dwoldrich

I don't disagree with you that freely distributed software on conveniently licensed terms is going to be the go-to stance for the majority of solo and non-commercial developers.

I just believe I could arrange the universe such that I get to have my cake (commercial licensing) and eat it too (with default open source licensing).

It is my experience that corporations do pay handsomely for software they use, even SaaS ones as the cost of doing business. Open source communities need mechanisms for funding that are consistent and low friction.

This is why the software language/repository/platform itself needs to facilitate license tracking and billing for alternative commercial licenses, to make it easy for corporations.

A successful new language effort that provides this facility need not be an enforcer except to say if an enterprise is willing and signed up to pay for any dependencies it uses, it is obligated to pay for all of them with something like AGPL 3 as the poison pill they have to swallow otherwise if they distribute or serve from any copyleft software.

Having simple, consistent rules that vendors and consumers have to follow with no rugpulls will be important for market acceptance. Having voluntary compliance with license terms will also be important to not turn people off from the ecosystem and to let them kick the tires. If software vendors want to distribute only unencumbered free and open source, then god bless 'em, they should be able to do it.

For libraries, I like the Gnu Affero Public License[1]. If you run the library in software with that license, you have to publish all the source of the entire project that incorporates it.

No corporation could tolerate this, though, so the library vendor can negotiate a commercial license of their software for appropriate fees.

That said, corporations are not going to want to negotiate fees with 100's of vendors over constantly fluctuating dependencies in their software.

This is why the next big language/software ecosystem needs to integrate payments to vendors in their repository system. That way, commercial license management can occur between the ecosystem owners and the corporate customers and all the vendors get paid their fair share.

Similar to Amazon's Dynamo API, whatever the next big language/ecosystem is needs to be designed around _billing_ and automatic license management for # of deployments, seats, call volumes, etc.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260712154038/https://www.gnu.o...

Element.scrollHeight first appeared in the DOM API with IE6 in 2001 as far as I can tell. That browser was the first really modern one, with javascript and CSS that could drive a dynamic layout and they innovated with things like AJAX and vector graphics. The web browser had matured from a document model with live elements to a programmable operating environment.

The API implementation was klunky though, where DOM Elements attached to the DOM became 'live' objects. Reading some of the properties would necessarily require reflowing the page in order to calculate the value. It's interesting to think about all the ways the DOM thread can stall for synchronous API's. The Paul Irish gist is always the top hit when I search:

https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a

The mouse event ones always get me.

I'm always impressed by how old sins like element.scrollHeight can get papered over with newer API's. You can use ResizeObserver or requestAnimationFrame() to time your reads of the property and hopefully get the reflows for cheap or free.

Because an LLM is the only way to express intelligence with a computer. So your conception of ram/cpu/storage/networks and learning (training on huge corpus of data) is the only way to do artificial intelligence?

LLM's are the perfect consumer-grade AI, safe to release to the public. It lacks creativity so little chance for a runaway super-intelligence, and it gives the people real tools. It's the best case. Isn't it tidy how reality is? Almost seems planned.

I should think so! I wonder what those original AI were used for.

so unless the military ran a giant expensive program just to hide the fact that they actually had machines 10000x faster than the $50M (in 80s money) supercomputers of the day, and had trained them on a corpus they whipped up out of nowhere (the amount of information on the internet at the time could probably have fit on a few of todays phones), it probably didn't happen.

Well, did they? They do fritter away a lot of money. Maybe there's a long-running black budget somewhere that could account for it.

You are framing your argument in technologies and technological progressions that you are familiar with. Reality isn't so neat though and there are surely many technological paths to artificial intelligence they could have exploited.

Why are you so certain you know what tech existed in the 80's?

NASA used Commodore 64's as part of the constellation of computers needed to launch the space shuttle. That whole program was pretty hokey. That silliness doesn't preclude some radically advanced compute tech from existing elsewhere at the same time. Of course something like that would be ultra secret and you and I wouldn't be told about it.

You have to be told something before you can believe it, right? You also get to choose whether you believe that something you're told is 100% god's honest truth or a load of bullshit as well. It's kindof sad to see people try to gatekeep thought here. Lot of rigid thinkers.

I recall Intel in the 90's trying to build clockless pentiums. They couldn't figure it out or maybe it had integration problems with clockful peripherals and it never came to fruition. But I wondered if that was some furtive attempt to seed some tech into industry. I just try to keep an open mind to these sorts of things.

I'm not saying the movie War Games was a limited hangout for a super-intelligent secret military computer system/network that already existed. I'm just saying it could have been.

I see those trillion dollar data centers we're building in the US are classed as military installations or at least appear to be a public-private partnerships where the data centers are being built on air force bases.

Perhaps the consumer compute tech has advanced to the point that it's good enough to host the next phase of intelligence for the military. Maybe all the water AI datacenters need is for energy, not cooling.

Well, that didn't happen.

The military had stealth aircraft in the 70's. I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's.

