101–110 of 300 posts
I fear their Mozilla-ification and Wikipedia-ification. Scope creep, various outreach feel-good programs, ballooning costs, lost focus etc. And other types of enshittification. Any change to the basic premise will be a negative step. They should just be boring quiet unopininionated neutral background infrastructure.
All the Mozilla executives have done for the last 15+ years is
* lay off developers
* spend lots of money on stupid side projects nobody asked for or wants
* increase their own salaries
and all that with the backdrop of falling quality, market share, and relevance.
I would happily donate to Firefox, but this fucked up organization will never see a single cent from me. They will spend it on anything but Firefox, which is the only thing anybody wants them to spend it on.
It might already be too late, and we will be left with a browser monopoly.
> raised concerns about the proposed $300,000 salary for arXiv’s new CEO, saying it seemed high Is a mid-to-high engineering salary outlandish for a CEO of what is likely to be a fairly major non-profit? Even non-profits have to be somewhat competitive when it comes to salary, and the ideal candidate is likely someone who would be balancing this against a tenured position at a major university
arXiv's CEO doesn't need to be a tenured professor equivalent it is a preprint repository ffs.
Though, saying that, I suppose all the reputation data is kind of public. Apart from emails/accounts.
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Yes the obvious play is to move human labor to cheaper countries like France (including CEO of course).
The reason the French can’t build these things is the same reason they shouldn’t be allowed to be in charge. It’s a preprint PDF host. Just make your own if you can run this one.
It is actually quite common to come across HAL in subfields of mathematics in my experience.
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My observation is that research, especially in AI has left universities, which are now focusing their research to a lesser degree on STEM. It appears research is now done by companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tencent, Alibaba, among many others.
Universities (outside a few) just have much weaker PR machines so you never hear what they do. Also their work is not user facing products so regular people, even tech power users won't see them.
The recent announcement to reject review articles and position papers already smelled like a shift towards a more "opinionated" stance, and this move smells worse. The vacuum that arXiv originally filled was one of a glorified PDF hosting service with just enough of a reputation to allow some preprints to be cited in a formally published paper, and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos. It ha…
> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, particularly in ML, with some decently cited papers never formally published and "preprints" being cited left and right. Consider the impression you get when seeing a reference to an arXiv preprint vs. a link to an author's institutional website. This just isn't true. arXiv is not a venue. There's no place that gives you cred…
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Salaries in the US are so bonkers. Everywhere else outside of the US, $300,000 is an outlandish high salary. To call it "mid to high" is insane.
Not everywhere. Switzerland exists. Also cost of living is a thing so if anything US/CH just ramp up to match that. The rest of Europe has high CoL but terrible salaries. Asia has bad salaries but low CoL (on average).
So if this is correct, then even in Switzerland, it seems like $300,000 per year would be an obscenely high salary for a senior developer.
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No, I mean that the pipeline requires software engineers to build/maintain, and salaries are (as in basically every tech organisation) the dominant cost
Then drop it and make people upload a pdf and a zip of the latex sources. Most people I talk to hate that pipeline and spend a lot of debug hours on it when Arxiv can't compile what overleaf and your local latex install can.
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Not everywhere. Switzerland exists. Also cost of living is a thing so if anything US/CH just ramp up to match that. The rest of Europe has high CoL but terrible salaries. Asia has bad salaries but low CoL (on average).
According to swissdevjobs.ch[1], the top 10% salary for a senior software developer in Switzerland is 135,000 swiss franc; that's roughly $170,000 per year. So if this is correct, then even in Switzerland, it seems like $300,000 per year would be an obscenely high salary for a senior developer. [1]: https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries/all/all/Senior
Even if we scope it to SWE, I don't think that's far off the US percentiles.
In London I imagine the top 10% SWE is not even 100k GBP. In Germany even worse.
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According to swissdevjobs.ch[1], the top 10% salary for a senior software developer in Switzerland is 135,000 swiss franc; that's roughly $170,000 per year. So if this is correct, then even in Switzerland, it seems like $300,000 per year would be an obscenely high salary for a senior developer. [1]: https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries/all/all/Senior
Well first of all it's a CEO position, not an SWE :) Even if we scope it to SWE, I don't think that's far off the US percentiles. In London I imagine the top 10% SWE is not even 100k GBP. In Germany even worse.