I don’t know much about architecture, but a building is generally bespoke. It’s made to a specific physical location and has to work in its surroundings and be built to local regulations. From that viewpoint I can’t really judge how much value the blueprint actually has and therefore if it matters who “owns” the IP. The architect has done real legwork to bring that specific building to life and anyone else would need to redo much of it to copy the result.

Any human effort can be a creative artistic expression. You could mass produce a jacket or a hand-stitch an equivalent jacket and both will be warm. You could code a subtle and elegant CMS for a website or use some pre-built solution, both will deliver the same content. The difference is, people will laugh you out of the room for trying to patent your home stitching technique but nod and clap when you put a license on your code.

I do write code. Code only exists as a high level abstraction that codifies logic and allows us to talk about the function of the silicone without getting bogged down in details. The utility of code depends entirely on the context of the people looking at it (eg. different code works better for a small shop of experienced devs vs a large scale enterprise vs a FOSS project).

I can show you a for loop and talk in simple English about what it’s doing or write a formal proof showing that it meets the problem parameters. I could show you the compiled ASM and we would struggle to have the same conversation even with the exact same functionality. Same math, different syntactic sugar.

The process of building software is where humans will always be needed (identify the human meat space problems, define features, manage risk and cost, set delivery expectations, etc). The specifics of how we create the code within that process isn’t as crucial.

Unironically a AI’s biggest win. Absolutely fair criticism on art and weak imitations of human creativity, but code is just math with syntactic sugar. “Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.

I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time. What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation? What if printers just worked? What if you could put adblockers on any device? What if every online game could be self hosted and modded? AI is (for the moment) giving an approximation of that timeline and I’m here for it.

How do I invest in sea temperatures? $SST?

The encapsulation of Mao:

“If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died [in nuclear war], the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.”

Zapp Brannigan revolutionary with no plans beyond bravado. There was/is no universe where a nuclear holocaust ends in sunshine and roses instead of the (functionally) permanent crippling of the human race. That lack of critical thought is still infecting leftist conversation today: vastly underestimating the cost and implications of actions and relying on blind appeals to moral determinism.