It's why I don't understand why people believe in "open source". Why would I contribute free dev work to a billion dollar corporation?
I do believe in "Free Software" which is contributing free dev work to my fellow man for the benefit of all man mankind.
Free software and open source are two ideologies for the same thing. Free Software is the ideology of developing the software for the benefit of mankind (it's sometimes termed a "political" stance but I see it as an ethical stance). Open source is the ideology of saving money at a corporation by not paying the developers. Sure open source can benefit mankind but will only develop corporate software for money. When developing on my own time, I will focus on software that either personally benefits me or benefits other regular people.
You need to think it in a different manner. When you have AGPL code, then it benefits mankind more than corporations. There's a Harvard report on value of open source to society based on how much money corporations put in.
Today linux is working nicely on desktops (even though it's not the year of linux) and is heavily dominated by corporations. The parts where linux doesn't do well are exactly parts without corporate support.
Software is becoming complex enough that it's not possible for a single company to just even maintain a compiler let alone an office suite. Its perfect ground for either one company having monopoly or an free software (not open source) being a base for masses.
Lichess, the gazillion of self-hosting software. There are many examples of free software that are exclusively (or let's say predominantly) used in noncommercial environments.
In any case, I agree with the commenter, and I think that developing a software which is also used by companies is different from looking for vulnerabilities in the context and scope of a bug bounty program for a specific company. Yes, you could argue that users of said company are going to be more secure, but it's evidence t like even in this case the company is the direct beneficiary.
> Why would I contribute free dev work to a billion dollar corporation?
The billion dollars company contributed more to your startup than you do to them. Microsoft provides:
- VSCode,
- Hosts all NPM repositories. You know, the ones small startups are too lazy to cache (also because it’s much harder to cache NPM repositories than Maven) and then you re-download them at each build,
Meh it depends whether you use those things of course. There's other IDEs, other languages. And Microsoft isn't doing this out of charity. A lot of the really useful plugins are not working on the open source version, so people that use them provide telemetry which is probably valuable. Or they use it as a gateway to their services like GitHub Copilot.
If a mega corporation gives you something for free it's always more beneficial to them otherwise they wouldn't do it in the first place.
So, no OSS contribution is valid unless you are using this very library?
Did Microsoft contribute more to the OSS world, or did the OSS world contribute more to Microsoft? I pardon Microsoft because they have donated Typescript, which is a true civilizational progress. You could say the OSS world has contributed to Microsoft because they’ve given them a real OS, which they didn’t have inner expertise to develop. We’re even.
Now you sound like you have a beef against large companies and would find any argument against them. Some guy once told me that I didn’t increase my employees by 30% out of benevolence, but because I must be an awful employer. See, why else would I increase employees.
This behavior is actively harmful to the rest of the world. You are depriving good actions from a “thank you” and hence you are depriving recipients of good actions from more of them. With this attitude, the world becomes exactly like you project it to be: Shitty.
The open source ecosystem was perfect before Microsoft tried to meddle, assimilate and destroy.
Microsoft has destroyed several open source projects by infiltrating them with mediocre MSFT employees.
Microsoft bought the GitHub monopoly in order to control open source further. Microsoft then stole and violated the copyright by training "AI" on the GitHub open source.
Microsoft finances influential open source organizations like OSI in order to make them more compliant and business friendly.
The useful projects are tiny compared to the entire open source stack. Paying for NPM repositories is a goodwill gesture and another power grab.
> So, no OSS contribution is valid unless you are using this very library?
You said Microsoft contributes to my start-up. That's only true if we actually use it.
> Now you sound like you have a beef against large companies and would find any argument against them.
I certainly have beef with Microsoft in particular yes. And most big tech. I work a lot with Microsoft people and they're always trying to get us to do things that benefits them and not us (and I hate the attitude of a mere supplier trying to tell us what to do). Always trying to get us to evangelize their stuff which is mostly mediocre, dumping constant rebranding campaigns on us etc.
I'm not looking for arguments but I do hate the mega corporations and I don't believe in any benevolence on their side. I think the world would be much better off without them. They have way too much influence on the world. They should have none, after all they are not people and can't vote.
I also don't appreciate their contributions to eg Linux and OpenStreetMap. There's always ulterior motives. Like giving running on their cloud a step up, embedding their own IP like RedHat/IBM do (and Canonical always tries but fails at). Most of the contributions are from big tech now. I don't believe in a 'win/win' scenario involving corporations.
