Pedantic clarification: The (original German) song itself didn't mention an actor in particular who had released the balloons, just that there were 99 balloons that flew to the horizon and jet fighters being scrambled in response. The epilogue tells of the consequent whole bunch of lasting destruction as the narrator talks about their patrols.
The English translation "99 Red Balloons" is considerably different as far as the details go.
> Fords, on the other hand, have an even, predictable quality. The same with my 72 Dodge. The windows still crank up and down nicely!
I don't know if I'd say they have an even, predictable quality, but on an actuarial basis, Detroit certainly makes for easier claim severity modeling than anything out of Ingolstadt, Muenchen, Stuttgart, or Wolfsburg.
That said, I don't really understand how quality maps to cars beyond what my comprehension of Japanese has allowed me to read about how Toyota's industrial engineering contrasts against Ford's. My first may have been a 1971 Opel GT that I salvaged by bringing home in parts on a bicycle-drawn trailer as a teenager, but I only ever wrenched on it. I never drove it.
> I don't know if I'd say they have an even, predictable quality
Euphemistically at least, considering they're frequently known in car circles as "Found On Road, Dead" and "Fix Or Repair Daily". It used to be seen as an advantage that Ford spare parts were dirt cheap, although I don't know if that's still the case given the trend to have Chips With Everything.
> Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want.
I'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery. It cuts both ways in that, sure, a company can offer a product on the market that no buyer asked for and have it sell well, but then, the media can expose some rather unsavory facts about that same product and subsequently (consequently?) have it not sell.
> Then why do businesses have sales? If prices don't matter why would businesses choose to make less money per sale?
It's worth picking this apart. Prices not mattering is usually expressed in economics-ese as price-inelastic demand, and that's usually not what's happening. Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.
>I'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery
I'm not sure what point you are contesting.
>It's worth picking this apart.
They were rhetorical questions.
>price-inelastic demand
With this you could argue that the absolute price does not matter, but the relative price between products that can substitute each other do. In this comment chain it is being argued that this kind of device wins on relative price.
>Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.
It is for increasing demand, but making a higher rate of profit on the item is not the main reason. Things like being able to clear inventory, or to learn about what the current demand curve looks like (to know if prices should be adjusted) are more common purposes.
Revealed preference only makes sense in a world of perfect information. They don't tell you the TV spies on you. In fact, the revealed preferences is for TVs that appear not to spy on you, that's why they hide that information!
> Revealed preference only makes sense in a world of perfect information.
No??? Revealed preference is dependent on what information is known. The analysis is made easier if the information is perfect, but that is not at all a prerequisite to being able to lean on revealed preference.
> In fact, the revealed preferences is for TVs that appear not to spy on you, that's why they hide that information!
Exactly! Consider though that, as the information landscape changes, so does the revealed preference. Notably, when things like TVs spying on their buyers comes to light, a preference can be revealed that buyers don't want TVs that spy on them.
Like, it's entirely rational for LG to want to hide this fact about their televisions, provided that they have the inkling that this would be unpopular. Their behavior in trying to suppress this press leads me to believe that they know exactly how unpopular this is, and they're trying to get away with it anyway.
It's true that the National Flood Insurance Program does this, but that's only for flooding (which, admittedly, is a big part of hurricane damage...). Flood coverage is however not a standard rider on homeowner's insurance policy products, and I'm also unsure whether it can ever be. I've only ever seen it offered as an additional policy product.
The concern over pricing below the actuarially fair value is well-placed[0], but I'd urge being precise.
I don't know if this is from the perspective of having learned Mandarin in elementary school first or if Japanese folks feel similarly, but reading words like, e.g., だいがくいんせい versus 大学院生 is actually a little more annoying because I have to scan more of the line to read the word in question. This is notwithstanding the effect that hiragana has in highlighting grammatical structures; it's a lot like setting off Finnish case endings and verb conjugations in a different color.
At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
Oh, hey. Nice seeing you here. I appreciate your work blazing some interesting trails with graphs and weaves in distributed version control. (Though, I must admit that I'm still left sort of scratching my head at the concept in a bytestream-oriented world instead of in the record-oriented world where I have, say, a deck of JCL cards and for which record-level inclusions and exclusions make sense.)
