3,045 karma · joined April 8, 2010
The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source. There isn’t anything really equivalent in China. The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take.
The notion of copyright -while not inexistent- is not really a basic cultural notion. Even more so, not caring about ownership, and not enforcing the legalities of it, is partly what allowed innovation at such rapid pace in China.
After all, the Chinese government mandated for decades that all foreign companies setting up shop in China had to have a 51% majority local partner, and technology transfer was mandatory. Basically a government-mandated mandatory transfer of knowledge, to be freely used by the local recipients of it.
So the intricacies of Open Source licenses are a bit lost. Many understand the benefit of it, but not the expectations put on them for this benefit.
In the case of Bambulabs, I suspect that, in their mind, they just want to control their platform. They show their misunderstanding of Open Source rights and expectations and I’m pretty sure they are baffled by the reaction.
It not necessarily malevolent or malicious, though it looks that way from a Western perspective, but more of a cultural impedance mismatch.
They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses.
This reminds me of the fights Naomi Wu used to have a few years ago, going to other 3D printer manufacturers in ShenZhen who were using GPL software but would not release their modifications for their equipment.
She had a hard time making them understand and see the duties and benefits that came with using these types of licenses.
Where are the pictures pulled from?
Enforcement is another things but photographers and artists have had ways to push back against illicit use of their work, notably by larger corporations. Licensing is an industry based on this protection alone.
The difference is that now, large corporations with plenty of money are able to just swallow other people’s work and pretend it’s “fair use” and derivative enough that they wash their hand of the fact that their models, that they charge lots of money for, would not be able to output anything they were not trained on. At least you could argue that a large image model would have a hard time creating a picture of a cat if it hadn’t been fed pictures of cats that belonged to other people than the company producing the model.
I don’t know if training on the world’s data without compensation is fair or not. There are valid arguments both ways, but as an individual, it should still be your choice whether you want to allow your work to be used in ways you do not agree with.
I think people at large expect at least recognition, and if possible, compensation, for their creations.
When a consumption system is built around providing neither, I don’t think we should be surprised that people feel slighted.
Assuming China takes TSMC in one piece (unlikely without internal sabotage in the best case scenario), it would still probably take years before it produces another high end GPU or CPU.
We would probably be stuck with the existing inventory of equipment for a long time…
I can’t help but be cynical and think that Google profited so much from the scam that they just turned a blind eye to the manipulations.
I appreciate that you provided multiple OS versions rather than just go for Mac only like some.
This is also a major base of French cuisine and called Mirepoix.
Reviewing drawings for incompleteness, contradictory informations, deviations from standards, etc and making recommendations would be very valuable.
It doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful.
For instance, the Leica M series have specific monochrome versions with huge resolutions and better monochrome rendering.
You can also modify some cameras and remove the filter, but the results usually need processing. A side effect is that the now exposed sensor is more sensitive to both ends of the spectrum.
Not an Apple fanboy, but I was under the impression that having access to up to 512GB usable GPU memory was the main feature in favour of the mac.
And now with Exo, you can even break the 512GB barrier.
It doesn’t have the versatility of KiCAD but is lighter and easier for light use or occasional design of moderate complexity.
I think it’s pretty good for non dev users. The distro doesn’t provide any earth shattering new innovations but they spend efforts to polish the interface and make it easy to use.
Its pretty good for people who just want a working system and don’t care about whether it’s linux or something else.
All downstream browsers are affected by Google’s bottom line. Putting lipstick and a few nice features on top of an engine that you don’t control doesn’t make your browser a true alternative from Google’s.
Their CEO Andrew Seddon was recently on the AmpHour podcast:
https://theamphour.com/699-circuithub-12-years-later-with-an...
Monetary value, certainly, but that’s considering money as the only desirable value to measure against.
From that angle, it indeed doesn’t seem to make sense.
I think, but might be completely wrong, that viewing these actions from their usual meaning is more helpful: you own a toy, it’s yours to do as tou please. You borrow a toy, it’s not yours, you can’t do whatever you want with it, so you can’t hold on to it if the owner doesn’t allow it, and you can’t modify it for the same reasons.
If virtually no one earns $7.25/hr and employers wouldn't dream of offering it, then why not just raise the federal minimum to $12?
If it’s truly irrelevant, then it won’t affect anyone -workers won’t be hurt, and businesses won’t be forced to pay more than they already do. Seems like a win-win, right?
My xiaomi TV is making thousands of request per day to their domains. I block them all using adguard/adblock, but imagine the amount of information they can get from a connected TV.
Samsung and LG and many others do this. Look for Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) in Samsung's privacy
This interesting study from last year: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
The killer feature for me is the app ecosystem. I have a very old 8-bay Synology NAS and have it setup in just a few clicks to backup my dropbox, my MS365 accounts, my Google business accounts, do redundant backup to external drive, backup important folders to cloud, and it was also doing automated torrent downloads of TV series.
These apps, and more (like family photos, video server, etc), make the NAS a true hub for everything data-related, not just for storing local files.
I can understand Synology going this way, it puts more money in their pocket, and as a customer in professional environment, I'm ok to pay a premium for their approved drives if it gives me an additional level of warranty and (perceived) safety.
But enforcing this accross models used by home or soho users is dumb and will affect the good will of so many like me, who both used to buy Synology for home and were also recommending/purchasing the brand at work.
This is a tech product, don't destroy your tech fanbase.
I would rather Synology kept a list of drives to avoid based on user experience, and offer their Synology-specific drives with a generous warranty for pro environments. Hel, I would be ok with sharing stats about drive performance so they could build a useful database for all.
They way they reduce the performance of their system to penalise non-synology rebranded drives is bascially a slap in the face of their customers. Make it a setting and let the user choose to use the NAS their bought to its full capabilities.
Wouldn't be surprised if some will tout a "better and safer experience" if you use their cloud services...
DJI happens to be a Chinese company but Samsung isn't, and they have been tracking what people watch on their TV (even if you're using HDMI and your own input) for years.
Big European, Asian and American brands are doing the same, washing machines requiring an account to access basic capabilities, cars phoning home, computers phoning home, phones phoning home, they all want it, they all do it.
Blaming China for this is deflecting the true culprit: the rampant notion that everything that could be sold has to be sold. Privacy doesn't matter, just put a red ribbon over it and force user to create an account and share their data in exchange for the priviledge of accessing what they thought they bought.
China didn't invent that, they sure love it, but they are not responsible for it alone.