But I'm very much against unbridled capitalism and neoliberalism yes. I think it causes most of what's wrong with this world, from unequal distribution of wealth, extreme pollution, wars (influenced by the MIC) etc. Even the heavy political polarisation. The feud between the democrats and republicans is really just a proxy war for big corporate interests. Running a campaign requires so much trouble that it's no longer possible with a real grassroots movement.
But anyway this is my opinion. Take it as it is or don't. You have the right to you own opinions of course! I'm aware my opinion isn't very nuanced.
> This behavior is actively harmful to the rest of the world. You are depriving good actions from a “thank you” and hence you are depriving recipients of good actions from more of them.
Nah. Microsoft doesn't care what I think. I'm nothing but an ant on the floor to them.
Besides, they are doing this for reasons. The thank you isn't one of them. Hosting npm is peanuts for a big cloud provider, just advertising really. And it gives them a lot of metrics about the usage of libraries and from where. And VS Code, I'm sure they had a discussion about "what's in it for us in the long term" with some big envisioned benefits. You don't start a big project without that.
With most of their other products it's more clear. Like edge, they clearly made this to lock corporate customers further into their ecosystem (it can be deeply locked down which corporate IT loves because they enjoy playing BOFH) and for customers for upselling to their services. It's not better than Google's, they just replaced Google's online services with their own.
I think the argument is that when big companies make use of stuff, it gets more scrutiny and occasionally they contribute back improvements, and the occasional unicorn gets actual man hours paid for improving it. So if your project gets big enough, it's beneficial. But you have to have a MIT/BSD license usually, because companies will normally stay away from GPL.
Well that's just it, my understanding is that FTL hasn't been proven to violate causality, or that causality is inviolable. It's just very strongly hinted at.
In special relativity at least it's pretty clearly the case that communication outside the light cone (so faster than light) will result in events happening in the wrong order in some frames, violating causality. I will not speak of general relativity, as while I've taken a course in it, years later I have returned to considering it largely dark magic.
Supposing you transmit a message to me at a prearranged time, a number. At that prearranged time I pick a number at random, and act as if it is your message.
When I eventually get your message some time later, if it turns out my random pick was wrong, I kill myself. If the many worlds interpretation is right, I should only observe universes in which I’be managed to conjure up your message faster than causality, right?
> If the many worlds interpretation is right, I should only observe universes in which I’be managed to conjure up your message faster than causality, right?
I feel that's pairing MWI with some non-physical (or at least beyond the wave function) overarching "I" that can see across or jump between branches of the wave function, whereas I'd claim the appeal of embracing MWI is largely that the universe's wave function is all there is and observers/consciousness play no special role (along with not having nonlocal random "collapses"). The experiment would be no different than gathering a bunch of people, assigning each a number, then killing the ones that were assigned the wrong number once the real number arrives.
An individual can end up dying - they'd experience themself seeing the wrong number, then committing suicide. There wouldn't be anything after that where an individual can "observe universes" with the ones where the wrong number was predicted taken out of the possibility pool - that individual is just dead.
I'd also be highly wary of the method they used because of statements like this:
>we note that the vast majority of its answers simply stated the final answer without additional justification
While the reasoning steps are obviously important for judging human participant answers, none of the current big-game providers disclose their actual reasoning tokens. So unless they got direct internal access to these models from the big companies (which seems highly unlikely), this might be yet another failed study designed to (of which we have seen several in recent months, even by serious parties).
Wow, that’s incredible. Cats are progressing so fast, especially unreleased cats seem to be doing much better. My two orange kitties aren’t doing well on math problems but obviously that’s because I’m not prompting the right way – any day now. If I ever get it to work, I’ll be sure to share the achievements on X, while carefully avoiding explaining how I did it or provide any data that can corroborate the claims.
That's a claim that is far less plausible. OpenAI could have thrown more resources at the problem and I would be surprised if that didn't improve the results.
The last time someone claimed a medal in an olympiad like this, turned out they manually translated the problem into Lean and then ran a brute force search algorithm to find a proof. For 60 hours. On a supercomputer.
Meanwhile high schoolers get a piece of paper and 4.5 hours.
Even though chess is now effectively solved against human players, I still remember Kasparov's suspicion that one of Deep Blue's moves had a human touch. It was never proven or disproven, but I trust Kasparov's deep intuition amplified by Kasparov requesting access to Deep Blue’s logs, and IBM refusing to share them in full. For more discussions see [1][2][3].
> How often are you trying to install custom drivers on a smartphone, console or car? Why would you have secure boot issues on those?
