1,074 karma · joined October 9, 2021
I'd also like others to be able to do the same, so I can get their modified versions. Usually, someone else will solve my problem.
I don't mind $20, but I do mind needing to pay $20. There are lots of companies who make great patterns. I'm not sure what makes this any different.
Streaming is a tiny portion of what the web is used for.
Even so, entertainment should be... entertaining. I got free Paramount Plus with my phone service. It has DRM, adblocker-detectors, and all sorts of other nonsense to where it usually doesn't play videos. I went with Youtube over Star Trek. That's not an ideological choice; it's just not entertaining to fight with computers to play a video or to talk to support.
I suspect the effect would have been the opposite: a more rapid decline of the major content producers. This stuff needs to be easy and to work. Netflix did that, before everyone started to jump ship. Napster did it well too.
At some point, there's a spiral, where:
- Declining usability / quality leads to declining viewership
- Declining viewership leads to declining budget
- Declining budget lead to declining usability / quality and more pressure on monetization
... and so on. That's the disruption S-curve. In retrospect, I'm guessing that would have happened if large content producers forced apps.
I can't post anything online under my real name (her mission in life is to protect the universe from me). If she finds out I'm associating with anyone, she'll try to network in to warn them off. Everyone in my life has been told that I'm abusive in some way or another. There's random harassment litigation. It's boundless. She just emailed me today saying she sent over a hundred bucks to some random political organization in my home country, which is invariably part of some convoluted scheme. She's broken into my computers before. Etc. She's smart, and there's never quite enough evidence for a restraining order or similar legal channels (and she's a much better communicator than I am; everyone believes her).
She divorced me, but she won't leave me alone.
Dealing with her nonsense is like a full time job.
* Yandex released everything as full open
* Facebook released open with restrictions
* OpenAI is completely non-transparent, and to add insult to injury, is trying to sell my own code back to me.
It seems like OpenAI has outlived its founding purpose, and is now a get-rich-quick scheme.
What I really want is a way to run these on a normal GPU, not one with 200GB of RAM. I'm okay with sloooow execution.
Any advice on how to deal with that? It's been a decade and things are increasingly scary.
Table saws are where fingers come off, where work pieces get chucked at you, and where blades sometimes explode. It's probably the second-most dangerous tool in any shop.
A good circular saw and guide can do much the same thing as a cheap table saw, safely. Nice table saws can do some precision work a circular saw can't match (such as various kinds of notches), but not a $40 HF mini table saw. But 90% of what a table saw does, a circular saw properly used will do just as well, only with a bit more work setting up guides.
Other tools can handle those rare precision notches a circular saw won't do.
Things to be aware of:
- You can adjust height and angle on a circular saw. It's more finicky than a table saw, and you might need a protractor, but once you set it, it's good.
- You want a long guide you can clip to the piece.
- You want something like a Kreg which attaches to the table saw and guides it for e.g. cross-cuts of the same length.
If you do want a cheap saw on a table, I'd consider any other kind (e.g. a scroll saw).
AWS and Azure tend to be easy to work with, if you're dealing with anything with regulatory requirements. I have projects which can't go on github, hosted gitlab, or bitbucket. We host our own gitlab, but if we were doing this in 2022, we might use CodeCommit since AWS is qualified.
It makes sense too. Each vendor expands your security perimeter. This isn't just dumb bureaucracy (but that doesn't make it less annoying either).
"can" is a complex question. You can do anything you want, but actions have consequences. I can buy a gun and shoot someone. The consequence is that I might spend the rest of my life in prison. I can fart in a crowded elevator. The consequence is that people will look at me funny, and might dislike me.
Consequences should be proportional to the action.
If farting in an elevator lead to life in prison, or if shooting someone led to people looking at me funny, things wouldn't work very well.
> If not, then you do have to license your entire work under GPL if you incorporate GPL code and distribute it.
