Is it because of ArXiv?

No. ACM has been on a slow path towards making everything Open Access for many years now - driven both by internal and external feedback. Given that the ACM Digital Library (individual and library subscriptions) has been subsidizing other ACM endeavors, that making stuff OA is not something you can take back later, and that the required article processing charges (APCs) cause other problems, they have been rather careful with the transition.

They plan to make the entire digital library freely accessible by January 1, 2026.

Here's a short article about timeline and implications: https://medium.com/sigchi/about-acm-open-cd544408559c

EDIT: for anyone wondering why there need to be APCs at all, Jonathan Aldrich gives a glimpse into costs and benefits of 'traditional' publishers: https://medium.com/sigchi/what-benefits-do-traditional-publi...

I'm interested in understanding how the ACM is handling the transition to Open Access, particularly given that they offer a lifetime add-on to their life membership option. How are they addressing potential pushback from individuals who have already paid a significant amount to access the Digital Library? Are they considering making a portion of the Digital Library exclusive to paid subscribers even after the transition to Open Access?

Note that LIPICs [1] publishes the conference ECOOP chaired by Jonathan Aldrich. It is a very interesting alternative to ACM for conference proceedings: it hosts some great conferences and it has lower APCs. It does not publish journals though.

[1]: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/series/LIPIcs

The entite library?

This is amazing, I hadn't been following recently!!!

Most likely not, at least not directly. CACM and arXiv do not in any way compete.

However, arXiv has done a lot for open access publishing, so perhaps it wouldn't have happened (this early) had it not been for arXiv.

arXiv is more than twenty years old at this point. I think the rising opposition to exploitative publishers has ratcheted up pressure on other institutions to switch to an open access model more than arXiv suddenly causing policy changes.

In 2019 there was a big dustup when people thought Trump was going to issue an executive order requiring all federally-funded research to be open access. ACM as an organization signed a letter with a bunch of publishers opposing this idea. It's own membership (myself included) objected pretty strongly... and the next year ACM announced plans to move to open access. So, just maybe, they're actually listening to their members.

arxiv is thirty years old i think?

Chinese don't care, if there is a market they will produce it.

Art, music of the spheres (literally)

Nvidia is known to retaliate (delaying future shipments) if you do stuff like this.

I run a basement compute server[^1], what’s Nvidia gonna do? Not let me buy their hella expensive H100s? At least now I get to learn ML skills without my failed experiments exponentially scaling on the cloud.

[^1]: https://prayag.bhakar.org/apollo-ai-compute-cluster-for-the-...

Don't you think Nvidia analyzed, sliced and diced the market to figure out how to maximize profits?

AMD is doing the same thing, the only high memory cards they put out (MI300) are for data centers.

NVIDIA has actually not really sliced and diced the market. They only sell Cadillacs, which is fine for now because they're the only game in town.

It’s possible to come up with many strategies and different companies will. Why are you so sure that Nvidia’s strategy is right for AMD or Intel who need to offer differentiation to get over the CUDA moat?

The new two stages desktop context menu is indeed insane. Probably "we need to give it a new look, but we can't risk breaking anything, so let's keep the old one too".