“Data, stop. Data. Stop. Data, SHUT UP!”

Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.

At the same time… People are pretty dumb.

I think the fans & press deserve equal blame for the initial hype. At some point I saw a supercut of things Sean Murray said, then the resulting headlines and Reddit posts.

In an interview, the journalist asks: “Will you be able to play with your friends in a shared universe?” The answer: “Well…we hope that eventually there will be at least some multiplayer functionality, though maybe not on day one…like maybe you could explore one another’s planets or share pictures or something.”

Headline: “NO MANS SKY WILL LAUNCH WITH MULTIPLAYER!”

Reddit comments: “I’m already forming a guild, we’re going to play as bounty hunters chasing down other players who are pirates in glorious multiplayer space battles!!”

There were tons of examples of that. Journalists would poke and prod for a soundbite, take it out of context and exaggerate it, and the community would just go batshit with their expectations.

As a software dev and open source contributor: stay the course, then! I’ll take open source software over a union 10 times out of 10. I get paid so well for what I do that it’s silly, and I love spending my time doing the stuff I like. I’ve been a union member in other fields, it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.

I seriously doubt anybody is contributing to open source for status & seniority. Respect, maybe. The status & seniority people become managers; as the old joke goes, that’s the best way to get them out of the workforce.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

They’ve never released proper open-source drivers for Linux, or helped external developers make any, or made it easy to use their closed driver with Linux. They’re just hostile to open source, basically. That used to be pretty common in the old days, but most companies have given up and joined in, which is why installing Linux is usually a smooth experience these days.

If you’re using Linux: get an AMD card. They just work out of the box, no failures to boot to GUI or anything. It just works…like everything else. Which, having spent 20 years fighting with graphics drivers on Linux, is sheer bliss to me.

Oh, but the defacto standard for anything AI-related is NVidia. So if you ever wanna mess with LLMs, object detection, speech recognition, etc…you’re likely stuck with NVidia, and the old routine: Got a problem? Of course you do. Try reinstalling the drivers three times, then uninstall some random other packages, then burn some incense, say 10 Hail Marys, and make an offering to the GPU gods before restarting the computer. Didn’t work? Well, repeat all those steps in a different order. Fifth time’s the charm!

I mean, that’s fair, and as was pointed out elsewhere Linus has sought help for his temper.

On the other hand, for all the talk of how “unprofessional” it was for him to behave this way, he did shepherd an OS kernel from a hobby project to the most popular OS on the planet (with the possible exception of Minix, apparently…)

I agree that polite directness might be better, bu IMHO the more common polite indirectness and avoidance of any hint of conflict is clearly worse.

Yeah, it’s kind of invigorating to see somebody speak so plainly. No “There’s a couple issues we should maybe discuss”, no “Let’s loop back on that sometime”, no “Hmm, is that really the best approach? Do you have any documentation?” Just a straightforward “Dude, this is shit! Here’s some reasons why!”"

Having worked for a decade in tech, I would love it of people were this direct.

Just so it’s clear for everybody: Nix is a programming language, build system, and package manager. NixOS is a Linux distro built with (and upon) Nix. Home Manager is a dotfile and home management tool using Nix, allowing control of dotfiles, but also per-user software, systemd services, and more. You can use Home Manager in any distro, not just NixOS (but you do need to install Nix).

If the EU bans Chinese cars, that’s not capitalism in action.

Another problem: legislation like this cements the status quo. It’s easy enough for large incumbents to add features like this, but to a handful of programmers trying to launch an app from their garage, this adds another hurdle into the process. Remember: Signal and Telegram are only about a decade old, we’ve seen new (and better) apps launch recently. Is that going to stop?

It’s easy to say “this is just a simple hash lookup, it’s not that big a deal!”, but (1) it opens the door to client-side requirements in legislation, it’s unlikely to stop here, (2) if other countries follow suit, devs will need to implement a bunch of geo-dependant (?) lookups, and (3) someone is going to have to monitor compliance, and make sure images are actually being verified–which also opens small companies up to difficult legal actions. How do you prove your client is complying? How can you monitor to make sure it’s working without violating user privacy?

Also: doesn’t this close the door on open software? How can you allow users to install open source message apps, or (if the lookup is OS-level) Linux or a free version of Android that they’re able to build themselves? If they can, what’s to stop pedophiles from just doing that–and disabling the checks?

If you don’t ban user-modifiable software on phones, you’ve just added an extra hurdle for creeps: they just need to install a new version. If you do, you’ve handed total control of phones to corporations, and especially big established corporations.

I propose we just stop talking about it altogether.

I mean, if people have lost faith in Amazon, they sure don’t show it with the amount they spend on it.

That’s basically an exploit. Different ‘products’ can be related, and the reviews are supposed to be useful across them. The most obvious examples are just different colors of socks, or different sizes of shirt. Sometimes it’s variants on a product: one with a handle and one without, or different models of TV with the same screen, or whatever.

But it’s not Amazon who makes those connections, it’s the companies entering product data. Some of them abuse it, and say products are related when they’re not at all. Since there’s millions of products listed, it takes time to identify and fix the false associations. In the meantime: people looking for headphone stands see reviews for whisks.

But yeah, quality has gone down. It hits some product categories a lot worse than others: cheap electronics is a shitshow.

Sure. But they’d make similar amounts of money (possibly more) by selling non-counterfeit goods.

They want their market to be open to third parties, because otherwise those third parties are gonna launch competing platforms. Better if they stick with Amazon, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. There are thousands and thousands of Chinese companies selling products on Amazon, and many of them are fantastic deals. If Amazon blocks them, they all move to AliExpress, and maybe that really takes off and bites into Amazon’s market share.

But when you consider the sheer number of products offered on Amazon, it’s hard for them to separate the good-but-cheap from the crap counterfeit bullshit. And as you say…they make money either way, so it’s not the highest-priority problem to fix–though as I said in another comment, they are aware that if enough products are crap, people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole, so they’ve tried different techniques to block bullshit reviews in the past.

But if somebody else wants to put in the work to filter shitty knockoffs from the results page? Well, that’s fine with them! They make money selling you the real deal products, too–likely more, because their cut of a more expensive original product is gonna be higher.