No. This is not a proportional consequence. If a random developer incorporates 10 lines of GPL code into Windows, Microsoft doesn't need to license Windows under the AGPL. That's not how our legal system is set up.
Microsoft has to remove the code and pay damages.
> If yes, what kind of environment do you think you're promoting? Is it positive for the development of the industry, and to society in general?
The logic you're suggesting -- is not only incorrect -- but would lead to an environment where people have an irrational fear of "viral" licenses. They're intentionally not viral. They don't infect code. Releasing your code is one option for remedy, but not one the GPL author can force. The FSF went over backwards to design the license like that.
Damages and removing code is an appropriate consequence. It's adequate to prevent most license violations, and still not overly draconian. I don't know of any business which has gone under due to an error around the GPL. That's as it should be. If the GPL were business-toxic, it wouldn't set up a successful ecosystem.
Think of it: If Nevada gave the death penalty for littering, would you liter less? Or simply never, ever, ever travel to Nevada?
In this case, I don't know of a reasonable remedy. I don't want to shut down copilot, but I do feel bad about having my code stolen from me. Perpetual license for everyone whose code was used to develop co-pilot? A nominal stock grant in Open AI? I dunno. When I've seen class action lawsuits, those are the sorts of places things usually land. Indeed, it's usually just short of being fair.
It seems like:
- Only standard resources ought to be cached (e.g. D3, common fonts, etc.). Perhaps these could be a free registration with the browser maker (e.g. I can always get them from cdn.mozilla.org or something), with some constraints (e.g. minimum number of users, some delay, or similar). As a user, I ought to have the option to cache *all* of these (which is helpful in bandwidth-constrained settings), either on my machine or on a proxy. If I'm at caltech, I can repoint my browser to grab these from localbox.caltech.edu.
- These shouldn't offer a unique fingerprint, since it only works once. If I needed to load comic-sans.ttf, I won't need to load it next time.
- I might be able to set a fingerprint (e.g. ask you to load 25 resources, and check if they're cached), but that's really for cross-site tracking (for which there are easier mechanisms), and it only works once. Once you've cached a resource, it's cached nearly forever. Your fingerprint changes each time, so it's not really traceable.
So the more I think about this:
(1) You raised a valid (and hard!) problem
(2) There seem to be reasonable solutions
The solution to that is to remove or replace those lines.
That's not worse than damages. That's just table stakes. That's expected no matter what happens. If I had a few lines of GPL code in a proprietary code base, I'd do that the day it was discovered.
To understand the frequency of injunctions, have a look at this test:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunction#Permanent_injunctio...
Injunctions generally only happens if other means (like damages) have been exhausted.
Let's do an experiment: You need to hit yourself repeatedly in the head with a mallet until you pass out.
Are you currently hitting yourself with a mallet until you pass out? No. Just because something is written doesn't mean you need to do it. If I incorporate your GPL code, distribute it, and don't license my code under the GPL, that means I'm distributing code without a license (or breaking a license). Unless I've crossed the line for criminal prosecution (which is far from anything we're discussing here), the worst-case consequence of that is .... damages.
If I've crossed the line into criminal prosecution, then the consequence is damages and jail time. I absolutely STILL do not need to license my code under the GPL.
(In most cases, it's a good idea to license code under the GPL, though, both due to branding/reputation damage, and since usually that leads to an out-of-court settlement; but those carry no legal force being that)
In most cases, damages are set to make both parties straight, not to be punitive. People cite how trillion dollar companies might have billion-dollar lawsuits, but that's pretty reasonable. $1B damages are 0.1% of a company's value in a battle between FAANGs, which have big-O trillion-dollar valuations. If you have a dispute between $1M businesses, the analogue is $1k damages. That's not atypical for a commercial dispute.
If liability sits somewhere, it's with copilot, github, and Microsoft.
A lot of that might come down to bedside manner. Right now, github isn't super-polite to people whose code it used. That's probably a mistake. They'd be a unsympathetic evil megacorp in a jury trial.
