If you have built something worth lasting 100 years, other people will help you ensure that it does. That reduces the concerns in this article considerably.
The fact that metaflow works directly in Python piques my interest. I can lint it, I can test it, I can format it, I can easily extend it.
I've been hesitant to commit myself and my collaborators to yet another DSL -- and that's part of why I haven't seen much to offer in snakemake and nextflow.
Re: "Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year."
You missed the first part of what I wrote in my essay:
"Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a judgement that is larger than the reserve. Whatever the reason is, it WILL happen. It would be naïve to think that the WMF, which up to this point has never seriously considered any sort of spending limits, will suddenly discover fiscal prudence when the revenues start to decline. It is far more likely that the WMF will not react to a drop in donations by decreasing spending, but instead will ramp up fund-raising efforts while burning through our reserves and our endowment."
I made it clear that Wikipedia is not in trouble at the present time. But there is a real possibility that there are bad times ahead, and we should prepare for them now.
I think you're reasoning about this backwards. They don't worry about setting harder spending limits because the revenue continues to increase. If the revenue cut back, you call it "naive" to suppose that they could put 2 and 2 together and cut spending. So they should be fiscally conservative and think of the future when they expect themselves to be... profligate and short-sighted? Why?
You started this page in 2017. The revenue has continued to increase at as steady a pace as expenses. And an argument along the exact same lines as yours could have been made in 2009 or 2010 or 2011. Actually, your argument has gotten weaker -- expenses used to be higher than the previous fiscal year's revenue, but in recent years the growth has been much flatter.
There's no compelling reason to think that now is the time to act to make sure that it's not too late to act at some vague future point in time. Sure, something can't grow forever. Granted. But are we at 127 grains of rice or 131,071? How can you tell?
Kind of disappointing to see that level of testing failure. A leap to assume there is something specifically strange about `666` without even trying `665`...
Remember when people used to let their kids fuckin play outside? =\ Sometimes for 12 hours!
We're less violent as a planet/society than ever.
But back then, the "gore" of all of humanity's everyday life wasn't smashed into our faces as a routine - only occasionally, as life dished it out to us personally.
Engineers tend to misuse “minimalist” when they mean “brutalist” or “spartan”.
Minimalist in the code doesn’t reflect on minimalism on the interface, and when you apply an adjective to the description of your product you are characterizing the overall experience and visible surface (UI)… not the “backend” that makes it possible!
You can have very baroque UIs without writing that much code, and it would still be considered “minimal” on the code side.
I think in this context, minimalism doesn't mean "lacking important parts" like a keyboard or mouse produced by apple, but rather, something you can use without a graphical server, not gobbling up memory by embedding your program in a locally running browser.
> It should result in advertising content that is more personal and emotionally resonant
Exactly at the moment I read this, an auto-playing Volvo commercial started making noise just below that paragraph. Ugh. We're a long, long way from advertising putting "users" first.
