I'm honestly surprised this issue in general didn't cause nearly every company to immediately ban all AI.
Why do these companies put so much effort into fighting right to repair to avoid IP leaks any halfway serious company could reverse engineer in a week, but on the other hand encourage their employees to vibe all company secrets into the cloud?
It's a bit trite, but the answers are: 1) money 2) money
Can't repair your own stuff and either need to use authorized repair shop or buy new? The company gets more money.
Force your developers to forgo quality in efforts to produce more cruft in less time? The company gets more money.
Of course, only considering short-term, long-term they'll lose money, but at that point all the executives and managers already got their bonuses and probably moved on to doing the same in some other company.
> Why do these companies put so much effort into fighting right to repair to avoid IP leak
Only if you believe they are truthful about the reason for fighting right to repair. I think the reason for fighting right to repair is to reduce the time before a replacement purchase is required.
> but on the other hand encourage their employees to vibe all company secrets into the cloud?
Lots of companies do ban or restrict usage of LLMs etc.
Uhh a lot of companies did and are strict on what AI tools are allowed.
The main thing I had to wait on for a long time was support for preventing 3rd party code from being plagiarized since our code base was intermingled with partnered companies.
I'd be very interested in more info, but am going to doubt this for now. Usually just the intra-day deformations of the terrain between the towers through hydrological activity should far exceed what GNSS can achieve.
It is just VERY VERY hard to beat the predictability of orbits.
As another EU citizen I'm strongly against it. There is a reason one of the 5Ds of the Potsdam Conference was "Decentralization".
This is just way too close to the nationalist-wing ideology of the 2nd International. Combine that with the overall strong shift left during the last 30 to 40 years and the staggering unawareness of the ideologies of the Internationals (beyond buzzwords) and you've put yourself on a path for repeated history.
Why shouldn't AI be able to sufficiently model all of this in the not far future? Why shouldn't have it have sufficient access to new data and sensors to be able to collect information on its own, or at least the system that feeds it?
Not from a moral perspective of course, but the technical possibility. And the overton window has shifted already so far, the moral aspect might align soon, too.
IMO there is an entirely different problem, that's not going to go away just about ever, but could be solved right now easily. And whatever AI company does so first instantly wipes out all competition:
Accept full responsibility and liability for any damages caused by their model making wrong decisions and either not meeting a minimum quality standard or the agreed upon quality.
> Accept full responsibility and liability for any damages caused by their model making wrong decisions and either not meeting a minimum quality standard or the agreed upon quality.
That's not sufficient, at least from the likes of OpenAI, because, realistically, that's a liability that would go away in bankruptcy. Companies aren't going to want to depend on it. People _might_ take, say, _Microsoft_ up on that, but Microsoft wouldn't offer it.
> Why shouldn't AI be able to sufficiently model all of this
I call it the banana bread problem.
To curate a list of the best cafés in your city, someone must eventually go out and try a few of them. A human being with taste honed by years of sensory experiences will have to order a coffee, sit down, appreciate the vibe, and taste the banana bread.
At some point, you need someone to go out in the world and feel things. A machine that cannot feel will never be a good curator of human experiences.
I hear you, but counterpoint: if you had an AI that monitored social media for mentions, used vision and audio capture in cafes to see what people ordered and how they reacted to it, had access to customer purchase data to see if people kept coming back to particular cafes and what they ordered over and over again...
Granted, there's lots that's dystopian about that picture, I'm not advocating for it, but it does start to feel like the main value of the "curator" is actually just data capture. Then they put their own subjective take on that data, but I'm not totally convinced that's better than something that could tell me a data-driven story of: "Here are the top three banana breads in the city that customers keep coming back to have a taste orgasm for".
I don't know though, it's a brave new world and I'm skeptical of anyone who thinks they know how all this will play out.
I don't even think it'd be this direct except maybe in the begining.
You already can monitor things like heart rate via motion amplification and track how and when they go where. And probably many other minor factors I can't think about atm.
