NegativeK

I've dreamt of governments hiring devs with promises of full time OSS work. It _might_ get some people over the lower salaries of government work. But I overheard a state CIO once say "We configure, we don't create".

That's to say nothing about opinions of open source that rival early 2000s Microsoft.

For old ass critical software and hardware, the org can always have a backlog of hardware and contingency plans (paying someone to fix the hardware, paying someone to create a fully certified and modern solution..) for when they start running out of parts.

Oh, definitely. But what my parent comment was suggesting that PE do for their dentist is what 10% business management companies were already doing.

An acquaintance doctor in vet med was pitched 10% ownership in a practice buyout; PE would do business management. The doctor countered with the PE company getting 10%, since they won't be doing any medicine. The PE company declined.

I don't agree with the parent of your comment, but saying they're a Maoist is way too far from my request of steelmanning.

In human med, it's a pretty standard practice to offer a management company 10% ownership for them to handle the business shit.

I'm not arguing with you; I'm legitimately curious what happened to that model and why PE has swooped in as more attractive to doctors. Maybe it's the payout and/or the fact that they don't have to handle business owner decisions at _all_ anymore?

Can someone steelman private equity, please? I'm honestly looking for the upsides (for non-investors) of when PE moves into an industry like medicine and begins buying up businesses that traditionally aren't already large chains.

I already hear the downsides frequently from someone whose work is directly affected.

> The issue is scale

A guest on a podcast said, in response to open source and community websites being flooded with AI scrapers, "the internet has always had people scanning websites; get over it".

I still respect the podcast, but that was such a shitty take. The difference between before and now was that those websites started closing their doors instead of paying the increased hosting feeds.

I'll get over it when we stop giving people a pass for the damage they're doing just because they're a corporation.

Making the possession of data this either illegal or too horribly cumbersome.

Flock is just an iteration, and getting rid of that brand won't fix it. And camera tracking of normal citizens is just an iteration -- not the underlying systemic issue that isn't being addressed.

The EU has GDPR. At this point, I want something stronger than that.

Publish enough docs to let someone write a full OS?

The Pixel line is, from what I can see, a tiny part of the smart phone market share.

So, yes, I can buy a phone that I can mostly control (at the risk of losing access to some draconian apps). But most devices being sold don't allow consumer control.

You can't really spit in the hobby 3d printing world without hitting the community. I have coworkers who talk about their printers, filament choice, what they've printed recently, etc etc. I've been around hackerspaces with that behavior for over a decade, but it spontaneously showed up at work from a shared interest.

That community is where open source tech tends to come from.

Moot to anyone who died, but you'd still be charged with the crime of building a bomb and the crime of murder.

We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability unless they have explicit consent[1] and a legit reason to house it.

A company selling me widgets wouldn't store or let another company store extra information about me if it subjected them the widget seller to HIPAA. Or better yet, something more stringent.

We don't need the government to be antagonistic toward corporations; we just need a government that makes the corporations internalize the risk they're making us take.

[1] The fact that ToS are enforceable when every court in the country knows that only a vanishly small percentage of people ever read them, much less understand them, means that they're not doing their job.

> I think the distinction between political appointee and scientist/researcher stands.

I agree with this.

I'm a civil servant and I know (personally; my work is nowhere near the labs) a number of people who work or have worked in that weird contracting DOE/DOD structure that includes the labs.

The difference I've seen is far more from the nature of work rather than the employment details.

Europe is implementing a law that requires software made for profit to hit at least industry security standards. Punishments include the purchaser being able to sue the seller as well as jail time for execs.

At some point, we need to push back against the reality in the US that we have effectively no way to stop mass harvesting (and then breaching) of our PII -- and there's basically zero downside to companies when it happens.

I've seen coworkers do this to each other when their expertise is in different domains.

I find that AI can be incredibly useful, but just text dumping its output into a conversation feels insulting.

It was partially completed lowers before this, and general machine tools before that.

