lin83

First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.

I don't find that the least bit credible. The proposition forum administrators would tolerate someone "warning others" against the core uniting aspect of their community is not realistic. Generally anyone who questions orthodoxy in such niche communities face vitriol and get banned quickly. Apostates do not hang around religious conversion forums talking about deconversion, gender transition desisters are not welcome on transgender support forums etc.

The survey was just 21 people "exclusively contacted in BIID internet forums". How many people who cut off a limb and regretted it would stick around the forum that fed their compulsion to do it?

I also avoid those platforms but that also means self-exclusion from entire communities. I've seen large groups (DnD groups, gaming/sports clubs, obscure tech forums etc) being swallowed wholesale by Facebook, then Reddit and now Discord. That may not matter for a random game group but unfortunately Twitter is where most of the worlds journalists post and network.

Also you can use the official Bitwarden clients with a free open source self-hosted backend, like vaultwarden [1].

[1] https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/

unfortunately the alternatives to Google are usually not any better in this respect.

I don't that's necessary true. Google (and maybe Facebook) are unique in the size of personal data they hold and they types of data they have access to. If you move email or docs or search to something else, at least that's one less data source for them about you. (Assuming they are not selling it to data brokers Google has access to.)

I also have Youtube left on my list. I also find it a little too addictive. Instead of using a browser, I use RSS to subscribe to the channels I'm interested in. From my RSS reader (newsbeat) I can even directly play the video (via mpv + yt-dlp).

It's difficult to overstate how bad things have been for the past 1.5yrs. Automotive and Industrial microcontrollers and components in particular are impossible to source. I have a friend at one of the big US semiconductor companies. His team exhausted their main competitor's evaluation boards stocks on various sites to strip them for components to populate their own boards (which are hand delivered to selected customers). For non-critical applications they're using grey market Chinese components and even Chinese clones of some of their less complicated parts. Even then it's far from enough.

ASML, who makes some of the most advanced products on earth for semiconductor manufacturing, have apparently purchased washing machines to harvest components. [1]

[1] https://hothardware.com/news/asml-ceo-claims-chip-shortage-f...

Hiring lawyers is probably going to cost more than the 7000 dollars taken from him. Large companies probably spend that much on their legal teams per hour.

People the British government don't like and who they have subjected to torture and extra-judicial killings, the biggest example being people in Northern Ireland opposing Union with Great Britain.

If the requirement to be narrow and time limited is not codified in law (which afaik it is not) it is pretty much guaranteed such broad searches will happen. All it takes is convincing a judge.

If the past has taught us anything it's that law enforcement will use any tool to the maximium of what is allowed and then beyond (e.g. coerced phone searches, racially motivated stop and search, drug dogs to force vehicle searches, privately sourced licence plate tracking and face recognition, criminal DNA testing from rape kits, forced biometric collection and more).

There isn't a threshold for copyright violation. If you copy a 3 line function from a GPL library, you have to comply with the licence. Tools like BlackDuck will pick it up.

Snippets aren't exactly defined but I see them as more than just a single line like "here's how to flatten a list in Python", it's some functionality - e.g. an algorithm implementation or some task.

I’m deeply disturbed that you think this form of plagiarism is universal

This thread is an eye opener for me too. Do engineers not get trained on their legal obligations? My company is old and not a tradition tech company but we have been running workshops on the issue for years. Even if they don't, what about their legal teams? Or CI tools to scan for licence violations? Some of the responses here are so naive it's crazy. I hope no one is identifying the companies they work for.

I don't think that's true and, if it was, it would be the death knell for open source.

Code Plagiarism is taken very seriously by every company I have worked with. Multiple companies have been sued for violating the GPL. The SFC is currently fighting Vizio in court for example. While not commonplace, to say it's "almost impossible" is a stretch. Every large company complies with code copyright obligations for a reason. My company publishes changes to GCC and a dozen other GPL projects. Entire products like Protocode and BlackDuck exist to ensure code compliance. Even small code snippets are flagged.

Over the past few years the source code for Windows, SQL server, Bing and Cortana have all been leaked. If someone built a product using that code, how long do you think it would take Microsoft to sue? CoPilot is one rule for mega-corps and another for everyone else.

Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission.

Something being cool doesn't exempt it from discussion of its ethics and certainly doesn't exempt it from legal consequences. Often what people call "disruption" is often just exploiting resources/people/their work in unsustainable ways until oversight is introduced.