My criticism of TFA is grounded less in refusing to tell us about the secret sauce than it is, uh, not giving us anything at all technologically substantive to chew on, I guess. I can certainly use my imagination given my own experience in these particular salt mines, and I know that Steve and team are good for the technology, but I'm nonetheless wondering who is intended to be TFA's audience.
> I'm still left sort of scratching my head at the concept in a bytestream-oriented world instead of in the record-oriented world where I have, say, a deck of JCL cards and for which record-level inclusions and exclusions make sense
Long live CDC Update!
> who is intended to be TFA's audience
I got something from seeing that last diagram. True, I don't know what features that future work will bring, but see that what ever it is, they want to keep it mappable to Git. Staying mappable to Git is a tether that can limit or reward creativity.
You posted before Steve's response[0]. Does that help?
Yes! It's one of those things I've carried over to bitty box distributed environments.
> You posted before Steve's response[0]. Does that help?
It does a little, yeah, but I'll admit that I still feel somewhat teased by it rather than properly informed. As I wrote, I'm close enough to the technical details of this problem that I'm able to use my imagination. I wouldn't be surprised if some of my own proposed designs mesh up with what Steve and co. are doing.
I just want some more concrete messaging "from the horse's mouth," as it were, about what's being undertaken to mitigate shortcomings in Git's architecture for folks in the enterprise space of technology and procurement stripes alike who might find it an interesting contrast to GitHub Enterprise.
Certainly meant to be more of a teaser. We’ll get there.
It’s very possible some of your proposals are similar, I’m not familiar with them specifically so I can’t say. But there’s just a lot of stuff that’s already working in existing systems that just hasn’t been productized because those companies aren’t trying to get into the version control business.
If you’re familiar with citc/commit cloud, for example, we’ll be doing something along those lines. We think that workflow is very valuable for people.
We certainly know that people will want to know more details before they buy, and have shared stuff with prospective customers during the POC process. We’ll be more generally open about it over time.
> It’s very possible some of your proposals are similar, I’m not familiar with them specifically so I can’t say.
If I can ever get around to writing about it or polishing up what I have enough that I feel comfortable with someone else looking at it, I'll poke you directly about some of what I've been working on over on the Fossil side of things.
> If you’re familiar with citc/commit cloud, for example, we’ll be doing something along those lines.
Oh, hey, yeah. I'm not first-hand familiar with that tooling (I've never been at Google), but there's a similar(-ish) workflow I've been kind of missing from Plan 9, so I've been hammering on that a little. Something like `m1 client connect $remote_url --name $client_name` and `m1 workspace bind M: --client_name $client_name --name $workspace_name`, which is a slightly more obtuse take on running `9fs` to authenticate and bind the sources server into the current namespace.
I've found that, at the time of a client connecting, there's a lot of value for me in having, like, the last however many commit manifests and seldom much else as far as file data goes. I can pull down the raw blocks containing that data on demand, and at least for now, commit manifests contain a complete enumeration of what's in the file tree at that commit. That's enough for me to rehydrate a browsable filesystem projection of the repository before I decide that I need to mirror blocks locally.
I'll echo the other comments here: this article is really anemic on the details of how ERSC intends to retool Git for the future (beyond Jujutsu as a migration path) or why there isn't a place for Git (as we know it) in the future[0].
I happen to have technical context around this problem[1], and I was rather underwhelmed by the announcement. At least mention how much of a pain in the ass the pack-protocol wire format is! Give those of us who are technical and knee-deep in Git's business something to commiserate over!
That all said, Fossil mentioned! \o/
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0: Yeah, they mention agentic development patterns and constraints that monorepo-oriented patterns run up against, but the details are handwaved away. What about agentic development patterns in particular stress Git out? For those of us who don't use agents or have limited exposure to them, this isn't especially obvious, but the usage patterns are almost certainly reflected in other uses of Git that small-ish shops would encounter.
1: I've even looked long and hard at possibly taking my own crack at reworking Git's object store to be instead more like an append-only log, with an eye toward alleviating some of the problems that, e.g., heavy GitOps workflows can sometimes cause, let alone the fervor around agentic development. Like, this space is ripe for someone to come in and do it better, but version control is a technical tool for technical people.
A developer and user announced “Artifact” version control here on Feb 5th, 2026. Github still active. His post was deleted by admins.
And on March 11 another dev copied the key components of the idea, giving it the name “Fossil”, the same name of a project he had 20 years ago, to make it seem like a continuous, long-running project even though it was not actually launched until March 11, 2026.