If you steal 10 lines of code from me, the damages will be the greater of:
- The benefit to you (10 minutes programmer time)
- The cost to me ($0)
- Statutory damages (probably $200)
In other words, it's very unlikely to be worth a lawsuit. The most likely outcome is:
- A legal letter is sent
- Infringing code is removed
- As good bedside manner, some nominal amount of money is transferred, mostly in some gesture designed to make the violated party feel good about themselves (e.g. a nice gift).
1) Mandating it for certain types of resources
2) Extending caching to cover the cross-site case.
Can you please explain the proposed timing-based attack?
url("https://fonts.googleapis.com/comic-sans", sha="abcd1234")
- If my browser has comic-sans cached, no request is made
- Caching works even if the same resource is sourced from multiple places (e.g. I can host comic-sans locally, but if they got it from a CDN, they don't need to get it again)
- If a malicious site replaces a resource, that's flagged
I think the trick would be to make this optional (but bandwidth/privacy-saving), and gradually to make this increasingly mandatory for different types of resources. AJAX calls obviously can't have SHA hashes, but JavaScript libraries can.
Google has standing for workplace sexual abuse. If I am a member of a religious / national / ethnic / etc. group with a track record of sexual abuse, I cannot be fired for that. That's discrimination.
There are many minefields here.
- I've seen many community members where I live boycott (unrelated) Russian businesses since Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
- I saw Muslims in the US persecuted after 9/11.
- I live in a Protestant/Atheist community which seems to hate Catholics.
- Etc.
Every large group has a bad component. There was sexual abuse in the Catholic church, 9/11 happened, the US did kill around a million Muslims in recent decades, and Russia shouldn't have invaded Ukraine. Laws are designed to protect individuals from generalization or stereotypes about from the group they're from, whether true or not.
Nepotism, for the most part, is legal in the US; it's just bad business beyond some scale. For a startup, the right strategy is often to hire people you know to be good personally. That's often friends and family. For a family business, the goals aren't purely economic, and again, it's fine practice. For large businesses, it tends to be bad business, but that doesn't make it illegal. Ditto for self-dealing.
There are restrictions for non-profits, public employees, etc. but those aren't general to private businesses like Google.
Google cannot take action against religions (even cults) it disagrees with (even for valid reasons for disagreeing with them), unless it gets over a very high bar of impacting business behavior.
The other path leads to far worse outcomes.
Morally, we cannot judge what happened here without hearing from both sides. But if action is to be taken, it should be taken by a prosecutor, not an employer.
Microsoft continued to suck, in virtually all respects, relative to competition, until around 2015.
I don't quite understand how Microsoft suddenly became competent, and released an awesome IDE, but that's a very new phenomenon.
Amazon, even as late as 2019, seemed ahead of Aliexpress on service and quality. Something happened with COVID which seems to have permanently broken Amazon. I understand a blip, but after 2 years, Amazon hasn't recovered.
My basic problem is that if I order medicines, I want to know they're not placebo pills. If I order vanilla extract, I want to make sure it's not produced in a chemical factory with random toxins. If I buy something brand-name, I want to make sure it has that level of quality. If I buy an SD card, I want to know it's not a defective product from a manufacturing run with a forged Sandisk label. I can't do that on Amazon anymore.
That leaves fast shipping as the prime selling point, but Amazon seems to miss delivery deadlines a lot since COVID, not to mention broad ranges of products which don't do fast shipping. Fast shipping I can count on is worth a lot. Fast shipping most of the time has negative value. Most of the time I care about fast shipping, it's because I have some deadline.
Google is a shitshow right now. I don't think they can do B2B. Chrome Extensions. GSuite Free. Google Workspace App security audits. I can list of dozens of other disruptions like that. No one trusts them. At the same time, cost structure is astronomical; employee count has grown exponentially, to match revenues, with little to show for it.
Amazon is a cesspool of knock-offs, scams, and rip-offs.
