college_physics

Can't comment specifically on this or that "dying company", but it is a bit disappointing that after, how many, four decades of open source? and the obvious utility of that paradigm, it still seems a major challenge to build sustainable open source ecosystems. This means we can't really move on and imagine grander things that might build on top of each other.

Its not clear if that is due to:

i) competition from proprietary business models

ii) more specifically the excessive concentration of said proprietary business models ("big tech")

iii) confusion from conflicting objectives and monetisation incentives (the various types of licenses etc)

iv) ill-adapted funding models (venture capital)

v) intrinsic to the concept and there is no solution

vi) just not having matured yet enough

What I am driving at is that building more complex structures requires some solid foundations and those typically require building blocks following some proven blueprint. Somehow much around open source is still precarious and made up. Ideally you'd want to walk into the chamber of commerce (or maybe the chamber of open source entities), pick a name, a legal entity type, a sector and get going. You focus on your solutions, not on how to survive in a world that doesn't quite know what to make of you.

Now, corporate structures and capital markets etc took hundreds of years to settle (and are still flawed in many ways) but we do live in accelerated times so maybe its just a matter of getting our act together?

> thousands of other people who dedicate their lives to the topic

to make it plain to you, there were thousands of slave traders who dedicated their lives to the topic, including e.g. how to optimally fill-up the ship with bodies. what does this prove?

the idea that meticulous pursuit of a domain somehow gives it its experts the moral high ground or ensures that they will keep it safe for society is so bizarre and alarming it only reinforces the notion that a bunch of people have become completely unhinged

AI practitioners have already proved themselves untrustworthy by putting themselves in the service of entities that invaded privacy and engaged in large scale algorithmic manipulation of e.g. voting. This is not an assumption. Its a dire fact.

More broadly, corporate structures have repeatedly proved themselves untrustworthy, both in the small, with scandals and fraud and at-large, with regulatory capture that ensured their negative impacts on society could go unhindered for decades

Honestly the current content is not doing the platform any favors. Who wants another social media option that ranges from the inane to the toxic?

Reddit like forums, open source self-hosting, federation, these are all good points but people need to see how they make a difference in practice.

Mastodon somehow managed to be seen as a less toxic version of twitter, though it might be mostly peoples wish than anything intrinsic to the platform.

But all new entrants in the fediverse party will have to think how to convince people that social media are actually worth the hassle

I don't think Zuck particularly cares about the next big thing. As the debacle with Apple shows, there are existential risks here and now, not in some sort of FOMO

Despite appearances, if the metaverse gambit in the current episode made any sense it was mostly as a defensive move: To obtain control over a device so that you can datamine at will and perpetuate your business model irrespective of what other major actors might come up with.

Think about it. If stars (you have little control over) align, device owners can flip a privacy switch here, introduce a policy there and annihilate your business.

To paraphrase Ballmer: Devices, devices, devices

its quite depressing but it applies to much of corporate structure and incentives.

how much more performance can you squeeze from an individual that:

i) is not intrinsic to who they are (hence visible when you hire them - if its not the right profile just don't hire them)

ii) is not tied to your own bloated structure, toxic culture and messed up processes and hence none of their fault

is that 10%, 20% extra performance? is that sufficient to satisfy the "markets"? when its your vision and business model is what is really the problem.

He more than did his job. But who is the Doug Engelbart of today?

Where are the people that can articulate an actually desirable digital future and rally everybody (including those exclusively focused on pecuniary matters) around a human-centric vision?

I had not doubt it will be downvoted. Techbros out in force. If its good for my pocket, suck it up, its good for you. But we are having enough of it.

SVB didn't have a chief risk officer. Why have somebody bang theoretically about risks when the business is best placed to assess the real risk /sarcasm

> you can’t stop progress

what is your definition of "progress"

> Microsoft is very aware

thanks, that is comforting

> the cat is out of the bag even if you don't like it

thanks for bullying us around

> the legitimately talented AI thinkers

who exactly authorised you to project legitimacy in a space that has not seen any regulation?

Would be interesting to every once in a while test "Using Linux without a network connection" (as in: install everything from usb/media and check all your workflows)

Well said. While its good to surface the challenges diverse people face and hopefully think about patterns that will solve them in efficient, systemic ways, the availability of Signal at the moment of time is of vital importance.

Same, e.g. with Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. It something working, that normal people can migrate to and break the stanglehold of the true oppressive platforms. No harm to keep expectations high for those "alternatives", but lets keep a sense of proportion.

people will once again try to defend the indefensible. antediluvian fractional reserve banking as it currently stands is not fit-for-purpose and the price paid by society is high and will keep growin.

The other side of lazy private profits from "riding the yield curve" or which-ever else inane business model is recurrent crises and social costs, sometimes overt, sometimes obscure.

Arbitrary and ad-hoc explicit or implicit insurance schemes and put options, obfuscation and complexity, moral hazards and perverse incentives under every carpet.

A fair and democratic society, especially in the hyperconnected digital age must very seriously consider the wiring of the monetary/credit system. The rule should be simplicity, transparency and working hard for the money: return strictly coupled to risk.

