Exciting things are happening in the world of gen AI, computer vision, and 3D! If you're interested in being part of the action, we're currently building out the new content understanding team and looking for early members to join us.
As part of this team, you'll be working on developing machine learning and computer vision systems at the scale of the world's largest, most active 3D platform, where tens of millions of people connect every day.
If you want to learn more about this opportunity (or if you know somebody who might be interested), please don't hesitate to reach out. We'd love to chat and see if you're a good fit for the team! Here is the JD - https://jobs.roblox.com/careers?gh_jid=4966703&gh_src=da92d0...
It's a small thing, but turning my screen to greyscale reduced my daily screen time by 25% and didn't impact any functionality. It just makes it slightly less interesting to use.
Once a month we pick a fun recipe that can be made in less than 1 hour and we all cook it together (over zoom) and then eat. We have done sushi, sourdough, ramen, pizza etc.
This works well as it feels like a shared experience of learning together, in this case learning to cook new foods. Many of us continue to make those same foods once we learned.
To make it easier on everybody, we ship any tools or ingredients we can and always do it during overlapping work hours.
I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on this. Was it wrong to openly license v1? Or the market changed enough from v1 to v2 that necessitated this change?
I'd be interested to hear why. I have no problem with companies choosing not to open source in the first place, it is just the idea of taking an open source project with an active community around it and closing it up that is a tough pill to swallow.
I won't get into all the context, but I think we should consider whether a community without contributors is a community. GL JS never had major active contributors outside of the company, and there are no self-funded webgl experts with lots of time who are ready to maintain a fork.
OSS, we hoped, was about enabling people and unlocking people's ability to collaborate. It turns out that in 2020, it's mostly helping companies and getting nothing in return. That's not a dynamic you can build a sustainable business on.
Oh come on Tom. Making a great, free toolkit utterly decimated the competition. Just completely destroyed any funding for a competitor. And I should know.
I believe that you believe this is well intentioned, but it had a very negative impact on open source geospatial software development. Again, I SHOULD KNOW.
Mapbox is doing what is good for Mapbox. It's a company. But let's not pretend this change is good for anyone but Mapbox.
If by open sourcing initially it hurt their competition, surely by going proprietary now it should help their competition (and FOSS geo stuff generally)?
It's certainly true that GL JS and Native never really got third-party contributors, and that the complexity of the task is a major reason; like you say, there aren't many GL hobby devs. Another reason is that they're simply great libraries and there hasn't been that much reason for anyone to contribute - I can only ever recall encountering one significant issue and it wasn't a showstopper.
But there's more to it. When the roadmap of an open-source project is tightly controlled by a sponsor, that can make third-party contributions hard or impossible. I know OSRM much better than MBGL so I'll cite an example from that - the distance matrix issue. This is massive for many users, plays right to OSRM's strengths, but Mapbox wouldn't accept patches to provide it for _years_. IIRC it only got in when Mapbox's attention shifted to Valhalla.
I'm not blaming the Mapbox devs at all for that; it wasn't important for Mapbox's business, and any extra code inevitably brings a maintenance burden. But it partly explains why third-party contributors are reluctant to contribute when the roadmap's out of their control.
Back on MBGL, there was/is a community, but the community formed around MVT rather than MBGL specifically - again, possibly because MBGL is just so good. https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles sums up the enormous community energy in the space (I think that might be your document originally, apologies if not). It's kind of a shame that MBGL being so far ahead of everything else has probably crimped development on alternative renderers.
I'm really sorry to hear it didn't work out the way Mapbox would have needed. However, pull requests to the core are not the only way to contribute to an open source project: think of all the map data you needed (by OSM contributors), all the bug reports you received, all the code people built that supported your paid product ecosystem (the map APIs).
Regarding code contributions, the community contributed e.g. the TypeScript and React bindings, or am I mistaken?
I'm one of the more frequent non-Mapbox contributors to the project. I've made a lot of PRs over the years and I try to help out with reviewing PRs and to triage incoming issues.
While I agree there has been non-trivial contributions external to the core of gl js (eg. bindings, plugins), and these help the ecosystem, they don't replace work on the core.
Personally I'd hoped that those businesses who were using GL JS commercially without a commercial subscription through Mapbox would contribute and become part of the core development and maintenance, but that didn't happen to a large degree.
An incredible ironic statement since what you’ve done is only possible because of open source. If you don’t realize that taking a huge dump on the open source community will have profound consequences for Mapbox then you’re in for a surprise.
You may be right, it’s certainly a complex area. But I do think this will put a lot of wind in the sails of Mapbox’s competitors. The inevitable fork of version one will serve most people’s needs and it may pick up some real momentum. But most of all, I think the move will generate an incredible amount of ill will in the developer community. Who would trust Mapbox after this kind of bait and switch? Why would anyone use anything coming out of Mapbox if they have any kind of alternative?
I don't understand your last paragraph. On the one hand you're saying OSS in 2020 mostly helps companies, but on the other hand you say this dynamic of company-helping is not one that you can build a sustainable business on. Am I missing something?
I've noticed similar things before a couple of times. (Like a comment changing from a day to 10 minutes old) Maybe they're doing site maintenance or changing stuff at the time...
I've found that when there's something that I can SHOW him, some cause/effect, simple explanations stick. For example, how keystrokes make matching letters and numbers appear on screen, how we can find a picture of a truck and print it out, or a model of his BRIO railroad and make it on the 3D printer.
On the other hand, when the cause/effect is behind the scenes, not tangible, simple explanations end up leading him down a (funny) road of misunderstandings. I was trying to explain to him the idea of place values when reading numbers, which is surprisingly hard to explain short of memorizing numbers. He came up with some great questions, all of which indicated he was on a totally different page.
Maybe you can make the intangible tangible. A good tool for teaching place values when reading numbers could be an abacus. In those that have 10 beads per line, you can use each line as a place value. When one line reaches 10, have the rule that they must be replaced by 1 bead in the next line. When you teach addition, you can group 2 or 3 lines per place value. Write one number using the first line of each place value group, and then the other number using the second line of each place value group. For every ten beads in a place value group, replace it with 1 bead in the next group. When every group has less than 10 beads, you can write the result.
I especially like those 10x10 abacuses that have 5 beads in one color and 5 beads in another color, switching the order after 5 lines. I got this one for my cousin:
It helps in visualizing a 1 digit number in more digestible pieces to help working with it in one's head.
Another idea is to use money to emphasize the "worth" of each place value. For example, the first place value could represent pennies, the second dimes, and the third dollars, so each is worth 10 of the place/digit on the right. You can say that it's inconvenient to hold a lot of currency tokens. Why carry 100 pennies or 10 dimes when you can carry a dollar? So, making a number is like reducing the amount of coins or cash notes we carry for the same amount of money.
Yet another idea is to simply show him a giant list of numbers and explaining the patterns in the sequence.
Exciting things are happening in the world of gen AI, computer vision, and 3D! If you're interested in being part of the action, we're currently building out the new content understanding team and looking for early members to join us.
As part of this team, you'll be working on developing machine learning and computer vision systems at the scale of the world's largest, most active 3D platform, where tens of millions of people connect every day.
If you want to learn more about this opportunity (or if you know somebody who might be interested), please don't hesitate to reach out. We'd love to chat and see if you're a good fit for the team! Here is the JD - https://jobs.roblox.com/careers?gh_jid=4966703&gh_src=da92d0...