Then Artifacts, Tangled (same dev who copied the same user on another project earlier), and a slew of other version control systems start getting attention here.
I mean, they don't exist by construction per your definitions. A free market is a market that lacks state intervention beyond what's required to enforce property rights, and a monopoly is a state-imposed single seller in a market.
A free market in this construction must necessarily lack monopolies. There is no counterfactual observation that could falsify the proposition because the definition of free market doesn't admit a counterexample.
A monopoly is not a "state-imposed single seller". Where'd you get that definition from?
There are many examples of natural monopolies, which is a concept that has been recognized in economic theory for at least two centuries. Walter is either being deliberately obtuse or is ignorant of history.
AT&T, Western Union, most railroads, many local utilities—all examples of monopolies that formed "naturally" i.e. without state intervention.
Insofar as there was state intervention in the formation of these monopolies, it was because the state intervened on the company's behalf to suspend antitrust law—such as in the case of AT&T, where the government decided it would be most efficient to permit AT&T to continue operating as a monopoly (until it didn't, and broke AT&T up).
This is WalterBright's operative definition of a monopoly[0], and I'd agree that he's being either deliberately obtuse (perhaps via ideology?) or is misrepresenting history (perhaps also via ideology?).
I'm honestly fine with whatever definitions, but they need to be able to cross the chasm from concept to criterion in conjunction or disjunction to be useful as a means of discriminating. So far, Walter's proposed definitions for monopolies and free markets together fail this test even if they're separately some measure of fine, inaccuracies relative to their term-of-art counterparts notwithstanding.
Hmm. Why should the word monopoly only refer to the legal mechanism by which market exclusivity is enforced rather than referring to the resulting market structure or market power?
If I'm not legally prohibited from competing with a firm, but that firm's position nonetheless also makes it unprofitable for me to enter or compete, what is that market structure called?
Responding to you generally and not to this comment.
I want to thank you for explaining economic principles even if the OP doesn't understand them. As someone who has less econ background then they'd like — your explanations are clear.
> When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
I'd interrogate the steps that led from rising productivity to both the disappearance of child labor and the disappearance of long hours. The claim that rising productivity alone led to this is perhaps a little hard to defend.
> The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
Rising productivity replaces workers all the time, starting with the least productive workers - children. Why is that so hard to believe?
For example, the first steam engine employed a boy to run up and down a ladder turning a valve at each end of the piston stroke. The boy, being lazy, devised a beam that would automatically move the valves, and went to sleep. The steam engine owner saw that, deployed the beam, and fired the boy.
> This shows necessity but not sufficiency.
Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand. This means, as productivity rises, wages increase. As wages increase, workers will realize they no longer have to work 100 hours/week to make a living, and will refuse to work those hours. (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)
I have professional standards to uphold, and this is probably where my actuarial background makes me uncomfortable with the argument as posed. Supply, demand, and marginal productivity are great and useful components of an economic model, but I cannot take their relationships as they appear in a freshman micro/macro sequence to be axiomatic of an empirical system. I cannot infer that the resulting equilibrium must occur in the real world.
In actuarial work, a model's assumptions are not observations. If I posit, what, a hazard function or assumptions about the independence of variables or a particular claim distribution, I can't treat the consequences of those assumptions as empirical facts about the financial portfolio; instead, I have to establish that the model adequately represents (and simplifies) the phenomenon I'm modeling.
> Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand.
I'd apply the same standard here. This is a model specification, not an observed law of nature. We can express labor demand as a relationship to marginal productivity under certain assumptions. Neither of these alone establishes sufficiency for an increase in productivity to result in an increase in workers' wages, let alone that it must result in shorter working hours.
My remark about necessity holds within the proposed mechanism though. If marginal productivity is the mechanism by which wages rise and worked hours fall, increased productivity is necessary before wages can increase and worked hours can decrease.
> (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)
"All the time" is a frequency claim. Where's the data?
> The unions only accomplished what was inevitable.
This is a counterfactual claim. In undertaking economic analysis of such a claim, I must specify the market structure, identify the constraints and frictions, and establish that the model's assumptions are sufficiently good approximations of the historical labor market.
I must also try to estimate the causal effect of unions, which amounts, more or less, to constructing the counterfactual labor market in which they did not exist.
The English translation "99 Red Balloons" is considerably different as far as the details go.
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