If CoPilot is copy/pasting large amount of code with unknown licenses, that is a large and real risk for users aside from violating open source projects licenses.

I believe the previous Python support extension started out as an independent open source project until Microsoft hired its main developer.

It’s baffling.

Vendor Lock in? Same reason you can't use the VSCode marketplace of mostly open source extensions on a non-Microsoft build of VSCode or any of the remote work features.

Insult charges apply when an individual insults another in public to damage their social reputation.

This is a gift to the rich and powerful to punish and gag whistleblowers and activists.

Isn't that what certification is? COMPTIA etc?

We needed healthcare reform. What we got was the ACA.

What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????

Wealthy powerful interests who fund politicans on both sides ensure those reforms fail or are watered down to nothing. This is not about complexity. It's simple corruption.

but with a surplus of sovereignty.

And not even that. Similar agreements and compromises on shared standards, data transfer, compliance etc still have to be made to enable trade. Brexit voters were promised a "bonfire of regulations" yet red tape has doubled to continue trade with the EU and the trade deals the UK has signed with Japan and others are literal copy/paste of EU ones.

Is Jaguar an interpreter and Toit the scripting language? How does it compare to MicroPython? Can I link in C drivers?

Testers are fascinating. I worked on firmware for a part under test and was amazed that tests are often literal vectors of bits and that interfaces (UART, JTAG etc) are bit banged. The Test team was super focused on time with the mindset being every additional second of test time was a million dollars less profit on the part.

Surnames are a direct indication and to a lesser extent place of birth I believe.

Yes, we are literally trained for that - to keep distance with cars ahead of us, expect the unexpected and so on. We are also told not to drive cars without proper maintaince (and inforced by law in most places) so our cars are reliable.

I wonder if future driver training will factor in spotting problems with self-driving or related functions.

It's honestly like a black mirror episode. "I have to have maintain a mental model of how my black box ML car AI will act so I don't die or kill other road users... and it can be updated daily."

You are assuming the default is negative.

I am assuming the default is negative - for Google.

I work for a far far older engineering company which is built on maintaining good relationships with our customers, vendors and their engineers. It is the exact opposite of the AI driven, frustrating/pointless bot response attitude of big tech companies. I like to think the difference is that we haven't optimised out our humanity yet.

I'm not sure there is anyone nice here. This is likely cynical corporate damage control at best or the work of an annoyed Google employee who happens to use this app and took a personal interest. I love Fairmail and as a paid user I'm glad it's back on the PlayStore but nothing about this makes me think better of Google or anyone in charge there.

I'm glad Nvidia made the right call at the end of the day. I like to think that developers taking a stand against EGL Streams contributed to their move to open more of their Limux driver stack.

going so far as to disable NVIDIA's non-free driver support in his wayland window manager/compositor Sway.

AFAIK this is backwards. It was NVIDIA developers that decided to invent their own thing (EGL Streams) instead of supporting Mesa GBM. This meant open source projects had to support a special backend for wayland specifically for NVIDIA harware. KDE also refused to support it until an NVIDIA dev stepped up to do the work for them.

Sway works on Nouveau (the severely limited open source NVIDIA driver) with the wonderfully named flag "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia".

I don't believe I said that is the case. A situation with poor or unintended incentives is not hard to imagine.

1) A team is tasked with providing suggestions to improve emails

2) "Inclusive language" or avoiding potentially insulting language is added as a feature by higher ups

3) The more entries in the "Inclusive language" feature the better the outcome looks to management or it helps meet some arbitrary employee metric (velocity or x issues resolved or similar)

4) More and more entries get added because it is easy to do

I am absolutely concerned about some of their actions, like their paused "inclusive suggestions" [1]. There's a big difference between providing a guide and highlighting words in an email that are marked as 'wrong' purely for perceived cultural reasons.

Google's suggestion to change "landlord" for example, which has very specific cultural baggage and, more importantly, legal definitions, to something else is definitely wrong and worrying. I think it takes a certain arrogance that maybe only a Silicon Valley tech company can have to try to change how billions of people speak.

I'm not sure how much of an ideology it is though. Like the writers guide above, once the reasonable suggestions have been made, the authors seem to overreach to find more things to "fix". If a persons job depends on finding "problems" they will simply create new ones once the run out of legitimate ones. I think that's true whether it's planning officers for property development or politicians.

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/25/google-word...