Tried atproto and bluesky and left the whole ecosystem because the people who made and maintain bsky are shitty people that I don't want to be associated with.
I agree with the "get your own domain" part. But I'm done with the faux decentralization of bsky and wouldn't bother with the time and maintenance investment in any of the other supposed "social media" schemes like mastodon or nostr.
Just putting up my own social network on my own domain and treating it like a blog. Whatever else social media pretends to be useful for, I'm happy to ignore.
At this point, I just assume anyone who advocates for the use of AI is actually just an output from some AI. Given that "human-sounding speech" is the thing that AI is most easily able to produce, and how many different AIs are out there, and how beneficial an army of never-softening commenters can be for any specific pet cause you like, I can't think of why it wouldn't be statistically irresponsible to not assume that.
I've met enough real humans with completely self-important defenses of it that I know that they exist, so I'm willing to at least give them doubt. But the assumption is that they are AI and they need to prove being human. To assume otherwise is unreasonable.
Being honest, I don't know what a 4GL is. But the rest of them absolutely DID claim to help me do things I was already doing. And, actually, NFTs and the Metaverse even specifically claimed to be able to help with coding in various different flavors. It was mostly superficial bullshit, but... that's kind of the whole tech for those two things.
In any case, Segways promised to be a revolution to how people travel - something I was already doing and something that the marketing was predicated on.
3DTVs - a "better" way to watch TV, which I had already been doing.
NFTs - (among other things) a financially superior way to bank, which I had already been doing.
Metaverse - a more meaningful way to interact with my team on the internet, which I had already been doing.
A 4GL is a "fourth generation language"; they were going to reduce the need for icky programmers back in the 70s. SQL is the only real survivor, assuming you're willing to accept that it counts at all. "This will make programmers obsolete" is kind of a recurrent form of magic tech; see 4GLs, 5GLs, the likes of Microsoft Access, the early noughties craze for drag-and-drop programming, 'no-code', and so forth. Even _COBOL_ was kind of originally marketed this way.
lol! I thought this was going to link to some kind of innovative mobility scooter or something. I was still going to say "oh, good; when someone uses the good parts of AI to build something different which is actually useful, I'll be all ears!", because that's all you would really have been advocating for if that was your example.
But - even funnier - the thing is an urbanist tech-bro toy? My days of diminishing the segway's value are certainly coming to a middle.
Since you broached the topic, I've got an open curiosity about projects like that: if I manufactured entirely new assets, completely independently from the source game (possibly not even matching the source; like a different "skin" or "theme"), and then used those assets in a "clone" (in all but assets) of the source game, would that run afoul of IP law? I'm aware that anything can be litigated, but is there some quirk of IP protection for that kind of thing, or would I be able to use the cloned source with completely new assets without really infringing on anything? Does the cloned (re-coded? recomposed? clean-roomed?) source cause issues or create some kind of legal link from the original assets to the unrelated ones?
Again, just idle curiosity. No actual intentions here, so just wondering if anyone has some deeper knowledge on the subject.
Game mechanics are not considered copyrightable[1]. If you had a clean room implementation with your own significantly different assets, it would be allowed.
However, the exact definitions of "significantly different" and "assets" is where things start to get fuzzy. While you could definitely make a very similar RTS game, exactly how similar can you get? EA doesn't own "military-themed RTS", but they probably do own "Soviets vs Allies with about 5 different unit types, air transports, and tesla coils." Getting even more fuzzy, are unit abilities considered assets, or game mechanics? It'd have to be worked out in court.
My gut feeling is these clone engines would probably lose in court. I think the specific expression of the general game mechanics being cloned here probably would constitute infringement. But there isn't much upside to the IP owners to pursue enthusiastic hobbyists cloning a 20+ year old game in a non-commercial way, so they let it slide.
[1] "Although Amusement World admitted that they appropriated Atari's idea, the court determined that this was not prohibited, because copyright only protects the specific expression of an idea, not the idea itself." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari,_Inc._v._Amusement_World...
I'm sure if EA could undo their release of Red Alert and C&C as open-source, they would.
