parasense
It's like public photography, it's intrinsically legal, except when it's a Flock camera and then it's suddenly an invasion of privacy.
I think that's true, and it's actually a very interesting topic. Just imagine the prospect that technology has effectively stalled out, and our civilization is stuck perpetuating the perception of forward progress.
Right now the rate of signal is high, and the ratio of noise is proportionally high. But it seems like everyone expects the signal to eventually plateau or sharply decline. Almost as if there is a finite supply of "low hanging fruit" for shallow scanning machines to easily discover, and then there will be some kind of new world that follows where only truly difficult problems emerge.
But eventually the question then becomes why even bother with Rust or any other silly borrow checking ideas if we can use more enjoyable programming languages with LLM side-kicks to catch security vulnerabilities on the front side of the development workflow?
IT seems to me if we exhaust all the extant security vulnerabilities to a calculus that asymptotically goes to infinitesimal zeroness, then... the only trick remaining is to scan code before it becomes vulnerable.
Because in reality the FSF is a WELFARE program for RMS.
Look, I'm done defending the FSF and the GPL. I worked professionally on open source software for over 20 years, but I'm just another former Red Had employee. But oh boy have I seen some stuff, and have seen how the open source sausage is made. I could probably write a wall of text about how the open source world is populated by a bunch of people with various kinds of pathological personality disorders. I certainly consider some of those crazy people my friends, but we have to recognize the nature of these folks.
RMS has to eat. That's why the FSF will never get involved with any big legal controversy. RMS cannot afford the legal expenditure from the modest stream of donations given to the FSF. But even if lawyers were willing to engage pro bono, they get disenfranchised by RMS and his specific quirky personality disorders.
But whatever. In my humble opinion... I highly doubt these European open source zealots will make much progress. On the one hand they say closed source interoperation with GPL code is a violation of the GPL, and on the other hand they say closed source code must interoperate with GPL code, or else... Something something European this-or-that... I think these are nice people, but clearly crazy. Then again it's not quite clear what these crazy people are chasing after? Maybe they merely want API documents, but probably they want to run GNU Hurd on Apple silicon
I'd say Microsoft buying GitHub was part of a strategy to not lose relevance in the world that moves slowly towards Open Source Software. Or put another way, the world moves in a direction away from Microsoft, and by capturing GitHub they can manipulate the outcomes that would otherwise have been adversarial to Microsoft interests. It's just like when Microsoft forked Java back in the 1990s, and later created .NET. The whole VSCode or Visual Studio thing... it's just Microsoft Word for software engineers, and the whole point is to create an ecosystem that locks people into the ecosystem.
To think in terms of what Microsoft does, you have to step back and look into economic theory, at least a little bit. There is this idea in economics about isolated economies, and integrated economies. For example, Europe or North America relies on cheap manufactured goods from China, and so China's economy is intrinsically linked (integrated) into the economies of Europe or North America. THAT is the idea of what Microsoft does. They start by adding value, a soft-dependency you might say, and then make moves to becoming a hard dependency... to put into terms of a dependency graph. Then they link to dependency graphs together GitHub into VSCode, OpenAI into VSCode, One Drive into GitHub or One Drive into Hotmail...
I'll say for sure, at least Microsoft has a strategy, unlike Google where they seem to have a lot of failed projects.
Anyhoo, NASA letting so many people resign is good if your opinion is such that lowering government expenditure is a good thing. So long as the exit package is comparable to retirement package these government employees would have got otherwise. My guess is the resignation package has great near term performance but low long term (retirement) performance, making it a great option for younger workers able to pivot to new careers.
Hello world is really large, and it's unamusing how so much of the standard library is creamed into the resulting binary, no matter how trivial...
Do you know the current status of dynamic linking? I guess the lack of ABI stability is the big blocker, right? Probably no use in formalizing the linking bits if the goal posts keep moving. So it seems like the big problem is some committee will never complete the task... Because it will never be perfect... Something like that.
I'm also sure many of you understand the farther reaching implications of this ruling, especially how it relates to software code written by AI. All that code written by AI cannot be licensed as anything besides public domain. Just think of all the code people have checked into git, that they did not write! Next, please consider the implications towards the open source community if ever there is controversy about Linux kernel code that was AI generated, and then suddenly cannot be covered by the GPL. I think the neck-beard people over at NetBSD can sometimes be eccentric about many things, but this topic was deserved when they loudly banned all AI generated code from their repos.
As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site. Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up...
The problem is if all these renewable eco friendly sources crowd out the dirty more reliable sources, then there will eventually not be any reliable sources. It's a nasty paradox.
