iamnothere

Perhaps one day we’ll finally understand the value of simpler software that moves ever-closer to “complete” (simple maintenance only), rather than constantly reinventing Zawinsky’s Law.

It’s ok for software to be replaced when something better comes along for a new generation, but what I wouldn’t give for more well-maintained tools that are feature complete.

What is the modern version of Zawinsky’s Law, anyway? Every program expands until it contains a web browser (Electron), notifications, and a chatbot?

I am in neither faction, as I already indicated. I’m not an LLM user except for search engine summaries.

I also already mentioned that some formerly GPL die-hards have been jumping ship from Linux to BSDs simply because of the respective stances on AI. That’s enough for me to say this works both ways.

Yes, and archiving as a practice became popular when people noticed that media sites were beginning to edit or delete articles without listing a correction, sometimes after the story had already circulated widely. Previously, editors would usually make a note of such things.

(This is why archives that bypass paywalls are particularly important. I wish we had more options here.)

BSD was tied up in lawsuits for years, giving Linux a head start.

Copyright is based on laws, and laws can be changed or clarified. Given the amount of overinvestment in AI, I expect them to change. The EU is already making moves in this direction: https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expro...

I expect the overall copyright regime to be weakened over time due to the effects of AI. It’s clear that the intent is to replace copyright gatekeeping with model/compute gatekeeping. This is a battle between two groups I greatly dislike, and I don’t really side with either, but there may be a small benefit for the average person who just wants to “download a car”.

It’s possible that they have different interpretations of how generated code affects licensing, but I think in general everyone is now abandoning old positions on licensing. It’s an exciting time for those of us who dislike copyright, something is bound to shift soon.

Whatever its stance towards the GPL, Linux has become the default home of GPL land with the exception of the few dedicated souls still working on Hurd. (I hope they keep making steady progress.)

I wasn’t referring to the specifics of the disagreement, I meant the level of vitriol.

Interesting to watch the rapid fragmentation of FOSS into “hard” anti-AI, AI-neutral-to-discouraged, AI-supplemented, and AI-driven camps, akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars. Suddenly I don’t see as many complaints about licensing, and some of the die-hard GPL stans are silently dropping that position as Linux adopts AI-supplemented development.

On one hand it’s unfortunate, because it hypothetically dilutes developer efforts, but on the other hand the most extreme groups already had incompatible personalities and weren’t working well together. This self-sorting may actually result in a better cadence and less energy wasted on arguing.

The downside is that a lot of loud and annoying people seem to be converging on BSD land. I am AI-nonaligned (I just care about Quality) but I’m very much in favor of OpenBSD’s heads-down focused dev culture. I hope that doesn’t change.

Early stages, possibly. Depends on how/if things escalate or if we deviate towards reform. We’re still a long way from the most brutal totalitarian regimes of the last century.

Excessive coercion eventually leads to the population “giving up”: voluntary unemployment/underemployment rises, productivity falls off a cliff, accidents increase, and corruption skyrockets. Unless there’s an outside benefactor nation both capable of and interested in carrying the weight, the society falls apart and you’re likely to get a revolution. This limits the amount of coercion that can be applied.

Depends on the margin on upgrade components. There may be a point that’s high enough for profit but still cheaper for the consumer than a new laptop of comparable specs.

Thanks for sharing. Good news: your needs should be very well served by the existing market.

Video with demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9dvzzc2cW8

Chromebook printing is just literal CUPS with an even worse interface. You can use manual configuration with a custom CUPS PPD, it’s just a pain. Also the driver definitions are restricted and can’t use executables, so PPDs that require an external filter don’t work.

If things get that bad, you make friends in an “unfriendly” country and have them beam in news and resources to you, which you distribute by sneakernet (or even paper). At that point you’re squarely in the territory of latent revolution, as sitting at home is no guarantee that the secret police won’t come for you anyways.

What does this article have to do with communism???

(Author specifically points out this is not a likely outcome)

Yes, but forced transfer or no, the money itself is not zero-sum. It’s the access to scarce resources (including time/labor) and the actual claims on those resources that are zero-sum. Money is a fungible proxy for these.

Technically, thanks to thermodynamics, the pie is constantly shrinking. We haven’t dug up or exploited all the useful stuff yet, so from our limited perspective there is still room to grow the pie. But we’re probably getting close to the limit, as the rate of consuming useful stuff is beginning to exceed the rate of digging it up or otherwise capturing it.

Or you could use Nostr, where there is no “account” and you simply republish all your content at whatever relays allow it. If your identity is banned from one relay, people can still get your content from others, and the identity never needs to change.

It happened in Norway and is happening in the UK and California. Unfortunately the effect seems to be real, although IMO it may not be the taxes themselves as much as the increasingly hostile attitude towards wealth, which may cause the wealthy concern about unknown future actions.

Without a global wealth tax (which seems impossible to coordinate) then I don’t see a good solution if the goal is to extract excess wealth from UHNW individuals. This is why a Georgist land value tax scheme is probably better; it levels out real estate speculation, which is a favorite parking lot for excess wealth and which has terrible side effects. Over time this will level out wealth inequality slightly, while forcing unproductive (rent seeking) wealth into the market.