The only reason there isn't a thriving community of third party OS's on most smartphones is because secure boot prevents it. And no, users do not have the freedom and choice to disable it (except on a very few models where the manufacturer has graciously allowed users to use their own devices how they want).
this can definitely be mapped in OSM. as far as a high barrier to entry, I'd say that there is a low barrier to mere entry. StreetComplete provides extremely easy OSM editing. Unfortunately, dong something complicated like mapping the turn lanes and what bus restrictions exist on turn lanes is not easy
Thanks for sharing StreetComplete. I hadn't seen that. My interests are usually around K8s, Linux, containerization, IoC, etc, so I honestly hadn't looked as deeply into OSM recently as I should. This looks like a fun way to contribute back a bit.
They can "control" them in any meaningful way if they use them for access of things that you do not allow or denies access for things that you do allow. If neither are happening, then you're effectively the one controlling, not them.
The specific issue at hand is sharing. With passwords, I can easily share my passwords. Is it easy to share passkeys? And could doing so be prevented by Microsoft?
The point of passkeys is that you can have many of them unlike a single password. Each device should have its own passkey that I can revoke if my device is lost.
Does the Passkey-enabled account support multiple passkeys?
I'm pretty sure I have my Android phone setup with a passkey for my Google account and also my Windows laptop.
Presuambly the same logic applies for a service that permits multiple passkeys. Each person would register a passkey on their device using the shared credential.
> Does the Passkey-enabled account support multiple passkeys?
There in lies the issue. With passwords, it doesn't matter if the account supports multiple passwords. I can share the one I have
> Presuambly the same logic applies for a service that permits multiple passkeys. Each person would register a passkey on their device using the shared credential.
but can I simply share the passkeys without someone's permission (other than my own)?
One of my hopes is that we can use our environmental and safety regime to do the industrial stuff in a more humane manner. Outsourcing everything to "somewhere else" only moved the externalities to another country. But people still get hurt.
Totally agree but is more environmentally friendly and more humane part of the current political rhetoric?
And absolutely outsourcing to somewhere else hurts somewhere else. But let’s be realistic: the kind of drastic change that would require no one getting hurt is not in the American discourse.
Have you been to a current US factory? All the big-company ones I've been to have safety and environmental compliance departments focused on zero-injuries and zero-environmental incidents.
Looking at what was done in the early to mid-1900's isn't a good guide to the current state of things. We've learned a bunch since then.
Define current. My dad turned the lights off on one factory as recently as 2018, a factory that Trump visited and bragged about saving (it wasn’t saved).
It’s not the same as factories in the 1989s true, but people are still missing fingers or limbs as a result of the work. Not only that but the resentment between workers and management remains extremely antagonistic.
We really need to stop glossing over the dangers of industrial work. It’s not a triangle shirtwaist fire but it’s not some kind of imaginary industrial utopia of pristine machinery.
There could be some legacy places out there that are stuck in the 50's. Also, small businesses seem to be more likely to not have good programs for safety than large outfits. But I've been working in industrial settings for 20 years on 3 continents, and all the big places have had extensive environmental and safety programs. Having said that, I've never been to a steel mill. The workers themselves can be their own worst enemy though. Places that have a large contingent of workers that started in the 70's and 80's tend to think the safety stuff is 'gay', and forced upon them by management.
but the industrial work still has to be done. Whether it's done in the USA (with OSHA and the EPA to keep people safe) or in another "cheaper" country where they lack the safety regulations we take for granted is the question.
I am rejecting the premise that I should be happy that industrial jobs are being outsourced overseas because those jobs are dangerous and kill people. I don't want people dying in industrial accidents anywhere and I trust the US EPA/OSHA (generally). I have severe qualms about outsourcing jobs because they are too dangerous for Americans.
I "hope" that will happen as well. It is a naïve hope indeed. Almost all current AI systems and all future ones I foresee, are made by large corporations that are looking to turn a profit. Enabling, ordinary "people ... to build the kind of digital experience that they envision" does not maximise profit. Instead AI systems will work for their owners to maximize profits by extracting revenue from the users. Some of this revenu could come from advertising. AIs could build ads that are far more personalized and convincing than anything we can imagine now. AI agents will work first and foremost for their corporate owners and will only do the users bidding if it benefits the owners. There is absolutely no reason to believe that it will be different this time and that now corporations will happily hand out everything for free and users will be empowered. I don't doubt that open source and freedom respecting AI will exist and that some will be able to use it. The great thing about free markets is that those who want to will be able to opt out. But it will always be niche and small just like it is now.
reply