I agree with Prime on most things, but I think he’s getting this one wrong.

There are more options than just “light-hearted satire” and “earnest business idea”.

The FOSDEM talk is silly, and reads like a skit, but it has a gravely serious undertone.

The security guy has posted on Twitter “I still can’t believe he hooked it up to Stripe lol”.

Meanwhile the LinkedIn of the other guy describes him as a “researcher of political economy of FOSS” at Rochester Institute of Technology, and he runs a non-profit about FOSS for humanitarian aid.

He’s also been very active replying to people talking about the conference talk or the Malus site, asking whether they think this should be legal and what we can do to protect the future of open source.

I think these are people who take this threat very seriously, and are willing to expose themselves to litigation in order to force the issue into courts.

I avoid the potential presence of ads.

I recall seeing some research that suggested “ignoring” ads makes you more susceptible to their content. I couldn’t find it after a couple searches though.

No, it was giant radioactive ants.

But now I am actually not sure if what I saw was Them! or Matinee (which features a film that very well may be based on Them!)

Saw “Them!” when I was like 6. That was pretty bad.

And then Starship Troopers when I was like 10. That one really got me.

Huh. Never thought about how they’re both bug movies.

Ever is an extremely long time.

Probably not for technical reasons, but for IP reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46554890

One box

To be clear, the best case scenario here is a Chrome vs Chromium scenario, because they want the ability to slip in some proprietary components into their official build in order to play nicely with their paid services.

Seems fair to me, and I understand why that’s a substantial effort if they’re still at basically a PoC stage.

Edit: And for the record, I am much happier paying With Reach (Kagi) with my dollars than I ever was paying Google with my data, so I’m very much in favor of this model. Still, some neckbeards only wanna use software from orgs who are in it “for the love of the game”.

I feel ya. But the pendulum will probably swing back the other way soon and we’ll have a ton of companies hiring to undo/replace slop code. That’s how it has been for previous coding fads, anyway.

Designed to curate a desired multi-experience

I’ve got some skepticism alarms going off on this one.

What exactly does “basically reverse engineered some assembly” mean here? Decompiled to C?

And what do you mean by “remake in assembly”? Like, literally writing assembly by hand? Or compiling C source?

I’m not a lawyer, but my guess is that binary-to-binary translation isn’t enough to strip the license, even if you’re making a pit stop in a higher-level language.

Dijkstra on the foolishness of natural language programming

But like, what does he know? He wasn’t an AI-native vibe orchestrator.

This analysis is spot-on. I especially think you’re onto something with your reference to the commons. (Edit: The generative AI movement could be a seen as a modern reincarnation of enclosure)

These guys think of a commons in a sense of ownership: if I own something, I can do whatever I want with it.

But the real historical examples of a commons are more like a mutual obligation. It’s a relationship, not a delivery of inert goods. Yes, you get access to the benefits of the commons, but that comes hand-in-hand with accepting the duty to care for the commons as an ongoing entity.

That’s what really irks me about all of this. They didn’t “steal” something. They killed a collective organism.

Primeagen mentioned it here, noting that sqlite does this

Midwest $3.59/gal today

I truly wish they could steal it away.

The BT client will advertise the IP(s) of whatever network interface(s) you allow it to use.

Maybe through CXL you’ll be able to “download more RAM” (renting it, really)

Money is fine. Financialization is not.