The point of the parent system is to prevent knowledge from being lost to humanity. It encourages disclosure on how unique and novel things work in return for a limited monopoly. If inventions were not patented then we can lose the ability to make them, which isn’t as insane sounding as you might expect.
Preserving this knowledge for the future of humanity is critical.
If you ever do a patent survey, you'll quickly discover that patents aren't written to preserve knowledge or disclose inventions. They're written to disclose as little as possible (or disclose everything except the thing that matters) as fodder for a legal defense.
OTOH, I’ve never, not once, ever, heard of someone reading through the patent database to learn how to do a thing. I’m sure someone has done such a thing, but that’s not the norm. The patent database is where you record that you were the first to claim to have done a thing. It’s not where you meaningfully explain how.
This is absolutely not the point of the patent system, otherwise there would be no provision for a monopoly over the commercial manufacturing of the invention.
Don't be deluded, the patent system serves as a weapon for bigger companies to block competition. That is their only goal.
> ...otherwise there would be no provision for a monopoly over the commercial manufacturing of the invention.
You should always be able to make your opponent's arguments at least as well as they do, as that is the first step to overcoming them.
The argument from patent proponents is that without the legal monopoly, they would rely on trade secret law instead, so they would do their best to ensure no one else understood what they do. They still do, within the confines of what disclosure is legally required to get a patent issued (I once had an engineer tell me that if he had not invented the thing being patented, he would have no idea what the patent application the lawyers wrote for it was describing), but at least there is a legal requirement.
Of course, there are important contexts where that argument is irrelevant, such as standards development. Trade secret law is no use there, because the value is in the network effects of the standard, not the invention. Yet we still have patent-riddled standards.
> The argument from patent proponents is that without the legal monopoly, they would rely on trade secret law instead, so they would do their best to ensure no one else understood what they do.
Look at China, and the argument of "maybe it will be bad" turns out to be wrong. I'm not saying the system is perfect, far from it, but the idea that patents are a life-saving measure is utterly false. Companies live and die in both systems, but at least in China they get to share their improvements.
The premise is that a patent is necessary to have funds for continuing innovation, but that's just not understanding what capitalism is and how pervasive it is in our society. The reason individuals need money is precisely because of capitalism redistributing money to those who have the most already, not to the ones who need it the most, not to the ones making the most progress, or not to everyone in a fair manner allowing all of us to live without worrying about that aspect (yes, there is more than enough resources creation for all of us). The patent system only furthers this uneven distribution. Innovators do not calculate the amount they might be getting from their invention before setting about and coming up with something new; that is a lie that needs to disappear.
Water levels supporting much of midwest[1] farming and ranching have been dropping for decades, far faster than the refill rate. Even areas that have formed water-use co-operatives have been unable to convince themselves to reduce draw enough to matter. Even if they zeroed their usage, the co-ops don't cover enough land area to make up for the surrounding areas that are drawing from the same aquifer.
[1] Leaving aside the cultural oddity of USA-ians who think the living not only east of centre, but as far east as any part of Ohio, counts as "midwest".
The AllSides report you linked to cites a Pew survey that found that "the majority of The Economist readers hold political values to the left-of-center," which I think might reflect left-leaning social values more than economics. AllSides themselves even say that their readers disagree:
> As of August 2018, 608 AllSides readers agreed with this media bias rating, while 1,302 disagreed. Of those who disagreed, the average said The Economist has a Center media bias.
I think that differences in economic vs. social issues as well as The Economist's international perspective make it difficult to categorize on a simple left/right metric. They claim[0] to support lots of positions that seem socially left-leaning to me as an American (drug legalization, gay marriage in 2004, repealing the Second Amendment), but OC seems to be talking more about economically left-leaning positions ("scrutiny of their ballooning compensation").
I said right-leaning, and centrist mainstream democrats in the United States would fit the bill there. The republicans, especially in the last decade, have gone fully right-wing and driven nearly all centrists from their party.
The Economist is one of the voices of the City of London. They appear centrist until they start talking against public schooling, nationalisation, or government-subsidised utilities.
They're sort of sane, educated, privileged business elites writing for other educated priviliged business elites.
To most lefties that gives a slight right-wing bias, even if they aren't ranting demagogues going on about foreigners.
To less sane and educated right wing people, that makes them seem like "the liberal elite" and so they see them as left.
They do seem to have pivoted towards an American audience somewhat more recently, which means they're sucked into the whole anti-woke thing, which these articles veer worrying close to.
No, they extract and sell oil and they happen to do it at a profit. This is not the same as being compensated or billed for things that resulted from the use of that oil.
This article presents an accurate picture of how things work at a high conceptual level. It glosses over certain details, because git is very complex. For example, git has, if I recall correctly, 4 staging areas, of which represent different sources when it comes to a merge conflict. However, this detail can mostly be ignored because it’s not relevant to the high level conceptual ideas this article is trying to present.
I would argue most things in technology are complex, and mental models are intentional ways to take something complex and turn it into something more simple. This article does not create meaningless metaphors.
> However, this detail can mostly be ignored because it’s not relevant to the high level conceptual ideas this article is trying to present.
Personally speaking, I find knowing and distinguishing among the 4 indexes to be essential to understanding git. Not including and really exploring that detail gives people an incorrect mental model of what's happening.
Marvelous, if the metaphors of the article helped you, but I empathize with the upstream poster's frustration. I believe that the content of the article is not medicine for the malaise it describes.
The official documentation for `git add` refers to "the index". I'm not seeing any reference to multiple indexes. I've been using git for years, and I've never heard of it. I read a book about it. But parts of it are definitely still mysterious to me. Anyway, where can I find any evidence of these 4 indexes?
While you are correct, this is not what I was referring to.
To be exactly clear, there are actually 4 staging areas within what you referenced as the index. This is indeed a detail most people do not worry about.
It’s useful to have as a shader which can help define the visual style of your game. Additionally you can highlight the model from any angle, which is a useful hint to users.
Since the model may be viewed from any direction, this would be very hard to do in post, since there’s no way you can get the model to look correct from all angles.
Azure DevOps has this concept, it’s called “semi-linear merge” where it will rebase your PR on top of the branch being merged into, but then create a 2 parent merge commit with the PR comments and text to merge the content, letting you easily reconstruct what changes were made in one PR, while also preserving commit history and keeping the history clean overall.
Preserving this knowledge for the future of humanity is critical.