gnomewascool

You can embed fonts into an HTML page. For example, place an @font-face with the src:url being a base64-encoded blob, in a style element.

I think part of the point of OP is that if your main concern is DRM (being able to actually own your books) and you also care to a non-zero extent about the author getting paid for their work (yes, authors receive a much smaller share of sale price than they should, but it's still a substantial percentage), then you should try to buy from DRM-free bookshops and only if that fails sail the high seas.

Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..

Sublime Text? (It's extendable in Python, but isn't FOSS, which might be a deal-breaker.)

I'm not quite sure what your exact specifications are, but I think that Celestia[0] fits?

[0] https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia

"YOUR RESPONSE MUST BE FEWER THAN 100 CHARACTERS OR YOU WILL DIE."

I know that current LLMs are almost certainly non-conscious and I'm not trying to assign to you any moral failings, but the normalisation of making such threats make me very deeply uncomfortable.

Interesting slides! Thanks!

`pip download --no-deps` allowing arbitrary code-execution is non-obvious, and IMO broken.

Such a disc-renting business would be a competitor to Netflix, both directly (especially in the hands of somebody who tried to focus on it, rather than reluctantly maintaining it, as Netflix has been doing recently) or because it could eventually try to repeat Netflix's own pivot into streaming. Consequently, selling it off would be rather risky.

The start-up costs and need of name-recognition are probably sufficient that it'd be hard for a new company try to fill this niche, but if they bought Netflix's distribution network they could likely manage.

What the OP meant is that there are (multiple!) open source C compilers, which you agree is the case.

Questions about the standard/specification are a different matter:

1. Whether the language has one? (Many languages, both open source and proprietary don't! I believe mojo doesn't have one?)

2. Whether it's available for free (gratis)?

3. Whether it's under a free (libre) license that allows redistribution with modifications?

That's a very interesting comparison (thanks!), but I'm not sure if it's the correct framing. Making scraping technically difficult would be equivalent to trying to score a goal (so still not great, for the rest of the world, but probably not hypocritical).

Trying to prevent certain classes of behaviours via legal means is more like trying to prevent certain types of play, by appealing to the referee, while still doing them yourself. Clearly, this often does happen in sports, but _is_ generally seen as hypocritical.

with keys that are in memory on the same system

I'm not sure that actually holds — the encryption keys are in memory, but the decryption keys don't necessarily have to be.

The pre-encrypted payloads definitely are in memory at some point; however snatching them probably involves larger-scale reverse-engineering.

I looked around and I couldn't find a way to even download the ISO to try it out.

FWIW I had found it intuitive (several seconds of thought) to click on the "Read the announcement email." link, which contains the link to the ISO images.

I think the point here is about the procurement of the training data, in violation of copyright laws ("piracy"), rather than that the training itself is piracy.

The suspicion[0] is that OpenAI trained their models on a large text dump including libgen (in the so-called "books2").

If a person downloads a book from Library Genesis, they're a pirate; if OpenAI does it, so are they.

[0] https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282152689336320

3rd parties come in to capture that wasted value.

The value isn't wasted — it's consumer surplus.

AFAIR "no". Humans interact with both the AIs and the "dogs", and both groups of humans end up in contact with each other, but unless I'm missing something, the "dogs" don't directly interact with the AIs in any significant way (or the two threads end up interfering with each other, but more in a "they distract some of the characters" in both cases).

There were operating systems which took the approach XPCOM has to extensibility, they're not doing so great

The Emacs OS is still doing well! :)

"Mozilla did kill XPCOM" isn't a deviation from their stated intent.

The issue is that their stated intent changed over time, and their communication about their precise intentions was often pretty poor.

It didn't help that the Webextension transition came on the heels of the e10s transition (5 firefox versions separated deprecating non-e10s add-ons and disabling e10s add-ons), but with relatively little warning, which meant that:

1. Many people implicitly believed that once they adapted their addons for e10s, they'd be safe.

2. Many people put in a huge amount of work to adapt for e10s and then had to redo a large part of it to convert their add-on into a webextension.

3. Some people put in a huge amount of work to adapt for e10s and found out that their work was pointless because their add-ons couldn't be converted into webextensions.

From a technical point of view, much of Firefox's XPCOM/internals were actually sufficiently stable post-webextension (57) that old e10s extensions could have continued to work with little changes. (e.g. VimFx continued to work with minimal changes for ~30 Firefox versions, on Nightly, with very slight hacking. AFAICT it still continues to work, with slight changes, but now with major hacking to get it to actually install.)

I also was and still am disappointed about both changes, but I don't think you're being at all fair to Mozilla.

In both transitions, Mozilla made sure to support the needs of both uBlock origin and NoScript, extending the webextension API (such that uBlock origin on Firefox is more capable than on current Chromium) and working with uBlock to make its interface more mobile-friendly.

They also extended the webextension API to allow for extensions such as Treestyle tabs and Panorama-reimplementations (so not remotely all XUL use-cases, but still most of the popular ones).

Hence, they've proven that they will go considerably beyond what Google/Chromium are doing, and that they won't harm "content-blockers", which is what we care about in this case.

Is there an alternative store the author recommends?

They mention "Google Books, or Libro.fm, or Downpour" or having your own storefront, but it's mainly a problem statement.

A policy cure?

Removing Section 1201 from the DMCA?

