The podcast source transcript has more context. Apparently "him" was whoever was in charge of MSBNx, an unrelated, Bayesian Network thing, which Bill Gates was also obsessed with.

I'm wondering the exact same thing

Yes, I do get paid. Sometimes considerably (for what tech writing can provide).

Indeed, writing tech articles on Medium has allowed me to get some extra income/free-time in between jobs, which I use to upskill myself and then share what I learn with the community (with some amount of friction regarding the paywall). This self-reinforcing loop is quite appealing to me, and - I would argue - aligns somewhat with my take on the Kantian categorical imperative.

For what it's worth, I like the typesetting. Medium also has extremely good SEO, likely from some direct negotiation with search engines, I assume. Eventually I plan to move my tech writings to my own blog, with some sort of minimal ad system, no paywalls. Also, I usually unpaywall my tech articles after the window of high income dries up.

I updated the post to use the "friend link" which should allow you to read for free. (I didn't realize you could edit the link on lemmy after publishing).

in which case I’d much rather pay directly to the authors.

All my stories have a link to my ko-fi at the end, but the income from that is significantly less than what I get from Medium directly.

Edit: Thanks @hayk@lemmy.ml for donating! Much appreciated!

Hmm, you must be Germænic or nordic. You know, places in which the soccer ball freezes during winter before the invention of frost resistant turf

Thanks bro, just doing my best to keep our kind employed and informed. Long live the machine whisperers

Every software system worth its salt should have safeguards against Nokia nunchuck attacks.

Thanks! I borrowed the open source katana bit from unix surrealism

This is a nice overview: CLPFD and CLPZ: Prolog Integer Arithmetic

mother can be used in several ways. If both X and Y variables are uninitialized, then it looks for all mother relationships. If one of them is initialized, it looks for matching relationships. If both are initialized, it returns true if such a relationship exists.