OpenAI’s notion of “fair use”: military and weapons

Those type of companies are getting so f*****g disgusting.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/12/openai-changes-policy-to-allow-military-applications/ https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036397/openai-is-softening-its-stance-on-military-use

Google loves open source likely for another reason than you do.

Google loves open source when they can capitalize on it.

That is, when a big community works on code that Google can use for free to build their monopolistic infrastructure. They love a global community which works for them for free. They might even foster this community as far as it serves their purpose or for image reasons.

However, if they’d truly love open-source, they could open the source code to their core services. But they’d never ever do that. For this reason they also ban the AGPL license internally (https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy). The AGPL license would force Google to open their code which relies on AGPL licensed projects. Google hates that.

Google does clearly not stand for the ethical values people usually have in mind when talking about open source. For example when something is competing with them, they’ll hate it. Like ad-blockers or browsers which don’t block ad-blockers like Google chrome does. The core business of Google is about surveillance and advertising. To maximize the profitability of this, then need to violate freedoms of their users (like the freedom to use their service while blocking ads). This is in direct conflict with the ethical values often implied by free and open-source software.

So if somebody tells you “Google loves open-source and contributes a lot”, think about what it really means.

gitlab.com is a for profit service/company. They have an open-source community edition of Gitlab which you can run on your own server. Codeberg is a non-profit association running the open-source software “forgejo” for you. At Codeberg you can become a member and then you can vote for important decisions and make proposals. People also care about ethics there. Nobody cares about profit. Codeberg runs on donations from members. I think some people feel more respected at Codeberg because the governing body of Codeberg is a subset of its users. If Gitlab cares about you, then probably because a bad user experience would be bad for business.

According to the experience of a friend, eating 1kg carrots a day makes your skin go slightly orange. You’ll likely notice only in places where the skin is thin and white. For example around your knuckles when you form your hand into a fist.

Selling railway infrastructure to car manufacturers is generally a bad idea. That’s how the car industry contributed to killing public transportation in the US.

Public transport is their competition. Killing it brings profit. Very simple logic.

It serves a purpose. But an evil one: stopping journalists from reporting on US war crimes

The rape story was part of a mud campaign. It was made up and the world fell for it. What happens here is: A journalist publishes proofs of US war crimes. And the war criminals (US gov) come after him because of exactly that. Their message is clear: who ever reports on our crimes will be destroyed. This is a fight against press freedom and against the democratic freedom as we think to know it.

https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange

EU subsidizes fossil fuel instead. But how could this be a problem…

Pessimists know the “rebound effect”: improvement in efficiency leads us to do more of the thing. More illumination for example. This (partially) counteracts the good effects.

It is completely creepy. Think about who is behind Open AI. That’s a mixture of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (Palantir), Microsoft and others. A right-wing, anti democratic, anti-human and purely profit oriented group. The name “Tools for Humanity” is complete sarcasm. What they do with Worldcoin smells like a modern attempt of colonization. Collecting biometry, subverting critical infrastructure (financial systems), making fake promises, blinding poor people with shiny metal balls and a little bit of money in some cases.

This can be stopped though! The Kenyan government apparently banned the project - for good.

$25 million? That’s ridiculously cheap.

Also fun to read this (by Google employee): https://blog.yoav.ws/posts/web_platform_change_you_do_not_like/ I literally snacked popcorn.

KiCad. Stay away from closed-source tools. They’ll all try to press out the max amount of money sooner or later. Or get bought and discontinued for eliminating competition.

Bin auch erleichtert. Die SVP hat sich recht ins Zeug gelegt.

Do you have a reflow oven? Or simply with a hot air gun? How do you do it?

Alone the sponsors of the Rust Foundation I find very questionable (Amazon, Google, Huawei, Meta, Microsoft, https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ on the bottom). Unfortunately, corporatism is what you get from corporations. Happy to hear about the crab-lang fork.