Core to a better design will almost certaintly have to be the concept of risk free deposits with the central bank that are not subject to runs. The rest needs to be worked out.

Its possible. Its called sovereign money. You basically have an account with the central bank just like private banks do (but they dont want anybody else to have)

These accounts pay strictly zero but can never default.

Anybody who wants to get a return can deposit with a private bank but then they need to monitor that bank because if it mismanages risk they are on the hook.

The thing to understand is that private banks are experts at risk free profiteering and passing the buck, not at managing risks which is really hard work

The monetary system is an absurd and unfair anachronism and it lurches from disaster to disaster.

> There’s nothing I should have to do to maintain my claim on my bank account.

Thats a wrong statement. You are thinking of money as a public good and thats how it should be, but thats not what it is now. Your claim is against a private enterprize.

You could have access to risk free sovereign money with the central bank and its entirely possible. But private banks are livid against it because it would deprive them of precisely the kind of game that blew up in their face with rising interest rates and discounted government securities.

Ultimately this is not about idiot VC depositors and whether they deserve a haircut or not. Its about idiot bank managers and whether they deserve extracting rents from the entire economy doing basically nothing.

They'll be recycled soon enough like the Lehmann guy. There is a talent shortage in the industry.

If I interpret the action correctly the Fed just granted all banks a giant put option to place any government securities at par for cash whenever interest rates move against them

The only decent thing would be to remove the bank's freedom to (mis)manage interest risk altogether, have sovereign money deposits with the central bank and force private banks actually work for their profits by properly managing risks

Dude, a depositor provides funds. Might get them back with interest, or not.

Thats not the definition of a customer, thats the definition of an investor.

The fact that it is supposed to be a low risk low return investment does not change that fundamental relation.

The business model that Shoshana Zuboff termed surveillance capitalism did not just ruin the internet but undermined the future of the entire tech industry.

Tech is far, far more than social or search. Most of it requires significant levels of trust between tech provider and tech consumer. It also requires that the tech consumer pays and therefore has some influence over the service, in a virtuous circle of demand and supply.

Despite absurd claims that people just want "free stuff", people pay through their noses for 1) hardware, 2) software and 3) bandwidth - the entire stack that makes the internet (and therefore search and social) possible.

The idea that they don't want to pay specifically for these "last mile" trinkets of search or social (that in reality have no option but to pay with private data) does not stand scrutiny.

The adtech gambit was so lucrative and it managed to buy so many consciences that people have normalized it. Yet it is a disastrous model that does not scale to deliver the promise that we all feel is within reach.

The simple fact is that for tech to flourish somebody must pull the plug on surveillance capitalism. The sooner the better.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff

"Visible to the naked eye" is increasingly a fuzzy statement ranging from magnitude 4.0 to 6.0+[0]: Light pollution means that in the environments where most of humanity lives we can see fewer and fewer stars. Nowadays if you see a "star" and it is not visibly moving or blinking, its probably a planet (and those come with very different "demographics" :-)

[0] https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/astronomy-qu...

Even if its not the "precise" moment, in the scheme of things does perfect timing really matter? Fact is, this shows beautifully that significant new algorithmic capability is becoming commoditised - fast. And thats a good thing.

thanks for the pointer, though from a quickscan this is not really a music theory tool but more like supercollider in rust?

Its a very cool project but as I have seen some other cool efforts as well, I feel that the domain of "open source computer-assisted music theory tools" is quite fragmented and people must reinvent wheels.

I wonder if we could imagine some sort of community project that abstracts certain music related objects (scales, chords) and representations and allows e.g. CLI or web-based rendering using possibly different stacks, interfacing with musicxml, lilypond etc.

Something like the "Grammar of Graphics" but for Music Theory

how did it come to pass that the more concentrated a sector the better?

the exact opposite is true. excessive concentration means an oligopolistic or oligopsonistic sector that is holding everybody hostage: clients, employees and the political / regulatory system at large

adulation of "bigness", if not with ulterior motives, is naive

> Touting “SVB’s deep understanding of the markets it serves, our *strong* risk management practices”

(Emphasis mine). According to other news [0] they did not have a formally appointed chief risk officer for eight months. While having a puppet CRO is obviously not a sufficient condition to ensure "strong risk management", having a well staffed and - as much as possible - independent risk management department is widely considered best practice [1]. In this instance such an internal body would get on high alert and run scenario upon scenario and stress test as soon as the inflation/interest rate environment changed.

[0] https://fortune.com/2023/03/10/silicon-valley-bank-chief-ris...

[1] https://www.bis.org/basel_framework/chapter/SRP/30.htm

It is not clear if this was a breach of US banking regulation though. Independent risk management functions within banks become a big thing after the 2008 financial crisis but it was up to countries how to implemented Basel recommendations.

For some context, it seems that this is the first bank failure since some time (Oct 2020) [0]

[0] https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/fai...

municipalities might have a counter-incentive to encourage bikes over cars. parking fees / taxes must be a sizeable chunk of income.

they might want some sort of franchise. push some costs and risks down the food chain for a share of the ad pie

I am not particularly interested about Meta's views on decentralized social networks.

But I would be interested to hear what Apple engineers might think about this. After all at some point there was a thing called AppleTalk [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk