'free for noncommercial use' licenses are nothing new, and we have half a century of experience showing that they're a dead end. they make it impossible to form an actual community around the software; the users remain at the beck and call of the software owner. sooner or later the owner loses interest or goes bankrupt, and the users are left high and dry, unable to fend for themselves
a commenter with more patience than i have has posted a longer explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835750 which i don't wholly endorse but which you'd probably benefit from reading
(as another commenter points out, futo's license is particularly broadly written, adding additional problems on top of the usual 'free for noncommercial use' problems)
> The license (...) may not restrict the program from being used in a business
> You may use or modify the software only for non-commercial purposes such as personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, all without any anticipated commercial application
That reads to me that if I type a work email using this keyboard, that would be a commercial use and against the license which makes this a total non-starter.
Thanks for the clarification. Source First is obviously better because it prevents big corporations from ripping off small developers and profiting from it.
> after which all participants switch to the bad behavior
This is how it has become with job applications. So many people started lying on resumes that the job reqs starting raising the requirements for a position, which causes more people to need to lie. If you don't lie, you just don't get a job and starve/die.
The Jerk Threshold is particularly low in low-trust, low-verifiability, usually-not-iterated games, and there's almost no setting that fits those conditions more than a job search.
Good point. I think the difference is that the society as a whole was much higher-trust than it is today. America is back to being the Wild West, take what you can and don’t look back.
And yet iPhone photos still look awful because of over-processing. That one split second when you see the beautiful photo you took and then BOOM "deep fusion" makes it looks crispy and gross.
I’ve been applying for 2 years and landed maybe 5 interviews, none of which offered me a job. Two friends recommended me for jobs and I couldn't even get phone calls screenings.
I’ve been on hiring committees at Mozilla where being a white male hurts the candidate.
The committee wants a racial minority, LQBTQIA+, etc. The best white males can do is claim to be neurodivergent. That one lets them get passed the filters. But I’ve been part of discussions where the committee explicitly said they were disappointed the best candidate didn’t help with diversity and thus we passed.
It was really illegal. But what are you going to do? You can report your employer but once your culture has gotten to the point Mozilla’s has - where you can openly say these things, your problem isn’t one person. And your employer has a ton of ways to retaliate, then you have to prove that.
Principles come at the expense of your salary sometimes, and sticking to your principles isn’t pragmatic if you can’t effect greater change.
We also have MRGs - Mozillian Resource Groups - where you can only join if you’re black, or gay, or <insert group>. That’s pretty blatantly illegal, too. Doesn’t stop it from happening.
Your entire account exist to disparage Mozilla. If your stories are true you seem to exist at the company to take a pay check and don't actually have any moral qualms about what they do as long as they pay you. If you actually do work there and want change then why don't you try to make change instead of anonymously posting?
> Principles come at the expense of your salary sometimes, and sticking to your principles isn’t pragmatic if you can’t effect greater change.
It’s not about having moral qualms or not. The company doesn’t want to change, at least not on its own. So if the ship is sinking, yeah I’ll keep my few hundred K + benies on its way down.
If anything the most change I can make is to keep working here and exposing all of the BS. Maybe enough of an uproar from the users will force them to change. Maybe if enough people who use FF see this and stop using it, they’ll be forced to change? It’s funny, we have an internal slack channel (#cccc to prove I work here) for dealing with external comms. Those in charge know a lot of our users are on HN, but they refer to people on this site as morons and it’s part of the playbook to avoid HN. Some are trying to change the opinion of HN internally.
I can’t tell you what will come of my posting here but in the meantime I’m going to keep rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
Goals to increase diversity are not illegal. And if an HR person were to hire a non-diverse person, it would be actively going against the company goals. So why would they ever do that?
But how do you avoid hiring a non-diverse person? What if the hiring manager likes them? Simple, just don’t even give them a screening at all. “Not a culture fit”
No that’s definitely illegal. They can’t discriminate on race/gender period. So what they do instead is just not hire anyone when the best candidate is not diverse enough, but this is also illegal as well, but super hard to prove.
Maybe you don't get interviews or offers if your contributions are generic "programs" and "etc" sums them up sufficiently as opposed to your race and gender?
To iterate , Your resume should be calling out what the projects were and its impact. It’s not enough to say “I can do Java”. No shit. What did you create/mantain/mutate with Java? What were novel problems that you had to deal with? What did this project aim to solve and if it did, how much did it benefit the company?