I support gun control.

This feels like theater, not gun control.

They don't want perfection. They want to move things forward, for their definition of forward.

If they ban bog standard VPNs and find out they're still being used, they'll punish the VPN companies.

If the VPN companies create workarounds and avoid the punishment, they'll punish the payment processors.

If the VPN companies start using esoteric workarounds and taking cryptocurrency for payment, then they've mostly won -- most people aren't going to deal with that shit.

All the while, they'll still go after the social media/etc companies for allowing circumvention of age-gating. So the social media companies will crack down on our ability to visit their sites with any sort of privacy.

My point: laws are all imperfect but can still have a huge effect. Pointing out work arounds doesn't change that.

For context, I'm really disturbed by the recent move to punish people seeking privacy instead of the social media companies that are enabling this social media shit. They know who the companies are, since that's who they're going to punish for not age gating. But they'd (I'm talking about US based age-gating pushes as well) rather fuck with our privacy and make our PII more susceptible to data breaches than tell the social media companies to eat shit.

What would happen if you honestly listed your earnings on your tax forms?

I live in the desert SW after living in far more humid climates. Two weird experiences:

Standing outside talking to friends after the sun set, where it's still over 100F outside: I could feel brief (minor) chills pass over me as I'd sweat in bursts and it'd instantly evaporate.

And back when I was cycling, I'd start summer rides about an hour before dawn, when it'd be at its coldest (sometimes 90F for the low). I learned to not rub my face because I'd have salt crystals from dried sweat, and they would abrade skin near the corners of my eyes.

Solar power is not free.

You can decide to not fix the panel that was being used to power a GPU.

Or you could sell the power back.

Or you could put it in a battery bank for when the sun is down.

Or, if none of those are the case and you just have excess power that's useless for anything but a GPU, then you prepaid for the GPU.

I love that we have solar panels, but we weren't gifted them. Using power has a cost.

I have no clue.

But I do think that this is a much better start than letting companies ignore the impact to software consumers or having open source devs be on the hook for volunteer work.

How so?

I'm thrilled that companies are liable for crap that ends up hurting other people. I don't think they should get an easy way out, and I also like that there's a carve out for people who aren't making money off of software (like OSS devs.)

That's apparently already changing in the EU, where software vulnerabilities mean the company is liable for damages. The only way out is to straight up not make any money (not just from direct sales) from the software.

Only referencing America, but professional liability for doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc isn't based on perfection. It's based on a reasonable effort.

So Google could, for example, switch from a tiny "this could be wrong!" byline to having the AI be less overconfident every freaking time regardless of whether it's spouting made up crap or actual facts.

The scale doesn't sound like a way out. If your company expects to get away with doing the wrong thing where smaller companies can't, then the solution isn't to continue getting away with it.

Are "your guys" a guerrilla force or something?

Because the military doesn't give soldiers rifles with guard rails. They give the soldiers intense, rigid training, and then try to enforce discipline and correct use socially.

If an LLM is going to be important in that way (this seems like a very contrived way,) then it's in the interest of the LLM's host to make sure it doesn't have guard rails that would get in the way _that_ way.

There are simpler ways to disrupt a flight.

The vast majority of people aren't aware of open versus closed protocols. If enough people they want to communicate with are using it to counterbalance how frustrating it is, they'll use it. It happened because businesses realized there's profit in lock in, and they threw resources at it.

Open protocols are still there and still used, but we're sad because the smaller userbase is frustrating. Just like how people still publish human written content to personal blogs, but they're proportionally non-existent.

That's the past.

Why does Google think it's a good idea to make that the case even if you don't block their crawlers?

A not thoroughly thought out response:

Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.

If you sell something to someone and they do computer crimes, you're going to have to prove that you couldn't've known that they're a computer crimer.

It's the same thing with selling general offensive security tools. You have to proactively make it clear that it's for testing and not criminal use. Otherwise, cops are going to assume you're complicit and make things shitty.