TechNom (nobody)

Google has discovered that FOSS software under their full control is better than pure proprietary software for monopoly abuse and rent seeking. With FOSS software, they enjoy the automatic popularity that they otherwise would have had to market very hard for. At the same time, none of Google’s free software is truly free. Google devs regularly neglect and reject overwhelming user requirements (jpegxl in chrome is probably the best example of this) and choose designs that clearly favor the company monetarily. It isn’t even practical for normal people to fork their projects.

Google often uses their ‘FOSS’ projects to twist open standards or the market to their advantage. Android and Chrome are very significant players in this regard. Using Chrome, Google even managed to make the W3C standard too complicated for others to make alternative browsers easily. Google has similar ambitions in the multimedia market. They want to replace the monopolistic media formats with quasi-monopolistic formats like webp and av1 instead of truly open ones like jpegxl.

It’s still possible on almost any distro with pyenv or asdf-vm.

Nice idea!

In addition, we could have an allowlist for honest bots (like search crawlers).

I wish there was something more interesting to do there.

You are not expected to remember a v6 address - or even v4 for that matter. They are designed for machines. DNS is designed for humans.

What do you do on the yggdrasil network?

We need three things:

1. A way to poison the data that will throw off the training without causing perceptible difference to humans. As I remember it, many image AIs were sensitive to a peculiar noise that was imperceptible to humans.
2. A blacklist of AI data stealers, so that their IPs/domains can be blocked in bulk.
3. Eventually, the above technique will become useless as AI data stealers will start using dynamic IPs and botnets to bypass the blacklists. We’ll need to throttle or block data to visitors based on pattern recognition. For example, if the visitor requests linked pages in rapid succession. Or if the request interval is uniform or pseudo random, instead of genuinely random.
4. If the pattern recognition above is triggered, we could even feed the bots with data from AI models, instead of blocking or throttling. Let the AI eat its own s**t.

Python decided to use a single convention (semantic whitespace) instead of two separate ones for machine decodeable scoping and manual/visual scoping. That’s part of Python’s design principle. The program should behave exactly like what people expect it to (without strenuous reasoning exercises).

But some people treat it as the original sin. Not surprised though. I’ve seen developers and engineers nurture weird irrational hatred towards all sorts of conventions. It’s like a phobia.

Similar views about yaml. It may not be the most elegant - it had to be the superset of JSON, after all. But Yaml is a semi-configuration language while JSON is a pure serialization language. Try writing a kubernetes manifest or a compose file in pure JSON without whitespace alignment or comments (which pure JSON doesn’t support anyway). Let’s see how pleasant you find it.

You can uninstall the sudo application and add sudo as an alias for run0 in your shell initialization script. That’s better than them renaming run0 to sudo, because that will prevent people from running the real sudo if they want it.

People are quick to judge without considering the circumstances. Wasn’t the customer’s attitude equally wrong? Aren’t you implying that the service person should have let her bully him?

I’m yet to hear anyone saying that chatGPT can navigate the complex series of design decisions needed to create a cohesive app (unless of course, it was trained on something exactly the same). Many people report spending an inordinate amount of time rectifying the mistakes these LLMs make. It sounds like a glorified autofill (I haven’t used them yet). I shudder to think about the future of the software ecosystem if an entire generation is trained to rely entirely on them to create code.

The newer FOSS projects have a preference for permissive licenses like MIT. That’s due to a narrative going around that copyleft licenses like GPL are somehow ‘less free’. Apparently, GPL etc are not free enough that companies avoid such projects. And if you want your project to be adopted, you have to avoid these licenses. You can easily guess who is behind such narratives and why.