A less cynical explanation is that it helps decouple product failures from support failures. Last thing you want is for your customer support to break whenever your product breaks.
Your explanation is literally "blame somebody else, shift responsibility". It's a pretty straightforward case of assuming bad intentions.
Obviously, I don't know for a fact what Anthropic's motivations are, but I don't believe I'm being overly optimistic because I know for a fact that "use a third party as a way to de-risk" is a tried and true strategy. E.g. when I was at Facebook, all regular day-to-day comms were on Workplace, but they kept an IRC server hosted by some vendor or other, specifically to coordinate responses for serious SEVs that disrupted the normal channels.
Of course, an even simpler explanation is that they perceive building their own support harness as just low value work for engineers who could be working on their core product instead, and the cost of buying that service from somebody else is probably a drop in the ocean.
Adding a support for new hardware to PyTorch is actually quite convenient. I did that with WebGPU using the same PrivateUse1 mechanism TorchTPU used. Every hardware has its own slot and identifier, and when you want to add a support for a new one without merging it into PyTorch, PrivateUse1 works essentially like plug-in slot
Honestly there is a lot for room of improvement in torch-webgpu for performance. Needs involvement of community but the opportunities are definitely there
Overall I think it’s a good perspective and worth reading to learn your perspective and experience. Just for anyone who doesn’t come from a good place, please be kind to yourself. You probably really need to work exceptionally hard and need to have top 1% resume. And articles like this can be quite depressing. Don’t let it you down
The author tries to be mindful about it and I appreciate it, but from a perspective of someone from a shithole it still might feel bad
Referring to:
> I've never gotten a job by applying to it. It's always been referrals or someone reaching out to me. So honestly, my resume is shit compared to my peers. I'm terrible at interviewing, and I've never done LeetCode. This is not a brag; it's just not my style. Am I a nepo baby? I don't know. Was I a morale hire? I'm pretty disagreeable. Was it merit? Also not sure
> I recognize that not everyone has access to the same networking opportunities, and the traditional job application process can be a valid and necessary path for many. But social media, when used correctly, is a great way to get an opportunity
Not really. If there are other maintainers who have ownership of the project they can just unarchive it themselves. If not, then he'd have to appoint a successor first, which would mean doing more work for free. So the best solution is just to archive it and let the community fork it if they're interested in continuing development.
Also your phrasing of "would be fine" implies that there are things that are not "fine" to do when doing work for free for the public benefit, which is exactly the sort of entitled attitude that makes many (myself included) uninterested in open sourcing their own projects.
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