immibis2

The people working for Unreal/Unity/Godot. Nobody writes search engines any more - except for Google et al. Nobody writes advertising systems - except for all the advertising businesses.

If it has a pittance of cache, then mechanical sympathy might not mean cache-friendliness. Linked lists were mechanically sympathetic on uncached systems - it cost the same to access any byte of memory, so you might as well go directly to the one you wanted.

Game jams aren't software projects - they are jams. Indeed you need a bunch of people to have a jam of any type. A project can spawn from a jam, but it isn't the jam.

this wasn't flagged, you just wrote [flagged]

That's literally what a blog post is, yes.

Is that all that relevant? Surely even if AI becomes financially unsustainable in the next two years, it's still rational to use it right now while it's VC-funded.

Several points:

You need to build a thing first. Community doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. License doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. I'm seeing people forget this principle a lot recently.

The best thing you can do to promote free software is to make good free software. I was recently invited to sign a European digital sovereignty petition (which I am not eligible to sign). Know what helps much more with that? Making European digital sovereign systems. Instead of petitioning the government to switch MS Office to LibreOffice someone would have to actually put in the effort to find out why the government doesn't use LibreOffice, and fix that. (It's probably not because it doesn't run on their computers!)

You have to use copyleft licenses or else the software quickly becomes unfree, if it's actually worth anything. This doesn't happen to most non-copyleft free software because it's not worth very much, not because it doesn't happen.

A community of users doesn't have much value. Any forum or Discord guild or mailing list is secondary to the actual software and it actually being used. Plenty of successful software has no "community" - sudo, for example. Plenty of software with a "community" is not successful. Some software is successful and has a community, like Blender.

A community of developers is only valuable if they're doing valuable things. The Fediverse chat group that shared the link to the European digital sovereignty petition - no useful Fediverse software seems to be coming out of the people in that group. It's all about ivory-tower protocols that won't possibly work in the real world, and stuff like that. No actually working software.

We also have to stop over-estimating the worth of free software just because it's free. Good free software is good software which is also free software. No software is bad, bad software is also bad. Some random code you wrote and published somewhere on the internet usually isn't very useful, and that's probably why it doesn't have a community. Don't try to create a community first - that won't make the software any better. You have to make good software, that can spread by word of mouth, first and then you can have a community after that. Think about the number of random little programs on the internet, now think how many are installed on your computer - not a very big percentage, but the ones that you do have installed, many people have installed. Those are the useful ones.

In most projects the original creators remain the main developers no matter how many other contributors join. Late contributors having a significant effect on a project is the exception, not the rule, and when it happens it's actually an undesirable power inversion since the original creator retains unearned influence - see the PolyMC incident. There is no way to become the chief developer of a project other than having created it. If you think you can rewrite the whole thing and make it better, don't "join the community" - make a fork (which makes you part of the community, but that is not the main goal!).

If you're actually doing the majority of the work, offering a dual license is not unethical. We are forced to live in capitalism whether we like it or not, and we should be trying to squeeze money out of capitalist entities - lord knows they're good at squeezing money out of us. To not play that game is to lose by default. This isn't incompatible with being nice to people who are not money-squeezers, if you dual-license. A community fork can legally continue as AGPL-only. (You don't necessarily need a full CLA either, you just need people to agree their code will be in your commercial version. Programmers treat licenses and CLAs like satisfying the borrow checker, but that's not how they actually work.)

Something like: An LLM can encode a query into a vector to match against a vector database of indexed pages.

You have to actually engineer that though, you can't just throw random stuff into ChatGPT and expect good results.

You don't want Google to be a direct keyword search. Well maybe sometimes you do, but not usually. Text search is not fundamental to the Google user experience - DWIM (do what I mean) is fundamental. The ideal user experience is that you type in what you want and the machine finds it or does it. LLMs designed and deployed properly are infinitely better at this than keyword search engines are, despite being less predictable.

Example search: video card game with the robot guy

AI overview [correct]: The video card game you are thinking of is likely Inscryption, which features a mysterious, robotic-looking or masked scrybe (like P03, the robot scrybe of technology)

If it was actually the best result for you, they wouldn't need it to be an ad.