That is to say that (practically) all software has a finite utility timeframe. So it's a lot like an organism in that way in that it 'dies' when it is no longer useful.

This is more than enshittification, it feels like purposeful brand destruction.

Are governments going to institute more lockdowns? Is this some topdown control thing?

I will root this POS android phone I have and forego any Google Play services and just use it as web browser and a phone. Fuck these guys!

AI propaganda crew hasn't rolled on yet today; not seeing the "it's different now, code is cheap/free with AI" messaging yet.

80% of the cost is maintenance, and all software dies so there will always be work to do.

I'm not a fan of state management in React apps, and it took me a long time to come to peace with it. What I landed on that works with the system rather than against is useContext at the page level containing Jotai atoms that wrapper Immer-managed objects representing the page states that get passed through the component tree as props.

I built my own action framework that gives me the ability to use Jotai getters to read atom data, launch asynchronous javascript, and then write to atom data via Jotai setters without ever having to fuss with useEffect myself. Jotai just handles the messy state transition work. My components used to be a jumble of DOM event handler, business logic, and markup, and now the business logic is all extracted to the separate action components.

React makes it hard to test business logic in isolation, and I am hoping my action framework could do a better job of that.

Yes, I hope I didn't contradict you, the economy has been shite. Was just trying to leave a positive note on recent developments that will continue, God willing.

Some enjoy their local cultures, customs and sovereignty and do not wish to dissolve into a homogenized nowhere-land of world culture/governance. Some people do not cheer for dystopia.

Continue with the scold though, very convincing argument so far.

There are upward and downward revisions this year at least, it seems like a mixed bag with many policies juicing the economy. [1]

Job opportunities differ by state and de-growth hostility to business policies and crony investments. Where I am, layoffs and offshoring continues. I hear new grads are increasingly opting for the skilled trades, which is interesting given they aren't getting use out of their degrees.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2026

Modern invented flag peddlers only seek to have us fly flags of the division they seek to generate. I only fly the flag of the country I live in and give side eye to anyone that does otherwise.

I'm referring to the model itself. The `.ckpt` file is clearly transformative wrt its training set. Or, at least, substantially more transformative than other things that have long received fair use protection.

Oh, I see. And the model weights are what one can make the copyright infringement claims on in the US?

Not to split hairs, but do you believe it's so transformative because you can't read plain text copies of original works in the weights or because the source material is so hopelessly discombobulated that the original work could not be reliably recreated?

I believe the 'hopelessly discombobulated' argument is probably pretty solid, but one could argue to a judge that the weights are something like JPEG compression. Sure the forged image of Mona Lisa is a bit foggy in the background and some of those details are incorrect, but the wry smile in the foreground is perfectly captured.

On the contrary, I'm invested quite heavily in the exactly opposite hypothesis -- that the ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini UX you're referring to is not fit-for-purpose.

Oh! Excellent, carry on!

rather than an anthropomorphic entity.

But it unfailingly passes the Turing test, at least with regards to an immature, non-discerning human mind like a child's. You may as well rub a lamp.

But I don't think there is any sort of fundamental barrier that prevents us from building appropriately constrained LLM-based systems.

This iteration of the tech, I agree. In future iterations that use intensive persuasion techniques, who can say?

Which isn't to say that the US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one.

The US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one, though, because it is codified law. Immoral laws eventually get overturned, but until then it is the rule because the collective we says so right now.

What is the derivative work of an AI response? Who is the creator making its derivative works? The AI is not an entity, it is a software engine operating over an obfuscated index.

Beyond the muddiness of copyright, there is the question of human flourishing. How the heck would you train children and adolescents on the responsible use of AI?

The current UX, the "friend computer"-themed REPL, is chock-a-block with moral hazards. Loss of privacy and profiling, fostering undue trust, emotional dependence and manipulation. Like, I get that you're invested in the industry, but we should condemn this tech.

I've considered there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me.

And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.

1619 project is Jacobin-style, revisionist history politics. Defund the Police, Jacobin. To flood drugs, homeless and immigrants into sanctuary cities is intentional Jacobin tactics to cause normal people to become fed up and to overturn the system. Revolutionaries are gonna revolt. Too bad everyone is too tired and distracted to give a crap about their utopian visions.

In rare and extreme circumstances it makes sense to have a revolution because the people are oppressed. For the rest of history, revolutionary fervor always comes from power hungry psychopaths who'd jail and kill everyone that stands in their way and then rule perpetually over everyone that's left if they could.

Thankfully, their time is usually short. They had a good run this time, very sneaky and devilish, but back to the political desert they go.

Somehow "centrist" has taken on a negative connotation in Democratic circles, but I don't understand it. Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation.

Governing in a sustainable way usually means big tent politics with give and take on the small stuff. Bill Clinton epitomized that style.

I also agree that Democrats are too invested in themselves and the status quo to put forward a candidate who will make the kinds of meaningful changes that Democratic voters actually want.