I’m in favor of a single tax (just LVT), which economists say is possible, but if you must then you could also tax stock/bond profits (trading, dividends, coupons) at a higher rate. This may be a bad idea though if it pushes investors over to foreign markets.

That’s not really how it works, considering how many people use them. In the recent past they just shut down all “suspicious” looking traffic when there are protests. This has false positives, which is why it’s not always active. Plus allowing VPNs in normal times acts as sort of a social pressure release.

The process of developing software has an impact on the outcome, especially if the software is tied in with physical systems. If you’re looking for software that meets specific criteria, built to an engineering standard, you need a formal process around it.

Also, a purely software-focused standard doesn’t make sense for CAs, as they also operate and maintain infrastructure. The failure with this CA was a process failure.

I probably emphasized software too much in my reply, but that’s usually where I see people call for standards to be forced on the “tech” industry.

And whose jail? Is India going to allow extradition to the US for this? I doubt it. The company has strong ties to the government and provides services to the BJP’s pet Aadhaar system as well as the military. Unless their failures harm the government extensively, I don’t think you will see any accountability.

Like it or not, CA infrastructure is global, and there’s no single set of laws that can or should govern it.

If you want formal engineering outcomes, you need formal engineering standards. But in the same way that redoing a home bathroom doesn’t require the same multimillion dollar process as building a bridge, not all software projects can fall under the same umbrella. Any scheme like this has to take into account where certification is actually needed and what the goals and costs are.

And guess what: this already exists. DO-178C for aviation, ISO 26262 for automotive, IEC 62304 for medical, etc. But these standards are specialized to the industry because, no surprise, there is no appropriate one-size-fits-all software development approach. You can’t just say “software must be bug-free” and leave it at that. That’s been shown to be impossible. Even formally verified software can have spec bugs.

There’s already formal standards that CAs must meet, and they get audited too. Maybe those standards aren’t rigorous enough. But even with those standards, what authority is going to punish a CA who breaks them, other than browser/OS vendors? If it damages the host nation, you might see something. But if the host nation is complicit, and used the rogue CA for intel purposes—or if the company has political connections—then I don’t think you’re getting the punishment you want.

It makes sense to have these heavy standards when you’re talking about software whose failure could immediately cost actual lives. I’m hesitant to expand it elsewhere as it could threaten the viability of open source and software freedom in general. Nobody should ever need a license to run a compiler or deploy an application to their own server.

Isn’t this just you saying that you received a decent education so therefore everyone else must have as well? Have you been to school in rural Kansas or Louisiana? Are you oblivious to the countless hours of content from organizations like Turning Point that are explicitly targeted at kids? And the endless influencers who do the same?

Are you not aware that the average IQ in the US is 97-98? And that academic performance has been falling consistently? Did you know that 54% of US adults score below a sixth grade level on reading comprehension?

> Is the government teaching the people that foreigners are the cause of all issues? I don’t think so.

Are you seriously saying that the current government isn’t pushing this idea?

It’s just a metaphor and it breaks down if you dig into the specifics too deeply, as with all metaphors. But if you insist, I as the seller am not responsible either. If I’m a bookseller and I send a banned book to you via UPS, after you paid me in person in cash, and your customs seizes it, you don’t get your package and nothing happens to me. YOU might get in trouble though.

Now if I keep sending banned materials to your country, it might be a bad idea for me to travel there. But nothing else is going to happen, unless you’re a global power and you drone me or compel my government to extradite me. (Or if my own country was foolish enough to make mutual extradition agreements for such things.)

(Note, I specified in person in cash above because as I mentioned before, electronic payments make things messy. But most websites are “free”.)

I agree with what you’ve said here, and I’m saying that the people are not “just” going to do what you’ve suggested. Because the people are not well informed, and this is on purpose. They will eventually figure it out, when the undeniable signs of collapse are around them, but it will be too late at that point. This is a pattern that repeats throughout history.

You’re suggesting that it’s the fault of the public for failing to overcome intensive propaganda, disinformation, and divide-and-conquer campaigns, a failing educational system, and normal human failings like normalcy bias. I don’t know what to tell you. Fine, blame the people, it’s not going to change anything.

It’s not the same legal conception of intermediary liability as with online services, but I’d argue that it’s an extension of the same idea. The manufacturer has somehow been conceived as a legally vulnerable intermediary between the user and the printed/milled product, and the legislature is attempting to force them to interfere in the manufacturing process, with the threat of liability as a club.

This same trend is happening all over, from banking to communications to manufacturing, where private industry is deputized by force to police consumer behavior, without consumers receiving any of the usual protections provided by the legal process. We’re effectively witnessing the construction of a privately mediated police state.

False. Making a website accessible from the internet is not “offering” it to anyone. You might have a claim if I were paying to advertise in that country, maybe.

And actually you can just make a gambling website overseas, people have done that since forever. You might have trouble with accepting payments, though.

> It's one thing to say that you can't CNC machine guns for customers of your CNC-on-demand service, it's another to say you can't sell CNC machines because someone might use them to make guns.

And yet some places (California for instance) are attempting to do just this by requiring some kind of vaporware AI mediator to review files before the machine operates. Intermediary liability is out of control.

For those not aware, note that Ofcom have effectively conceded defeat on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167028