Gather up enough of those and you should be able to establish a very strong sidechannel into when a restaurant might have new items, its food quality and how it changes over time.
Like how long does a person of age range a, who entered on his own with heart rate x and left with heart rate y, stay if he liked the food vs him not liking the food. Or something like that...
In the end a few public cameras or other type of sensor might be all that's needed. Even if we were to fix our portable wiretaps, I dont think a global surveillance society is avoidable.
We need to built a society that can allow for a modern equivalent of privacy and rule of law within that reality. We might not be able to get away with going 5mph over the limit or accidentally keeping a pen anymore, but neither do we want speeding in our neighborhoods or all our pens gone. So what's the solution here? Random sampling who gets punished? Law breaking quotas? Increasing fines based on severity of the crime and assets and income? Figuring out how to measure intent? Replacing all punishments for minor crimes with corporal ones? idk
I'm in no way an expert, but IMO there is a major misconception in the free-ish software community that profit should be at most secondary to offering a fair and as good as sustainably possible product.
I strongly disagree with this. IMO developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible within the rules they think that should be followed (and those that are mandatory ofc).
Profit is not only by far the strongest motivating factor for others to adopt your set of rules, but also a guarantee to your community that the product will still be around in a few years and not turn into a rug pull because its developer is burned out after working 80 hour weeks for months or even years for less than minimum wage. It is also something you can trade for your values, e.g. offering great working conditions to your employees or funding projects or lobbying for laws you think will benefit society.
Are you confusing revenue and profit? Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and Lichess are examples of successful non-profit sites. They have costs, they have revenues, but they don't exist to generate profit.
>but also a guarantee to your community that the product will still be around in a few years and not turn into a rug pull
There are no guarantees. Think of all the perfectly good websites that got shut down not because they weren't financially sustainable, but because they didn't generate enough profit for their owners. Google's graveyard is a good place to start.
Or the sites that were profitable, so they then they got bought out, and shut down, because what the owners really wanted was money more than anything.
Clearly the site in question here is not currently sustainable. But attempting to build a sustainable non-profit website is not impossible.
> developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible
Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.
Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.
Why don't YOU commercialize your fork of their service, and use the proceeds to hire developers to maintain the code? That would be infinitely more useful than armchair criticism of others.
Because donations are a system that works very much in their favor and not at all in favor of other types of projects. Look at the OpenSSL Software Foundation having received less than $2k in yearly donations during the leadup to heartbleed.
> Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.
I very much want to disagree with you, but I do not know how. Achieving some commercial success if you do look for it where others with your skill set are successful is not too difficult (see the trades), but the whole point of such projects is the exact opposite: Doing things differently and pushing accepted boundaries to where you think they should be.
On the other hand I think that this is acceptable. As I wrote in another comment, the obligations in these projects mostly arise from what the developers wants to commit themselves to (or, sadly, do so mistakenly). It is very reasonable to e.g. not value the long term success of your project highly.
You might want to just share an idea, maybe someone else will carry on your project or maybe if in 5 years someone shows a picture of you proudly presenting your project, you're like "AI has gotten really impressive, if I didn't know better, I don't think I could tell that this is a fake". And if you're anything like me, strong commitments to internet strangers might be life-threatening. 2 out of 3 times a promise I made got upvoted, I got hit by a car within less than 48 hours of making it and not once otherwise. An up-arrow got just one pointy end, a GitHub star 5. I'm not taking chances.
They pay fair wages because they have enough scale where pestering for donations once a year is enough to justify their costs and then some. And even then, this forum is very famous for shitting on such a large scale not-for-profits, with many justifying their decision not to donate by seeing how much money the non-profit already has in their pockets. The only reason we even know how much money the non-profit has in its pockets is because non-profits are legally obliged to publicly disclose that, while for-profits are not (until they go public of course).