The old saying "the customer doesn't know what they want" seems true of the average Democratic voter. I look at the Democratic party planks as primarily boomer-era causes increasingly misaligned with technological progress and social evolution.

I see average Democratic voters as wistful and earnest, but ultimately not (yet? ever?) grounded with a cohesive vision for modern/future American society _at scale_. In my opinion, the moment for a legitimate new vision to emerge was Occupy Wall Street. All that movement seemed to yield for the grassroots was an acquaintance with homelessness culture.

And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly.

Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election.

Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices.

Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris?

WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.

I think developers have these amazing connections with the work and hope for what connecting can be, what the internet means, and are so inspired by having help with the labor of building.

Yes, this is it, you understand! The little spark of creation that we all can wield is so clear in software development.

But these stories these feelings: they are gonna be crushed. It's not a tale that's easy to tell.

Noooo! This is the narrative. The matrix has you. Don't believe the hype. The problem of existence is choice, and it's a continuous problem.

The top down narrative control is so so powerful now. Your mention of anger at the web is all one and the same. I am seriously yearning for the Lightphone[1] just to disconnect from the web and messaging apps when I'm away from my desk.

[1] https://www.thelightphone.com/lightiii

'Hate' and 'fascist' seem to reliably trigger people to stew in anger and give up their power.

Don't fall for the divide and conquer. You have agency, you can do your part to steer the ship if you can resist the learned helplessness of hatred.

AI is a tool. I enjoy using it as a search engine. But just like I don't trust everything on the internet, I don't blindly trust AI. AI's index the same information as search engines with additional retrieval error factored in.

There are deeply unprofitable modes of AI. The chat interfaces are, as I understand it, deeply unprofitable loss leaders whereas the enterprise API's and agentic stuff is profitable.

Maybe try to intensify your use of the unprofitable offerings if you you dislike what the AI companies stand for before the economics come back to earth for them?

Time for a shameless plug for my friend's product: dependencies built from source and served up a la carte. Removes a lot of trust issues with rando tarballs uploaded by bad actors. There's nothing quite like it.

https://www.activestate.com/curated-catalog/

They sound like very important people no matter what the circumstances are, haha.

Having "house rules" on a team that new members must agree to follow tends to flush such people out and they usually exit on their own when their shenanigans get repeatedly called out as violative. Gotta introduce the rules in the interview process and get agreement after they join. Catching them out early is the key.

We had an intervention on one hard case and he rage quit the next day. I don't know why people do that, it's a small world and people talk.

No offense taken, I see you are wrestling with the idea of faith. The way I look at it, God doesn't just meet you where you are, he pursues. So, if you are meant to surrender, it's a good thing. That just means you were one that didn't get away. Question everything, but don't fight it unnecessarily.

On the other stuff, I will only observe that war is not a human thing. It's too organized, requires inhuman (evil) top down control. Iran is a detestable war just like every other war.

But, there is also the unlimited psychological warfare being waged everywhere now that affects us more directly.

You saw Hegeseth doing a disgusting Deus Vult routine, but I guarantee you the majority of people are tuned out and missed that entirely. (So they get away with it.)

In my opinion, that was another targeted demoralization psyop intended to wound and stun people like us, and for different reasons. It is so far outside the acceptable narrative frame that it cranks everyone up who is paying attention, makes them bewildered and furious and that drowns out other news stories they want everyone to miss.

It is all "fake and ghey", as the kids like to say. How do I know? They're all actors reading scripts, Hegeseth especially. Right out of central casting as Trump says.

What is really happening is a complete toss up. The greatest casualty in war is the truth.

I have no solutions to offer. Just please don't take your frustrations out on normie Christians, even if you think they're misguided, they have no power.

I worry when the rhetoric gets angry and scared. Fear and disgust can lead to atrocities. Who stands to gain when we fight? Who capitalizes every time a lefty shooter pops off? I'd prefer you challenge the rage bait narrative, roll your eyes at how outlandish it all sounds, and become more cynical than scared.

Other insane/outlandish psyops meant to stun and confuse:

* The Charlie Kirk memorial

* Everything that comes out of Stephen Miller's mouth

* Trump coin, Trump nft, Trump Card (immigration)

* The Whitehouse Twitter account, yikers!

Just philosophically speaking, an accidental entropic universe eventually producing Labubus doesn't work either.

History, law, civilization, anti-slavery and the dignity of man all come from judeo-christian teaching, it's not just comfort/assurance. You just gotta be careful who you follow, there's loads of shysters and crummy humans in religion just like everywhere else as you are probably aware.

Church is supposed to be about community, but it never really was for me. I didn't put in enough effort. I still go for the kids.

What hooked me was Bible Study Fellowship[1] where I got a real education in the Bible. That gave me a community where I have a men's group and they know me and we meet weekly and they give good advice and support when things turn sour.

If you want to understand the architecture of the world, check it out. Next year they're doing Romans, holy shit, that one goes deep. Maybe you're searching, and that's a safe place to simply learn.

[1] https://www.bsfinternational.org/