The fact that this was ever more than half should make us extremely suspicious of the whole search engine. Almost all of that money is coming from paid manipulation of search results.

Me personally, I use my bank card, which I assume registers as Mastercard.

I also have the option to pay by scanning a non-QR non-SEPA-Instant code generated by my bank app, through some other third-party system.

At some stores, but not the supermarket, I have the option to pay by SEPA Instant. It's more common with online payments, but a store could also accept it. The main problem is that SEPA Instant payments aren't always instant (thanks to USA-imposed KYC/AML rules), and if one isn't, then I'd have to come back later to collect the goods, or pay twice and hope to get a refund later.

To save others time: it's a cartoon where Putin's in everyday situations and gets out of his responsibilities by saying "I have a nuclear bomb". First scene: Putin is sitting at a restaurant table and asked to pay. He says "no". Waiter says "but sir you have to pay." Putin says "I have a nuclear bomb." Waiter says "Okay sir, enjoy your dinner."

Second scene: Parking warden catches Putin in a disabled space, says "I have a nuclear bomb", warden leaves him alone.

Third scene: Putin's playing a card game and making up the rules, opponent objects, Putin says "I have a nuclear bomb", opponent lets him do whatever.

Fourth scene: Putin cuts to the front of a line, says "I have a nuclear bomb", but the person he cut in front of (apparently Biden) says "I also have a nuclear bomb", but Putin says "but I have a nuclear bomb and I'm crazy", and the guy lets him stay at the front of the line.

There's a good comment too: "Missed opportunity. At the end, in line, when [Biden] points out to Putin, "Look, I have a nuclear bomb too," the others in line should have gotten angry with him, saying things like, "You see, you're a bully?", "What are you doing, threatening? Reckless!", "You're provoking him!", and Orsini should have appeared and said, "This is how we risk escalation!" "

They get awareness of AI annihilation and capitalist annihilation instead...

When something like this is new they always put in effort to make it cool the first, but then with time and iterations it becomes a cost center to be minimized, or worse, an advertising center.

No they are not? You might be thinking of cheque-style payments (recipient pulls, with proof of the sender's authorisation) versus giro-style payments (sender pushes, with their own authorisation). The latter are obviously much more secure.

Haven't we been ignoring climate change for over 100 years?

In all the centuries of human dissection, nobody has ever been able to find the soul particle inside a human. It appears that one does not exist.

Okay, but then you can't do the same thing to LLMs, either.

Sadly Trump is not the only person who has to be decoupled from. Germany has its own locally grown problems too - I'm not sure it's better to trust Germany than to trust America.

The centralised state-run exchange that you have to connect to to make the software useful?

The problem with this line of reasoning is that is works for all values of "they", "criminal", "investigation", and "fascists". Right now we probably don't think it's a problem that you can't buy drugs with this system. In the future, if they ban books about Tiananmen Square, and this system gets introduced and it also doesn't let you buy books about Tiananmen Square, we won't think that's a problem either.

Of course in Germany you can purchase and publish e-books about Tiananmen Square, but I think that Tiananmen Square was just a placeholder to be replaced by something your government really doesn't like.

no, that hasn't been correct since COVID. Some places are even card-only now.

The other half of the usual story is that: the user gets confused by all the possibilities and non-cohesive implementations of the FLOSS version and just pays some US startup which offers a single straightforward package.

Isn't there already a standard QR code format you can scan with your bank app to make an instant SEPA transaction?

That seems to be the widespread attitude in Germany, that the current systems were set up to prevent a repeat of the bad stuff that happened, and as long as those systems are functioning, the bad stuff cannot happen again.

The total value in the financial system will always be forced to match the total value existing in the real world, one way or another. This is inevitable with any financial system, and it usually takes place by a rapid devaluation of whatever people are holding lots of.

It could be in Germany until the law was reformed. You were civilly responsible for whatever the botnet did.

isn't that precisely why they block most VPNs now? I worked for one, and all of our content licensing agreements stipulated that we had to block VPNs, and which vendors were allowed to give us the list of VPN addresses to block. (it's Digital Element, by the way.)

Of course, we weren't liable for failing to block any VPN address not on the list, but we also weren't allowed to not block an address that was on the list, which resulted in customer complaints.