Facebook's reputation is in the toilet right now and internal incentives are completely misaligned.
Microsoft is, oddly enough, doing the best of the bunch. They recovered from their evil hay day in the nineties, their incompetent '00s, and seem to be doing okay.
I think the move to degooglify will spiral. I think an Aliexpress might take down Amazon within the next decade or two. And Facebook might be Myspaced.
I used to have Photoshop, PageMaker (then Quark), etc.
Price is $55/mo, which comes out to $660 per year. Apparently, I misrecalled the price.
But I can't afford $660/year either, for a hobby.
Best interest of the children are to minimize parental conflict. No matter the outcome, a legal process inflames conflict.
Arab countries have this right. There is a strong presumption that kids go with mother up to some age, and father beyond. The rules are clear and simple, barring exceptional circumstances. Some of the Scandinavian countries do to. Barring exceptional circumstances, there is a presumption of 50/50 custody and child support is capped.
There is nothing to fight over, and fighting dies down. The US high stakes system, where child support is astronomical and where everything is up for fighting over, is the biggest loser here.
Legal processes -- with lawyers -- inflame conflict and turn things adversarial.
We need clear, simple, consistent rules. We also need social workers instead of lawyers.
Photoshop has not withstood the test of time for me. I did a lot of Photoshop a few decades ago. I can't afford > $1000 per year for a hobby. My old Photoshop files are dead, for all intents and purposes.
I do occasionally use decades-old, unmaintained open-source tools to open old files.
> Audacity's 3.0 update removed a feature I relied on. I wasn't forced to update to it, sure, but proprietary software doesn't force updates either.
Yes, it does. Cloud-based, you have no choice. Installed, increasingly, you have no choice either, since activation servers get taken down.
> Being able to fix your own bugs is a great part of open source! But not something most professional software developers really expect to do for their IDE.
It's a check-and-balance. I fix issues maybe in 0.0001% of the tools I use, but when I do, it's really important. With proprietary, you can work 70 hours per week for five years, and invest your blood and soul into a project, and be left hanging at the end, because you're reliant on someone else.
With open-source, you bite the bullet, fix it yourself, and keep chugging along.
> you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time in or money in will be the leading tool in five years.
My experience is that "leading tool" is way oversold. The difference between JQuery a decade ago and React today is important, but even a huge difference like that won't make-or-break a business or a project. Technology is easy. If I needed to write my stuff in FORTRAN, I'd be less productive, but in the end, I'd learn FORTRAN and get the job done.
It's not a reason I'd pick proprietary over open-source.
What is important is all the other stuff. If you've bought something from Oracle or Google -- who are famous for this -- and they discontinue your product or ramp up licensing costings 100x once you've built your infrastructure around them, that CAN and WILL break a business (or a personal project).
Startups have a short half-life. Big businesses have a longer one ("No one got fired for buying IBM"). Open-source is eternal.
Legacy is important. If you don't believe me, have a look at all the FORTRAN and COBOL code still running on old mainframes. If you don't take long-term into account, you're unlikely to do anything lasting.
Most people don't think of it in terms of freedom, but freedom it is. With proprietary software:
- You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued. Even your paid-for existing version stops working when the activation servers go down.
- You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks something you rely on
- That's not to mention issues like being able to fix bugs yourself, extend it, or understand it. I don't do this often directly, but something like being able to understand a file format my data is in or similar is common
I don't mind paying for things, but things need to be a lot better on other axes before this one becomes the most important.
My experience is that:
- Things I did decades ago are sometimes useful. Nearly 100% of the time, if this was in a proprietary system, it's gone or unusable. My LaTeX files still work.
- Companies switch between growth mode and cash cow mode. When this happens, the cost to me is almost always higher than the initial benefit over free.
- Which is better on other axes goes back-and-forth. An investment I make into a tool now doesn't mean it will be the leading tool in five years.
- Those sorts of long-term considerations are almost always more important than short-term technical stuff.