Amusingly, neither Zendaya nor Javier Bardem are Middle-Eastern, but they can easily play so because skin color works that way. I think the fact that it could just as well be a post-El-Niño Chihuahuan desert makes sense too.
note how the theme of the Nigun Shamil is echoed by cyberpunk computer cowboys:
> "For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh." —WFG
Lagniappe: my current favourite music video performed by caucasians that references (however unintentionally) Lancaster vs York would be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQabTTRg
it's tempting to think that our ways of thinking about mathematical objects such as software and data files—liberation from the contemptible flesh into the bodiless exultation of eternally absolute and changeless beauty, universally accessible but only through the mind, or as https://www.chabad.org/multimedia/music_cdo/aid/1692239/jewi... expresses it in its exegesis of the nigun, "the soul cries and yearns for her former glory, her sanctity now tarnished as she dwells among mere mortals"—represent a secularization of an essentially religious discourse that originally pertained to theism, an absolutist monotheism that identifies the fleshless and changeless with the divine and sacred
but when i read parts of the torah like ספר שופטים, which are mostly about 2700–2800 years old, i don't see any of this fleshless and changeless or universally accessible stuff. people don't consecrate themselves or places by contemplating sacred truths, meditating until mystical revelations present themselves (though angels do make appearances), or experiencing bodiless exultation of any flavor. instead, the sacred is pursued through abstaining from pork, eccentric hairstyles, animal sacrifice, ornamentation with precious metals, carrying around wooden boxes, and spilling torrents of blood in the name of tribal deities; and it is manifested through victory in battle and material plenty. divine and sacred beings are conceptualized as partisan, constantly changing their opinions, and often even physically solid, though immortal; and alignment with them brings not liberation from the contemptible flesh but bestowal of victory and riches on that flesh. texts from that period from other cultures like the rig veda, the mahabharata, and the iliad agree on this, though the avesta may be an exception (there seems to be a significant amount of yearning after bodiless exultation in an afterlife after liberation from contemptible flesh in there)
even in the slightly older rig veda, where agni (for example) is described as undecaying/ageless and everywhere visible (an empirically valid description of the sun), and where mental attention to the gods is lauded often, what the worshippers are asking for is cattle, battle victories, and gold, not bodiless exultation and liberation from flesh, and their means for achieving it is singing songs, sacrificing food and drink, and performing rituals with their bodies
it's about 2500 years ago when we start to see people aspiring to bodiless exultation and liberation from flesh through mental contemplation of eternally absolute and changeless beauty, and we see it in two places: in the tipitaka and in platon, who apparently got it from the pythagoreans. in both places it's coupled with a belief in reincarnation, which, together with the close temporal coincidence, suggests a common historical origin. as for the divine beings of older books, shakyamuni apparently accepts that they are partisan, constantly changing their opinions, physically solid, but denies that they are immortal or worth worshipping, while platon takes the opposite tack, condemning the poets for describing them as partisan and constantly changing their opinions
so perhaps the current ran the other way: cyberpunk abacus and sand-table cowboys had humanity's first encounters with eternally absolute and changeless beauty, universally accessible but only through the mind, and the resulting bodiless exultation changed their outlook forever, and eventually everyone else's?
a great difficulty for this hypothesis is that the tipitaka doesn't contain, as far as i can tell, so much as the simplest seked calulation, much less theorems about angles and prime numbers
> cyberpunk abacus and sand-table cowboys had humanity's first encounters with eternally absolute and changeless beauty, universally accessible but only through the mind, and the resulting bodiless exultation changed their outlook forever
Now that's an interesting idea.
I need to check out the Avesta[0] and track down Platon's Nuptial Number[1] before commenting more, although some obvious replies to your difficulty are that accounting and scribing[2] have traditionally been priesting-adjacent, so there could well be more orally-transmitted relation than we have textual evidence for. (speaking of the latter: my hypothesis up until this point is that even ancient Sumerians had their own geeks who had their own analogies for abstraction, but the reason we now rest the abstract/concrete duality on Platon's broad shoulders is because he was in the first generation[3] who bothered to write their ideas down[4])
[2] the spoken word can certainly provide examples of object-attribute lattices that should bootstrap abstract thought, but maybe it was too closely related to our conscious processes for early human fish to notice the water? By the time one is making arbitrary marks for numbers, or even arbitrary clay blobs for numbers with units ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_(seal)#Origins ), it should become obvious that both {Bossy,Daisy,Buttercup} and {Cupcake,Ebony,Fiona} can be mapped to "3 cows". Literacy (where one stamps a number for 3 followed by a sign for cow into the clay) makes it even more obvious?
[3] compare Socrates' complaints about literacy, which remind me of our current arguments about LLMs: "but what if someone reads something which has just been hallucinated"?
