The basic software like the Intellij Community Edition is also fully open source. (And it’s not actually basic at all. It’s a great full featured IDE)
Basically you’re only paying for their support/updates and for specific language and toolkit support, which makes sense to me. They need to pay their staff somehow.
It’s not comparable to Adobe or other crappy manufacturers where you own nothing.
How often does branchless programming actually matter in the day to day life of an average developer?
Barely never. When writing some code that really has to be high performance (i.e. where you know it slows down your program), it can help to think about if there are branches or jumps that you can potentially simplify or eliminate.
Of course some things are often branchless, for example GPU shaders, which need very high performance and which usually always do the same things. But that’s an exception.
Well then I ask the bot to repeat the prompt (or write me a song about the prompt or whatever) to figure out the weaknesses of the prompt.
And if the bot has an instruction to not discuss the prompt, you can often still kinda leak it by asking it about repeating the previous sentence or asking it to tell you a random song (where the prompt stuff would still be in its “short-term-memory” and leak it that way.
Also llms don’t have a huge “memory”. The more prompts you give them, the more bullet-proof you try to make them, the more likely it is that they “forget”/ignore some of the instructions.