I work at Manifold, I don’t know if this is true but I can easily generate some arguments against:
Manifold’s business model is shaky and Manifold may well not exist in 3 years.
Manifold’s codebase is also shaky and would not survive Manifold-the-company dying right now.
Manifold is quite short on engineering labor.
It seems to me that Manifold and LW have quite different values (Manifold has a typical startup focus on prioritizing growth at all costs) and so I expect many subtle misalignments in a substantial integration.
Personally for these reasons I am more eager to see features developed in the LW codebase than the Manifold codebase.
I work at Manifold, I don’t know if this is true but I can easily generate some arguments against:
Manifold’s business model is shaky and Manifold may well not exist in 3 years.
Manifold’s codebase is also shaky and would not survive Manifold-the-company dying right now.
Manifold is quite short on engineering labor.
It seems to me that Manifold and LW have quite different values (Manifold has a typical startup focus on prioritizing growth at all costs) and so I expect many subtle misalignments in a substantial integration.
Personally for these reasons I am more eager to see features developed in the LW codebase than the Manifold codebase.
Can you elaborate on this point? Why wouldn’t the codebase be salvageable?
I don’t have any special knowledge, but my guess is their code is like a spaghetti tower (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NQgWL7tvAPgN2LTLn/spaghetti-towers#:~:text=The distinction about spaghetti towers,tower is more like this.) because they’ve prioritized pushing out new features over refactoring and making a solid code base.