My point being that it's a mountain to climb, and just because those at the top have already climbed it doesn't translate into everyone being able to climb it. It takes a whole lot of effort and probably some public grants, but getting those public grants is a whole different skill set than actually building the thing. And you can only get a public grant after you've already created something useful, so your idea of a non-profit quickly turns into an inescable hole in your pocket that you're desperately trying to fill for at least a year or two.
This is why while our lists might vary, every single one of us can only name like 5, maybe 10 non-profits that have "made it" (however we define that success).
All that said, go set up a reocurring $2/month donation to your favourite non-profit right now. Whether you choose Wikimedia or something else, I'm sure it's well worth 10% of a monthly subscription you're already paying for an LLM or whatever. Unlike your for-profit subscriptions, if the money becomes tight you can always cancel these without losing anything.
This is a really interesting view, but I'm not sure I agree. So many amazing projects are truly free without the goal of profit yet their maintainers still do amazing work. I feel like part of the reason this works is because often the load is split between several maintainers (of which I hope to onboard soon, and have one or two offers already from people to contribute) and also the fact it's genuinely something enjoyable to work on (of course, to the extent it's not too stressful and overworked).
There's a difference between awesome projects that don't have a recurring cost (i.e. open source software that users run themselves) and a search engine. You cannot physically run a search engine without real-world costs today. Those funds need to come from somewhere. And offering a good product at scale costs a lot of money.
Just brainstorming here, but would a distributed search index be possible / usable with current network speeds and latency? I'm not sure how to set up the data structure to not require many high latency jumps, but maybe someone has solved this problem.
It's possible, see the YaCy project. It suffer from probably a couple of orders of magnitude too few resources (in the funding/development sense) to really be competitive though.
That is very true, and it's not cheap to maintain. I do however really hope that donations can cover it enough, and I have plans about other ways to monetise it while remaining not-for-profit without ads or anything that affects the user.
Examples? If you are going to say something like linux, almost every developer gets paid to contribute to linux(I remember 95% commits have company attribution). Same with postgres etc.
Honestly I agree. This is part of what I love about the idea of Kagi. I do believe a not-for-profit alternative is needed, however if there's any for-profit model a search engine should have, it should be paid for by the user rather than the advertiser imo.
It depends what you mean by "profit". If you mean "the developers/maintainers can pay the bills of a modest lifestyle", then yes, I think that's important. But often "profit" is used to refer to the idea of unlimited upside, that there are stocks, that the project will be sold, that some kind of sizable windfall is expected, etc. And that I think is to be avoided.
There’s part of this that I agree to - I tend to disagree with most anti-capitalist (or anti-profit) sentiment. However, I disagree that builders “owe” anyone anything, and I strongly disagree with goal of as much profit “as possible”.
I miss the days when someone would make a service where the user would benefit as much as possible and the creator got compensated fairly. I feel like that system worked for hundreds of years. It’s only in the last couple decades that we’ve made this obligation for maximal profits - something that I personally hold responsible for all the mass enshittification going on these days.
I disagree, but I think "owe" carries too much of a negative connotation. Through your project you enter both a relationship with yourself, having taken on a commitment to achieve what got you interested in starting your project in the first place, and the community (who also could be nobody but yourself) you want to benefit from your project, who want to rely on your project to some degree.
These relationships lead to obligations, few, if any, of them being legal or moral ones. Instead they are obligations put onto you by your own interests. You do not observe them because e.g. your project's community demands them (who, I'd like to point out again at this specific point, may still be nobody but yourself!), but because they are important to you. What is important to you can and will change, of course.
> I strongly disagree with goal of as much profit “as possible”.
TBH, I consider the "within the rules they think should be followed" part essential to the statement.
> obligation for maximal profits - something that I personally hold responsible for all the mass enshittification going on these days.
I'm not sure, but I don't think that's the case, sad enough, IMO the reason is to be found a bit to the opposite:
As a group, the people we're overall aligned with in our values (on this issue), having found fulfilling success in goals way less influential than money.