[4] which might help explain your "and eventually everyone else's"; before writing, it would be difficult for a small fraction of geeks in a population to remain motivated, but after writing it would be possible for them to think "even if I know no one else from my village like me, there have been others, and there probably will be more..." and decide to participate in the literature?
any chance you could provide me with entry refs for the tipitaka?
The zoroastrian Ahuna Vairya and (especially) Ashem Vohu do seem to contrast following asha with worldly power. (compare med. {bellatores, laboratores, oratores} or PIE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifunctional_hypothesis )
Given the relative dates, I'm proceeding with the very tentative hypothesis that Zoroaster (who does seem to comment, in stuff I have yet to read, on immortality?) might be the common source for both?
(oddly enough, the "silk road" as such is supposed to be more recent than all three, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Chinese_and_Central_... suggest many possibilities for bits to already have been travelling back and forth across eurasia even if trade in atoms had not reached its later heights)
As for the nuptial number: at this point I'm not convinced it isn't just technakos barbar (technobabble)? IIRC elsewhere in the Republic it's argued that the guardian class will reproduce by sending its youth to the ancient greek equivalent of open-air music festivals, where they will camp together letting nature (as with bulls and cows) run its course, so the passage here seems to be a deliberate contrast. (but to what end?)
Edit: think I found it, via source attribution. The speaker of those lines is neither Platon, nor Socrates (whom he supposedly quotes), but the Muses (as "quoted" by "Socrates"): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
in which case technobabble makes perfect sense.
[at one point I ran across a Soviet book on religion —because a colleague had relied upon it in the 01960's to follow the Western CS literature and their use of Easter calculation as a running example— and was amazed at how much detail it went into on minor european sects but disappointed in how relatively broad its coverage was for other continents]
Edit: HN can express the sumerian signs for 3 and cow! 𒐈𒀖
That’s a serious citation needed: if you think there are lavish social payments which reward poor people for having kids, the 80s called and want Reagan’s campaign mythology back. The United States makes parenting expensive but the richer you are the easier time you’ll have dealing with it.
The rich are just fine, it's the middle class that's getting squeezed out. We used to pass programs to make it easier for the middle class to have kids. But the liberation of Black people in America has caused so much racial resentment that the rich were able to exploit it to make us think we were fighting over scarce resources in the richest nation in history... meanwhile we have billionaires quietly and not so quietly tilting the playing field in their favor. As racism towards Black people declined somewhat, we're being sold another racist lie that illegal immigrants are the reason America is ill...
The rich can absolutely afford as many children as they want.
Whom you are talking about are upstart "upper middle" who have a good wage but no capital of their own, and the rich are generally happy to have them thrown under the bus rather than face them as equals.
The method of throwing under the bus is have them overwork for a wage and then second job to waste that wage on "fueling economic growth". Not turning these into anything permanent.
You're not wrong but you're also not fully right: there has been a second instance that the devs have been using to test out the federation code. It's not yet open to the public because they are still working on the implementation. At the protocol level, it is very much there, but you are right to point out that the advantages haven't been fully realized just yet.
It is very different than manually moving instances in the Fediverse, in my understanding. For one, it's totally transparent to the people that are following. All of your data comes with you. You don't lose your posts, your followers don't lose following you. I know Mastodon has at least recently gained account portability to some degree, but https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ has some serious drawbacks that aren't present in the AT model.
Activitypub is the federation equivalent of an at-home 3d printer. It’s easy enough to understand how it works and do stuff with it. And very hackable. Bluesky is trying to be more like Firefox: it’s much more complex and built by experts to be well optimised for the problem it’s solving. But it’s much harder for lay people to understand how it works internally.
I, for one, hope that the "product vision" people stay far away from it. It works perfectly for the thing it is: an easy way for listeners to listen to and purchase DRM-free music files.
- Give a place for independent musicians to upload their music to showcase and sell music and merch with one click and no fuss (and a reasonable sales cut).
- When fans buy music, they get the files (no app, software, DRM, or any bullshit).
That's all. Nothing more is needed.
The "alternative" doesn't offer that. It will fail.
Thanks! One of the next features we'll on work will be support for arbitrary folders (basically all notes will be plaintext inside folders, currently they are all plaintexts but inside a local database), so you could sync your notes with any cloud provider (e.g., Dropbox). We'll also provide our own built-in sync option. There are plans for sharing notes, but not quite for real-time collaboration, if that's what you mean by "multiplayer". There are plans for collaboration in the future, but not real-time - I just don't think real-time collaboration is good for text-based formats.
