.
It may not be obvious. But this is actually a good thing when we looking back in a few years. I always feel weird that executive branch can just destroy private enterprise with "Supply-chain Risk" / "Terrorist List" without Due Process.
That's a good thing right? In a capitalist society, you cannot just burn $300B without consequences. Not to mention it is not just anyone's money. It is Saudi's.
The giving back part is strongly related to the "freedom", not related to whether you profit from it or not.