IMO too many people come to the conclusion that Qualcomm will in some way screw up the Arduino takeover at the expense of the community.
And I think these people are right, but that is not necessary a bad thing.
There is just about no reason a giant like Qualcomm would take over something like Arduino for any other purpose but to acquire resources (talent, customers, community, processes, documentation, ...) they can use to teach themselves how to become more open, to what degree they even want to and to have a trusted platform they can take their initial steps in and will get feedback from.
And the reality is, that someone with little experience will screw up badly, several times. I mean, look at the current state of the major silicon IP holders, the only reason they dont ship brain-chips with their NDAs that explode the moment you mention the wrong part number infornt of a competitor is because the NDAs for the documentation on how to install the brain-chips would get them stuck in recursion hell.
And just as little experience Qualcomm has at making open source a successful business strategy, Arduino has just as little experience at being a corporate Godzilla trying to carefully pet the egg they just adopted. And let's be real: Open source projects OWE it to their community to be financially successful, because it's that financial success that guarantees that the project CAN STAY open and wont force its core maintainers into choosing between their commitment to their community and a fulfilling lifestyle, although for someone like Qualcomm this success can probably be something else but financial in nature (acquiring talent, their products becoming a preferred choice, schools teaching students using Qualcomm products, whatever).
Both Arduino and Qualcomm will end up outside of their domain and it'd be surprising if this would not result in major mistakes being made.
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Qualcomm has to evaluate whether their new talent at Arduino is doing a good job and are suddenly looking at a giant dumpster fire, wondering what could have possibly caused this since their lawyers aren't even half-done sticking on the "by Qualcomm" labels yet.
Right now, instead of trying to pressure Qualcomm into making commitments they do not understand, the community should try to adopt the role of a stakeholder, who prioritizes a long and healthy relationship with a currently struggling contractor over getting the desired product at a reasonable timeline.
The community needs to make a cold day in hell happen, calm down, get together and formalize what they think they liked about Arduino up until now, the fundamental requirements that need to be retained or even developed and what would be nice to have.
Wearing a mask in public while wearing your unique style of clothing, BUT you may be able to exit your apartment building through the service entrance if your landlord is into spelunking and replaced the front door with a nutty putty cave imitation.
I cannot overstate how much of a pain it was to share 51Gbps of peering with 40M other homes and 60M mobile customers. Luckily they now have made generous upgrades, shoving an additional 15M to 20M customers through a whopping 371Gbps.
Unless of course the network your traffic is headed to has deep, widely open and sufficiently climatized pockets.
Regarding NixOS, I'm mostly afraid of them going on a user purge after their developer purge. You just never know who this group of people will come after next, especially after they started defining "Fascism" as "anyone asking for how they define Fascism".
And the jump of getting rid of people you hate who contribute to your project and you can do little harm to, to getting rid of people you hate who are of no use to you and you can do genuine damage to (e.g. by installing a tor exit node) is a step down if you think you could get away with it.
> Regarding NixOS, I'm mostly afraid of them going on a user purge after their developer purge
... Why? I don't know what developer purge you're talking about, but getting rid of people running a project almost never means suddenly they'll start to get rid of users, I'm not sure why that assumption is there. Not to mention that they couldn't even "purge users" if they wanted to, unless they make the download URLs private and start including some licensing schema which, come on, hardly is realistic to be worried about...
To provide some opinionated context for this unhinged rant:
The community developing nix had a falling out with a couple highly unsavory groups that basically consisted of the Palmer Lucky Slaughter Bot Co. and a couple guys who keep trying to monetize the project in extremely sleazy ways. This wasn't some sort of Stalinistic purge, it was people rejecting having their name attached to actual murder and sleazy profiteering.
Why do these companies put so much effort into fighting right to repair to avoid IP leaks any halfway serious company could reverse engineer in a week, but on the other hand encourage their employees to vibe all company secrets into the cloud?
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