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gnerd00

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I don't know

it is abundantly clear from the post, agree

Bill Gates

MSFT declared open source a "cancer" and "a threat to American Values" .. later, almost the entire Internet is run fundamentally on OSS.

What motivations might MSFT have had in 1998 ? Are there clear lessons from the extremes of the past that could be applied now?

Do authors have a right to LICENSE software they write? which ones, only Linus or Daniel Stenberg ? are there others? does a LICENSE mean anything ?

##-- related

From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> To: wire-service@thyrsus.com Subject: Microsoft and the Big Lie Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:47:38 -0400 ...

In the last three months, Jim Allchin and Craig Mundie and Steve Ballmer ... have described it (open source code ed.) as "un-American", "a destroyer", and "a cancer". They have deliberately confused the GPL with non-infectious open-source licenses, and they have deliberately confused active combination of code with passive aggregation of data.

OK you are right but that is selective for an "overview". The attention to documentation has always been outstanding for substantial packages. The culture is to make many repetitive steps into one liner "magic" that sometimes is very very useful; lastly, the completeness of advanced statistical methods in standard libraries is real. ps- I do not like the R language at all myself, but to be fair there are reasons it is widely used in higher ed.

Jobs had some vestige of the value system of Reed College in him - respect for literature, typesetting, fine arts ... which dramatically evolved into a taste for the power-money politics of Silicon Valley, distantly akin to big-business Hollywood at the time.

The "Barbarians of the North of Seattle" had a frat-guy MBA wolf-of-wall-street element that actively mocked and preyed upon artists.. artists were weak and whiny entitled people.. their product was not art with a markup value, but something to be commoditized in the spreadsheet That Must Be Your Master. Bill Gates, after building a what, thirty thousand square foot house? prominantly announced that he had massive digital screens to display art, not purchasing any physical paintings or similar design pieces.. maybe it sounds distant today but at the time it was a specific statement to do that, and announce it.

Most LLMs focus on the English, German, French and Chinese languages, but everything else is... left behind at best.

that is not true, so please read before make an opinion. The French Mistral project shipped seven+ years ago with 140 languages for example.. language translation was the first LLM task from 2015

Maps Camp Google 2007 -- to the assembled 400+ engineers and guests, at the podium. A calm and thoughtful pitch during the five minute talks "You at Google have a special responsibility, we all do, to make a closed loop industrial ecology with this hardware".. Later that month, bills unpaid, rent payments on credit, the blog EWasteInsights folds after two years.. Silicon Valley Bank has a another boozy party...

Communities of Not 2 months ago

An influencer without children becomes a parent, an urban bike commuter by choice buys a Porsche, a respected developer tries LLMs, and the community feels betrayed

wow - certain tech people live in an alternate world. I feel like this group with these problems are like a social anti-matter at this time of history: Isolated in a bizarre network tech, too much money and time, outrage in a teacup, constantly self-referential, untouchable by many.. go live in space suits then.. bye

do writers and authors still really care about AI

it is demographics.. there is no single answer, you are talking about millions of people with varying amounts of this JOB description

most people are completely put off by AI slop

this is almost pathological.. most people consume media not produce it. Those in the business of media have been eliminating people for thirty years, and this AI tooling has multiplied that effect

the value of XXXX writing or image generation generation is basically zero

yes - bingo.. the average capable person now can expect to be paid ZERO for their ability to personally produce writing or image generation.. and, if you don't start somewhere, you will never get to ascend the ladder of success in those fields, by definition

I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too

consistent with the other statements here, this is 180 degrees false.. substantiation? the content of the letter signed by world class mathematicians, who are visibly quite concerned

Xeon is a group of products with really varying specs. There is no indication of which XEONs. Also new consumer CPUs often have really small internal caches.

I knew a Buddhist monk in Berkeley in the 1990s who was very interested in "games" to teach Dharma.. Games in those days did not look like they do in the last ten years.. Obviously what is now called AAA games are very much the opposite of Dharma talks..

BBEdit 16 2 months ago

So great to see this -- the last version of BBedit I paid for is the gold standard for me, for editors... I mean compared to twenty other editors of various kinds on desktop Linux and elsewhere..