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Cake day: October 2nd, 2020

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  • Or they’re just adding improvements to the software they heavily rely on.

    which they can do in private any time they wish, without any of the fanfare.

    if they actually believe in opensource let them opensource windows 7 1, or idk the 1/4 of a century old windows 2k

    instead we get the fanare as they pat themselves on the back for opensourcing MS-DOS 4.0 early last year (not even 8.0, which is 24 years old btw, 4.0 which came out in 1986).

    38 years ago…

    MS-fucking-DOS, from 38 years ago, THAT’S how much they give a shit about opensource mate.

    all we get is a poor pantomime which actually only illustrates just how stupid they truly think we are to believe the charade.

    does any of that mean they’re 100% have to be actively shipping “bad code” in this project, not by any means. does it mean microsoft will never make a useful contribution to linux, not by any means. what it does mean is they’re increasing their sphere of influence over the project. and they have absolutely no incentive to help anyone but themselves, in fact the opposite.

    as everyone knows (it’s not some deep secret the tech heads on lemmy somehow didn’t hear about) microsoft is highly dependent on linux for major revenue streams. anything a monolith depends on which they don’t control represents a risk. they’d be negligent if they didn’t try to exert control over it. and that’s for any organisation in their position. then factor in their widespread outspoken agenda against opensource, embrace, extend, extinguish and the vastly lacking longterm evidence to match their claims of <3 opensource.

    they’re welcome to prove us all wrong, but that isn’t even on the horizon currently.

    1 yes yes they claim they can’t because “licensing”, which is mostly but not entirely fucking flimsy, but ok devils advocate: release the rest, but nah.






  • Glad to see everyone agrees this is

    1. funny cos they’re crying over stealing what they stole

    2. acknowledges this means the weights are actually open sourced (which is how it fuckin should be)

    also discussion i’ve seen elsewhere:

    1. when considering the energy footprint of chatgpt, also consider the energy footprint of running the internet for 20 years to accumulate all that data they stole. therefore the most ecological option is to extract the weights and then opensource it.

    just want to add

    1. if the accusations aren’t true (still a possibility), oai is probably deliberately buying time/stock recovery by keeping this discussion in the news rather than everyone discussing how much they suck

    2. if large entities are going to capture and then open source each others proprietary weights, that may actually be one of the best outcomes for global humanity amidst this “AI” craze




  • this is a complex topic and probably belongs in a different thread.

    essentially i don’t personally believe in punishing citizens of a country for the actions of its politicians.

    at best its misguided, at worse it basically empowers politicians on both sides who draw power from friction between citizens of different nations. typical divide and conquer bs.

    why do you not think a software developer wouldn’t have to

    wouldn’t or shouldn’t? if you mean wouldn’t, it’s not surprising and its not the dev’s fault they have to comply with policy, so the criticism is not with them.

    if you mean shouldn’t, i don’t agree with punishing athletes either, but regarding foss specifically, isn’t the “friendly competition” of olympics equivalent to that? sort of. in some ways yes. in other ways its actually the opposite.

    collaboration is actually the opposite of competition.

    and while there’s a case for the benefits of healthy sports competition, i don’t believe it truly fulfills the spirit of international goodwill to the degree it says on the packaging. foss and other forms of international collaboration for the betterment of greater society are definitely on a higher rung - in my opinion at least.





  • When you work in an industry where the entire collaborative workflow of everyone is based on software that doesn’t run on Linux, then not running that software is equal to not being able to work in that industry.

    there’s no denying that’s true, though ofc it has alot to do with microsofts very agreessive and anti-competitive practices.

    though its all a bit tangential, the main issue i think comes down to what someone means when they say “everything”. certainly if someone said “you can do everything”, i’d expect them to qualify what is (should be) obviously a slight exaggeration as parlance. they don’t literally mean “everything” they just mean most everyday things. i think its fairly common in everyday speech for someone to be able to work out thats what they meant.

    in the few rare cases when someone literally means absolutely everything, then yes that silly statement would be incorrect. and if strictly intended with that meaning would certainly qualify as misinformation.



  • Yeah I don’t know. Just see how the modern world is shaping society to the negative I just don’t see where we are close to utopia But right now we are on a different path

    That was essentially a big part of my point. We could be close to a utopia by now (from the perspective of technological possibilities).

    Instead, as I said

    for some suspicious reason we took a very different road, and here we are

    That said I don’t currently believe technology itself is inherently bad.

    Like all tools, it depends what you do with it.

    Is a general purpose tool like hammer good or bad? It has the capacity for both. And therefore it’s up to the user which is which.

    And that’s the issue really, what are we doing with our wonderous technology?

    This might be a bit of a radical take. But in that ~125 year window i was refering to, alot of machines we’ve invented are actually weapons.

    Weapons to destroy eachother physically (conflict/threats of violence etc).

    Weapons to destroy nature (deforestation and probably most mining).

    Weapons to destroy the mind (social media etc, actually most media now).

    What if we’d had 1+¼ century of building a collective utopia instead of all these weapons?

    afaict from the technical perspective it’s not really unfeasible, its the non-technical problem: the user and what they use the tools for.

    Another clue for us is probably the term appropriate technology, which is a vibe i think eg. solar punk is helping to cultivate.

    Anyway we’ve done ALOT of misuse. That’s why i don’t blame technology itself.

    I still think it’s more about what we’ve done with it.


  • necessary decline in our quality of life

    unlike most people replying to you i’m not refuting your core premise.

    but on the note of this issue, not sure i can agree.

    have a look at this public infrastructure technology from 122 years ago

    https://youtu.be/2Ud1aZFE0fU?t=11

    imagine if we’d spent the last 1+¼ century collectively working towards the utopia this kind of project hinted at - instead of developing new machines to destroy?

    typically they say utopian dreams scatter in the face of increased technological awareness. have to say my experience has been the opposite.

    the more i learn about technology, the more i realise we could be very close to a near-utopia by now. for some suspicious reason we took a very different road, and here we are.