So I think the deeper issue is the transition to “big science”, where I’d probably argue the PhD itself is increasingly meaningless, irrespective of how it is constituted.

It’s a bigger issue to separate contributions in big-team-authored articles. A candidate with only team publications may not have shown evidence they can do independent research — which is, after all, the point.

IMO any submission which omits that evidence does not deserve to be accepted.

PhD by published works was available as a thing when I studied in the ‘90s. I don’t have a huge issue with it. After all, the thesis is in partial fulfillment anyway — it is the candidate that matters, and that is examined.

But… times have changed, and that was an era with more sole-authored work.

So I think what GenAI is doing is throwing away every single thing we’ve learned about good software development, all the checks and balances against poor practice, including both the good parts of agile (people > tools) and the good parts of waterfall (think before you code).

And another manager I knew believed, because he ran a design team, the fact that he didn’t know squat about design, meant he needed to lead the design work. The result was a predictably terrible design.

I think that’s fair, but I think it’s been a problem for a while. I knew a manager in a major hospital, who, despite running the IT department, would write a lot of their code. In PHP, at, like 2am. Thing is: prototyping is easy, delivering sustainable and valuable systems is hard.

Thank you! I'm already planning :-)

As the song goes: "you can almost see the coast of heaven" (from "Bruichladdich", by Robin Laing)

Annoyingly, I didn't see a single otter when I was on Islay. Not one. And there are a lot there. So, what happens, but less than 24 hours after I get back to Nova Scotia, a brief hike, and there's the otter back in his usual haunts, chomping fish like he'd never been away.

“Private” means “not public”, unless you have another special word for “not public” that I’m not aware of. An employee-owned company is *private*. So is a mutual or co-operative.

I mean, if you want to argue that any and all collective ownership == public ownership, then good luck.

Are you casting aspersions on our courageous Minister for Shopify?

I disagree. Capitalism doesn’t mean laissez-faire. It means production is outside governments/states, and there can be profit. That’s about all. It’s a broad tent, & it’s possible to be under it without being either a market anarchist or state socialist — both of which love what I hate: monopolies.

I’d say that at least concrete is predictable. And usually stable.

The area of contention is the amount of state planning — key to the Yugoslav model. That kind of control is driver for corruption and capture. We get enough of that with our current governments anyway. I’d rather governments were referees (and, crucially, trustees of public assets) than rule-makers.

Well it is a form of market socialism, but 100% not “Yugoslav style”. Also, it’s a global problem by definition, so no single jurisdiction can ever solve it alone.

It’s a start. It’s not sufficient: I’d also reform property — especially intellectual property — to re-establish a commons.

Economic democracy argues the problem isn’t capitalism so much as monopolism, and all monopolies (even temporary ones like patents) need to be socially controlled.

I’d argue that erasing capitalism entirely is not viable and probably harmful. Co-operatives and employee-owned companies are generally not the problem.

The problem is we have monopolies the size of countries that negotiate directly with governments to escape all regulation and social contracts.