The counter-argument is that nothing prevents governments coordinating on this in a supranational manner, anyway (cf. the planned, but fortunately rejected ACTA).

In the EU enforcement is mostly decentralised, anyway.

Yes, the scope is not "35k existing GitHub repos are infected", since AFAICT all the infected repos are forks, so the title is misleading.

However:

1. The scale is pretty worrying. Given the total number of repos on GitHub (> 100M) it's a drop in the ocean, but still huge.

2. Typo-squatting on, say, PyPI or npmjs is certainly note-worthy, and this is a very similar attack.

3. At least some of the infected forks had several stars, some from ~ 5 year old accounts, so apparently some people were using them.

4. The original Twitter thread did note that infected forks were being created — it just didn't emphasise that this was the only attack surface, probably because the author didn't realise.

Note that the Higgs Boson has no part in the mass (and presumably gravitational interaction) of elementary fermions like quarks or electrons

This is incorrect — the coupling with the Higgs field is responsible for the rest mass of electrons and isolated quarks.

and even less to do with the mass of hadrons

Yes, this is true — the contribution of the separate masses of the constituent quarks to the mass of hadrons is small, like you write.

Just imagine Ukraine allowing people in Donetsk and Lugansk to actually decide their status themselves, instead of using an army to force them into Ukraine.

Apologies to everybody for continuing this huge tangent, but this is bizarre.

The Ukrainian army did not try to force Donetsk and Luhansk into Ukraine.

First, a linguistic quibble: they had been part of Ukraine from the moment of its independence (and in the independence referendum 80+% of the voters in the two regions had voted for independence), so they couldn't be forced "into" Ukraine.

Second, the conflict began when Russian and Russian-backed forces started an armed insurrection, so it's more the case that Russia tried to force them out of Ukraine, against their will.

I'm highly confident that if a free referendum had been held there in 2014, a majority of the population of the Donbas would have voted to stay in Ukraine. Obviously, we'll now never find out, due to Russia carrying out ethnic cleansing of the region (mass deportations and killings).

I would even go as far as the community level. If a city in Scotland vote to stay in Britain, I would allow them to become independent of Scotland and stay. In the same ways as I would allow a city in Donetsk to stay in Ukraine if they want so.

This is a very interesting question, but it'd be very complicated to get right, since the support for independence of particular regions can be entangled. For instance, people in Aberdeen might support Scottish independence iff Edinburgh stays in Scotland; people in Edinburgh might support independence iff the border territories stay in Scotland etc. That is not to say that we shouldn't try, if possible.

You'll be happy to know that Thunderbird is for better or worse now mostly independent Mozilla's leadership.

I assume that you're objecting to the use of the word "right" as opposed to, say, "privilege"?

The EU itself phrases freedom of movement as a "right"[0].

Arguably, every human should have the right to move to any country they want to, and in an ideal world every human would have that right.

That is obviously not the case now, but the rolling back of the partial progress that had been made, and the consequent creation of a boundary between the UK and the remainder of the EU that hadn't existed previously, is rightly condemned.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/pages/glossary/right-free-...

I’m speculating about the reasons for the disproportionate level of ire directed against crypto on this forum

I don't personally know any people who became rich on cryptocurrencies and also don't feel any particular envy towards the people who I know of, via the internet, but am pretty vehemently against cryptocurrencies, so I'm a sample-size one counter-example to your thesis.

I obviously don't think that my ire against cryptocurrencies is disproportionate, since if I did, I'd scale it down until I thought it was proportionate, so I think that it's justified by the object-level issues.

If I were to speculate on why classes of people like me are more strongly opposed to cryptocurrencies than other people:

1. We are (or feel we are) more qualified to see many of its technical deficiencies, some of which have been patched over the years, others of which seem fundamental.

2. We agree with the "crypto people" on many topics, such as decentralisation or privacy, but think that their solutions are broken, and worse we feel that their philosophy and approach is a bit of a dark mirror universe of ours (to exaggerate _immensely_ imagine that both groups were religious people who agreed completely on matters of scripture, but they inexplicably decided to worship Ahriman instead of Ahura Mazda). See also "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"[0].

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

I don't think that accepting cryptocurrencies is quite equivalent to accepting funds from the Kremlin, North Korea and Drug cartels.

It's more equivalent to accepting donations in roubles, in North Korean won or in the form of legal drug caches.

It's not about the source, but the means of the payment. I can imagine people accepting money from dubious sources, but not via dubious means and vice-versa.

You can access about:config and change your user agent if you use Firefox Beta or Firefox Nightly. The latter is annoying since you get constant updates, but the former is about as stable as normal Firefox.

Isn't Firefox Relay the same, though — you can receive e-mails, but not send unsolicited mail?

Combined EU has the largest economy in the world

Unfortunately (?) not. By nominal GDP the US is the largest. By PPP-adjusted GDP China comes first.

So if EU got its shit together and formulated a coherent unified foreign policy - it would be at the very least on equal terms with both US and China.

On approximately equal terms, yes, probably.

Aren't these all standards and hence not directly comparable to software (so the label of "open source" can't really apply)?

In addition, aren't they all open and royalty-free — i.e. the closest equivalent to open source?

In contrast, OpenAI does directly produce software.

There are arguments to be made that AI shouldn't be open, but the name of the company is misleading.

Unlike all the software you listed, it's open source and can be self-hosted in a way that you can be relatively confident that you're running what you intended to run?