I learned Java after learning GO, and I learned go after learning C++.
So I have my own perspective.
I still love using GO, but omg my blood boils when it comes to making things public or private... the concept of using an upper case character is only valid in latin based character sets. Go was originally supposed to be transcendent of characters, being a universal language with UTF8 first principles.
But there are old unix neckbeards lurking in the GO higher echelons, and those are the kind of people that think TABS are superior to spaces for indentation, and capitalizing the first character is great for exporting, and that UNIX was the best thing ever next to the bestest best thing Plan-9 (which only they used)...
But I digress, exporting by capitalizing first character means nobody in asia can write code in their own language, or that StarTrek nerds cannot write code in Klingon poetic verse, as they used to do in Perl back in the 90's. It's brilliant because you can simply look at a thing and instantly see it was exported without having to hunt down the declaration in some far away file deep in the code, but it broke the promise of a universal UTF principled language. I will never forgive that violation way early on in the early days of GO. It's one of those stupid things that breaks the language forever, but is also brilliant.
Oh yeah... it does web assembly too... hurrr....f'n.... yaw!
Are you for real? These accusations are not merely memes.
While I don't endorse terrible people, it is note worth sometimes awful people are the target of even more awful laws. For example, you can do research into a person named "Adam Smith-Connor" who was literally convicted for standing in public while introspectively praying silently. The conduct of standing while appearing to pray was deemed as a form of illegal protest too near an abortion clinic. The same exact thing happened to another person "Isabel Vaughan-Spruce" who was not convicted.
There are also well documented incidents in the UK involving the prosecution of people making remarks online, which could arguably cross into thought-crime territory. I'll leave it to you to actually research these incidence, Google is your friend.
I am acquainted with Ted via the open source community, we have each other on multiple social media networks, and I think he's a really great person. That said, I also recognize when he gets into flame wars with other people in the open source social circles, and sometimes those other people are also friends or acquaintances.
I can think of many times Ted was overly hyperbolic, but he was ultimately correct. Here is the part of the Linux project I don't like sometimes, which was recently described well in this recent thread. Being correct, or at least being subjectively correct by having extremely persuasive arguments, yet being toxic... is still toxic and unacceptable. There are a bazillion geniuses out there, and being smart is not good enough anymore in the open source world, one has to overcome those toxic "on the spectrum" tendencies or whatever, and be polite while making reasonable points. This policy extends to conduct as well as words written in email/chat threads. Ted is one of those, along side Linus himself, who has in the past indulged into a bit of shady conduct or remarks, but their arguments are usually compelling.
I personally think of these threads in a way related to calculus of infinitesimals, using the "Standard Parts" function to zero away hyperbolic remarks the same way the math function zeros away infinitesimals from real numbers, sorta leaving the real remarks. This is a problem, because it's people like me, arguably the reasonable people, who through our silence enable these kind of behaviours.
I personally think Ted is more right than wrong, most of the time. We do disagree sometimes though, for example Ted hates the new MiB/KiB system of base-2 units, and for whatever reasons like the previous more ambiguous system of confusingly mixed base-10/base-2 units of MB/Mb/mb/KB/Kb/kb... and I totally got his arguments that a new standard makes something confusing already even more confusing, or something like that. Meh...
Agreed. I'm pretty sure normal folks never actually shifted left, not as much as the far-left ideology people imagined. Folks would use any plausible excuse to end the insanity progressive politics has caused. Mind you the reverse is also true of ultra conservative politics. The world is elastic in this sense, and we see corrections from time to time.
> Why it matters: The move is a strong signal to Meta employees that the company's push to make inroads with the incoming Trump administration isn't just posturing, but an ethos shift that will impact its business practices.
I would say the shift in policy is to avoid law suites, as the Federal Courts have held DEI programs are sometimes discriminatory... especially the equity parts. Diversity and Inclusion are important parts of existing civil rights laws, so those aspects of DEI programs are not very important except to actually ensure ethical hiring practices are in fact practiced (E.G. not being racist or sexist when hiring). But practicing equity, or sometimes called other things... like affirmative action, etc... are illegal (they are sometimes blatantly sexist or racist). I've been on technical teams blessed by the DEI hiring program, and it was alright... We got more ladies, and we hired people (who earned less) in other time zones around the world. It got weird, for a lot of weird reasons I won't go into, but the main point is the team stopped vibing like before, and that's fine to some extent but this was a disconcordant vibe, not a minor offbeat member of the band, but a bunch of folks playing their own tune...