toyg

The legal permissiveness described is critical for most software because it enables business adoption. But for a kernel, which sits at the intersection of hardware and software, "free as in beer" is not enough, there is another critical factor: how easy it is to make it work with proprietary hardware. A free kernel that won't work with my custom chip and whose maintainers won't accept the necessary patches to fix this state of things, is just useless to my business.

If pypi started charging too, you'd have nowhere else to go.

Maintaining a popular registry is very hard work, hard enough that commercial entities would rather pay than having to do it themselves. It is literally SaaS. It could absolutely be monetized for the common good - although the gamification worry is real, and the governance would be really difficult to defend from sharks. But there might be clever ways to fix those issues.

The one thing you cannot fix is the cross-planet level playing field that registries provide. Today, a small African company can pull from a registry more or less in the same way as large US corporations. If you put a toll booth up, the toll will soon be too high for people in various parts of the world.

If there isn't an even more generous option is simply because building a mainstream OS is incredibly hard.

(2014 is different, in the sense that it was always going to happen if Ukraine ever managed to escape Russian orbit, and more or less everyone knew.)

You assume this deal was driven by military needs. And we all know what happens when one assumes...

I would be ready to bet that, considering how the current administration decapitated the military and installed yes-men at the top, this effort was not, in fact, driven by military needs.

Not that it really matters, with the current Supreme Court being what it is, but still...

What I'd really like is a simple utility that, given my system and a model, will tweak llamacpp to run decently (or tell me it can't be done).

(I also disagree that the two US parties share "a certain set of beliefs". This might have been true 15 years ago, but after the Trump takeover it's becoming increasingly difficult to see any common principles between any other party and what is effectively a satrapy.)

George W. Bush's administration already showed a streak for dictatorial rule that had nothing to do with classic liberalism; Trump took that to extremes. Classic liberalism developed in opposition to absolutist monarchies, promoting rule by parliament - Bush and Trump did the exact opposite. They are not classic liberals by any stretch.

I do agree that there are people for whom "the speaker circuit" is a job, and you can kinda smell it right from the presentation. But I think their numbers often depend on the type of event.

"WATCH THE FOOTBALL! WATCH IT! IT'S GONNA MOVE!!"

"This tree smells like cum."

Mitchell and Webb had so many legendary lines.

The longer this stupid war continues, the worse off everyone will get (well, except oil executives and shareholders, I guess).

In some cases, if the action is a bit too effective, you might even want to avoid it being pinned on you. Al Qaeda occasionally refused to claim ownership of things they very plainly did, and the Russians do it very often (e.g. when they shot down a Dutch passenger plane a few years ago).

Debatable, but it was still just a personal computer - sure, refined in exterior, but inside it was still just a workstation.

> AirPort was the first affordable, mass-market consumer Wi-Fi router.

Absolutely not. There were plenty already on the market. Was it the first one to have a name, rather than some crappy codename? Maybe. But mostly it was the polished version of an existing product.

> The iPod was the first MP3 player to incorporate the then brand new 1.8" Toshiba hard drives

It was still an MP3 player, there were already loads on the market - some even with similar capacity. It was refined in UI, yes.

> most people would see as much more than "refinements"

Most people with no knowledge of the market, maybe. Everyone in the space marvelled at the skills Apple displayed in taking existing products, refining them, and selling them like they were the first-ever products in those segments. That's when the "reality distortion field" was first described.

This is also why, multiple times, established players failed to understand these products would succeed - see the famous quips about the Zune and later the iPhone. Everyone knew those products existed already, they just did not grasp how Apple's knack for polishing (and marketing) could make such a big difference.