EarlKing

> As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.

This is my point. I've grown tired of telling people to hate those who exploit us all when they're tossed crumbs from their master's table and decide that is sufficient to make common cause with him.

I'll shed a tear for the common coder when they can spare a tear for the rest of us.

I'm sure I'm supposed to sympathize with the plight of the poor Amazon coder, but since everyone in the valley are encouraged to systematically shit on everyone they believe is beneath them.... I can't.

...and don't tell me they don't. I've been to way too many corporate parties and seen how they act when they think no one is watching.

Yes, I know that. I'm saying this is utterly futile and if they really wanted to accomplish something they'd structure themselves as I described above. If their goal is to highlight the absurdity of the law... they won't actually accomplish anything. The Attorney General is not going to magically decide this was a terrible idea and reverse course. If they want to change the law then this isn't the way to do it either. If they want to ensure business as usual then what I propose is one way to do that.

The truly aggravating part is that if they really wanted to thumb their noses at the Attorney General's office and get away with it there's a pretty straightforward way to do it: Fork every single project they want to offer through their operating system and thereby become a first-party developer-distributor thereof. AB 1043 is worded in such a way that it really doesn't apply if the operating system developer doesn't provide a covered application store (see 1798.501(a)(1)). This should apply in every other such app store accountability act in every other state (save Texas, since this is the text they seemed to adopt after the Texas law was challenged). Instead, all they're going to accomplish is getting pimpslapped by the Attorney General's office.

Maybe they're interested in performative noncompliance, but I'm not. I'd rather engage in creative and effective noncompliance.

An intellectual Mode rather than a Mean or a Median?

There are already "App Store Accountability Act"s present in Texas and Utah. I believe South Dakota is the other state that has one in their House right now. So no, this isn't California being a nanny state. Actually, California's is a lot better than the ones found in other states since literally you're allowed self-attestation of your age bracket (i.e. you don't have to supply an ID or some other such mechanism for independent verification). It's literally the equivalent of what they used to do with porn sites back in the day when they would ask you if you were over 18 -- and if you said yes, well, we tried! (Gold stars for everybody!)

In all seriousness, though, this is the only way where politicians get to pretend they did something and the rest of us get to avoid getting royally screwed. If parents were given dumbed-down versions of the tools that already exist to manage corporate-owned cell phones and laptops then there'd be a lot less for people to complain about (not that it would stop perpetually incompetent parents from pointing the finger at everyone but themselves for their own failings, of course, but at least the vast majority who AREN'T those people would be satisfied).

It is not about whether or not it is available for free, at cost, or otherwise, but whether or not the activity has the character of commercial product development. It's what the product is used for, not what price it's set at. A 501(c)(3) directly developing, or funding the development, of commercial software is not engaged in charitable, educational, or other exempt activities.

For reference: This is exactly what happened to the Yorba Foundation, and numerous others since then.[1]

[1] https://www.stradley.com/business-vantage-point-blog/irs-con...

> Using the model of the university and various tenured profs, I'm not sure what you are saying is true. But, perhaps it's a misunderstanding of what I was intending.

Tenured professors are not engaged in commercial product development.

Boldly asserting that all grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes does nothing to change the character of the grant. If you're giving money to someone for commercial product development then you're giving money to someone for commercial product development ... and if that constitutes the majority of what you do then you've got a major problem.

It's like someone saw an episode of Black Mirror and Idiocracy and went, "That's it! That's what we need to do!" and began using them as a playbook.

Yeah, I'm sure this won't drive massive adoption of ad blockers or anything.

So.... you just created a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization to offer grants for product development.

Yeah, this will end well.

Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status? Or, in the case of a state-run university, this raises all kinds of issues regarding how tax money is being given away to random schmoes instead of benefitting the public at large.

So, yeah, there's plenty of reasons why they don't do that.

Open source wouldn't have a funding problem if people would stop being so averse to just paying for what they use. Maybe... the world should stop expecting something for nothing.

> There is a common myth about newbie programmers that FORTH is write-only and that you need to type everything in one line, without comments or function calls etc.

By contrast, in APL it's not a myth at all.

More than a few companies. Nothing would allow advertisers to justify raising ad rates quite like being able to point out that their users are real rather than bots.

Correction: Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and QuantumLink (insofar as Mutiny is QuantumLink, anyway). Season 3 can be roughly summarized as "LOL, Norton".

Well....... shit. I'd been in there previously and never noticed that. Disregard.

That would be the source code posted to that sonic.net site. It was a mix of raw dumps of FORTH blocks and printouts converted to PDFs. It wasn't the full source code, and there weren't any design documents in there.

Point of information: By and large FORTHs did not use bytecode. Execution tokens (XTs) were usually stored as a function of the default word size, which typically was 16 bits. There were some FORTHs that went out of their way to use token threading so they could store programs in byte codes, but those were pretty rare. Rarer still were programs that mixed byte code with word-sized code (although one such scheme is described in an issue of Forth Dimensions).

I'm not sure what you're referring to since the files T.C. Lee posted on that geocities site are the only design documents he (or anyone else) ever released, and those are preserved in the SFFiles.zip found at the oocities mirror linked from the github there. That zip contained only a partial dump of some source code, while that sonic.net page contains a more complete copy (but lacks any kind of design documents whatsoever). Was there something else you were referring to?

Just in case anyone else wants to poke around and discovers there appears to be archived versions after 2020[1]... don't bother. They all 404. At a guess: There were links to them in anticipation of creating updated zip files but they never got around to it. Lame.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-...

Cost was not the only issue addressed by OP.

They can require whatever the want. Good luck stopping people from just building their own printers without such "blocking technology".

What I find particularly galling is that he failed to learn perhaps the most important lesson: Maybe he wouldn't have these kind of problems if he hadn't outsourced his manufacturing to China but kept in on-shore instead.

Yes, actually... but I suppose I'm particularly critical of projects that have been running for 40 years and are still asking for money.

.....because it was posted on an American site?

Yes, that is an opinion you are supposed to have. You are supposed to associate the regime's class enemies with nazis and communists so that their claims can be dismissed without a single rational thought. "They beat up jews and gays!" is a great way to avoid having a difficult conversation about the regime's blatantly hostile policies against their own people.

Bring back n-gate!

I wish they'd spend less time giving awards and more time producing an actual specification for Project GNU so we can actually measure when it will be feature-complete.

I was wondering what that sucking sound was...

We'll know AGI has arrived when we finally see papers on Coca Cola Vending Machine Consciousness.