Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.

I’ll say what I just said on a similar thread: if the internet goes down tomorrow, mesh will mean very little compared to ham radio.

For what purpose? Hanging out with friends? Watching porn? Getting vital information around?

AFAIK, ham is really mostly geared towards synchronous voice communication, whereas most of the Internet is asynchronous communication in a variety of forms: text, voice, video, etc. In an emergency, synchronous voice is pretty important. But, for day-to-day life, asynchronous dominates most people’s usage of things.

So, if the Internet goes down tomorrow and you need to know why, what happened, etc. your best bet is probably not ham radio but normal TV and radio broadcasts, not rumours being spread by other random people using ham radio. If you live in a country where a complete overnight shut down of the internet, and complete stopping of all news broadcasts is possible, then ham might be useful for the first few days / hours to figure out what’s going on. But, in the longer term, ham isn’t really a replacement for the Internet. For that you’d want asynchronous sharing of various kinds of data, which is more a mesh network, not ham radio.

What many people don’t think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.

Since all software is bits, and it’s free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”. A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.

This means that it’s really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it’s much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.

Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can’t do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.

Government officials are really scared of changing the status quo. They’re really afraid that if they get rid of anti-circumvention laws, that they’ll become a pariah state. In the past that probably would have been true. The US would have thrown its weight around, and Europe would have fallen in line and boycotted whoever it was. Many countries also have a lot of Hollywood productions made there. The major Hollywood studios care about anti-circumvention because they think it guarantees their profits. So, if these countries scaled back anti-circumvention, Hollywood would probably throw a fit and cut them off too. Even if the economic impact of getting rid of anti-circumvention were a huge positive, Hollywood has a big cultural impact worldwide.

I’d like to see it happen, but I think the most likely scenario is that a country that already doesn’t fully respect US copyright laws, like Switzerland or Singapore, might take an additional step and stop respecting anti-circumvention.

Nice.

Ok, now tell us what your magic 8 ball said.

Once again proving that while AI can’t do a programmer’s job, a tech writer’s job, an artist’s job, a composer’s job, a doctor’s job, or any other job involving thinking and understanding – it can easily do a CEO’s job and probably better than the CEO.

Yes, any journalist who uses that term should be relentlessly mocked. Along with terms like “Grok admitted” or “ChatGPT confessed” or especially any case where they’re “interviewing” the LLM.

These journalists are basically “interviewing” a magic 8-ball and pretending that it has thoughts.

No, they haven’t. They’re effectively prop masters. Someone wants a prop that looks a lot like a legal document, the LLM can generate something that is so convincing as a prop that it might even fool a real judge. Someone else wants a prop that looks like a computer program, it can generate something that might actually run, and one that will certainly look good on screen.

If the prop master requests a chat where it looks like the chatbot is gaining agency, it can fake that too. It has been trained on fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Wargames. It can also generate a chat where it looks like a chatbot feels sorry for what it did. But, no matter what it’s doing, it’s basically saying “what would an answer to this look like in a way that might fool a human being”.

You Should Know: The “Cartel de las Soles” isn’t actually a real cartel.

See, the Venezuelan military uses a sun insignia for generals, where the US military uses a star. A journalist invented the term in 1993 to talk about corruption in the Venezuelan military. Get it? All the members of this “cartel” wear suns. But, it’s not a real cartel. Not everybody who wears a sun (i.e. is a general) is necessarily involved in crimes, and those that are aren’t necessarily working together.

Those matter to normal humans, but not his MAGA base. If an American soldier had been killed in this operation, they would have been against it. But, because the only people killed were Venezuelans, they probably support what he did.

I get the cynicism, but there was something to the “Rules Based International Order”. In the past, the US trade representative might have strong-armed countries into certain deals, but when the deals were signed, they were generally honoured. When Germany and Mexico had a dispute over tariffs or something, it was accepted that the way to resolve it was with communication, mediation, and maybe courts. It wasn’t to use violence, bribes, extra-judicial killing, espionage, etc.

The change under Trump just shows how much of the system was taken for granted. Now, the world is having to adjust to the fact that treaties signed by the US are meaningless, and that we’re back to a world of bribes and military force.

The FIFA thing is so strange. They have such a long history of obvious corruption that I don’t think anybody has a positive impression of them. If they actually gave a real award to an actually deserving group, I think most people would wonder what the catch was.

So, when a massively corrupt organization like FIFA gives an award for peace to a warmongering autocrat, who exactly do they think they’re fooling? Why do they even bother going through the motions? Are there people out there that think “Wow, FIFA is a credible organization, and they specialize in peace, so this must indicate that Trump is a force for peace in the world!” It doesn’t even work with the MAGA faithful, because they have no idea what FIFA is.

Have you ever seen someone pull a trailer using bungee cords, or use a bare wire in an electrical socket, or use a power tool without any safety gear? It’s frustrating if they get away with it, and as a result learn that what they did was a good idea.

What’s really awful about this Venezuela operation is that the initial phase of it actually went just fine. No American soldiers were killed, Maduro was captured alive and uninjured, and so on. It was an incredibly stupid and reckless thing to do. But, for the moment, everything went as well as the Department of War could hope. It will probably have bad long-term diplomatic consequences, but those aren’t visible yet. If there’s a phase 2 of this “war”, it’s probably going to have unseen issues. For the moment though, they got away with it.

we should teach them these things directly, instead of relying on science classes

Ok, so by “these things” you mean logic, argument analysis, media literacy, critical thinking, etc.

Yes, I had classes like that, and I think they’re much more important than science and math classes. You can learn science and math on your own from YouTube videos, but you need the media literacy to know which YouTube videos you can trust.

It sounds like they lost you in 3 months, not immediately.

They work, but there are no humans inside them.

It’s amazing how complicated just the O2 cycle is. Basically, we don’t yet how to do it without a whole planet being involved.

Like, plants do release O2 sometimes, but they also use O2 as fuel when they grow. Growing a plant requires light. On the earth that’s easy, just put it in the sun. On Mars there’s no atmosphere and no magnetic field, so if you just put a plant on the surface they’ll die. So, you need to grow them underground in a mostly earth-like atmosphere at mostly earth-like pressure lit by artificial lights.

So, you plant a lot of plants deep underground lit by bright artificial lights. Then you need to supply the plants with a lot of water. Some of that water will be released into the air, but some of it will be incorporated into the plant’s body. There’s a whole water cycle that isn’t yet fully understood.

What about the soil? On earth worms and other bugs break down leaf litter and other things into usable soil and bees pollinate many of the plants. So, do you ship up a bunch of bugs? You’d have to supply a whole ecosystem of them so they live in balance. You could go with hydroponics instead, but then you’d need a constant supply of nutrients for the plants, and given the amount of plant matter needed for just one human, that would be a huge supply of nutrients.

I’d love to see another honest, scientifically rigorous attempt at a biosphere project. Building a closed ecosystem on Earth is easy-mode compared to doing it anywhere else, but so far all the Biospheres have been failures. IMO until we can easily do it on Earth, we’re nowhere near ready to do it in space, on the moon, or on another planet.

“… and now that I realize how easily conned I am, I promise not to vote in any future elections because I’d just make the wrong choice.”

(One can dream)

Don’t misspell things in your quotes.