OpenRA simply downloads a copy that it loads for the purpose of assets, but the engine is completely new, and it is very different from the orignal Red Alert. At this point, I don't think a single unit acts exactly the way it did in the original game. It's endlessly being rebalanced.
IIRC if you make entirely new assets you're good to go. OpenTTD (Open source version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe) has its own custom made assets, but can also be used with the original if you own them.
Not sure it's ever been proven definitively in court, though. And if you "made" custom assets that were exactly like the original ones only with a 1px color difference or something I'm sure you'd fall foul of it. What counts as different "enough" is always debatable.
It would probably be the usual clean room reverse engineering rules: one guy describes the assets to be cloned, and then another guy who has never seen the originals uses that documentation to create the replacements.
Once you've seen the originals, you're contaminated and no longer suitable for the role of doing the replacement work.
Oh, awesome! Yeah, this is a great example of something that I would have guessed would kind of be "over the line" being that it looks similar enough to be an issue. I'm glad it's not, though! But, either way, it's a perfect practical example of what I was wondering about, so thanks!
Unfortunately I think definitive answers are difficult to come by. No one cares that much about Transport Tycoon so no one is motivated to enforce anything. But if you made a clone of Call of Duty that had models as similar as OpenTTDs are to the original you might find yourself in hot water.
https://freedoom.github.io/ does that for the still proprietary DOOM assets. Though the DOOM engine itself is open source, so a slight different situation than Command and Conquer.
> It’s like we’ve chosen to ignore the truth in favor of a good story or a good feeling.
Aww, man. I've got some bad news for you about literally any fact you know that isn't derived from math. And even that is still, philosophically, just some stories we're telling ourselves about the observations we're all seeing.
My downvote was to indicate that I reject your implication that there are legitimate reasons to keep his communications with government officials private. "Government" is, in most instances, replaceable with "Public". If you don't want your private business to be public knowledge, do not do business with the public. And if you do business with the public, expect that business to be public. There are mechanisms to protect "private" information that do not require government secrecy or redactions. Private businesses use them all the time. They are fallible, sure, but so is everything. More importantly, they are subject to subpoena and other legal remedies so they can be made public if necessary, but they are otherwise private (unlike email). And no, it doesn't matter to me what levels of harm can be done by the lack of secrecy; that's not a reason to be secret, that's a reason to not provide so much harm exposure. Government should be minimizing risk, not providing mechanisms that engender it. Besides, if my refusal to show ID to a cop with no RAS can still get me arrested, obviously the state understands the law as a "do the bad thing, sort it out later" kind of setup. So show us the emails and let's start working to fix the fallout.
But the position that because an institution works on behalf of the public, every communication it receives should be public seems naive. The entire publicly funded criminal justice service depends on secrecy to function, for example. Similarly, the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory or how to build a Falcon 9 any more than it needs to know the identities of whistleblowers, and if you don't redact that information, you don't get people blowing whistles or sharing their expansion plans with governors or IP with NASA. Without the ability to deliver suitcases full of cash in response to a private conversation being inconvenienced in the slightest.
As you've already pointed out, we have such things as subpoenas already to deal with the actual criminal conduct. This is a better approach than "don't write anything you wouldn't share with everyone", not least because the latter actually normalizes every interaction with government officials being a request for an off-the-record in-person conversation.
> the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory
Putting aside your other sensible comments, this one is true from Tesla's side, but false from the government side. I don't "need" to know what Tesla is doing, but I "need" to know what the government is doing. Let's say Tesla is weighing its options where to open the next factory, I want to know what governments are doing to attract (or not) their business.
I mean, the impact of that usually fairly public anyway, especially if it involves subsidies or legislative changes. Companies are free to whinge about legislators they consider obstructive too; Elon loves it!
I'll put it another way. Florida is quite happy to send state officials very publicly to small events explicitly focused in reeling in businesses, do a very public presentation about how they don't do socialist things like handouts but do offer them material support in building out their US base in Florida, and then hang around for networking. It's very much part of their jobs, and it's advertised and reported on, and in at least some cases open to the general public. So if I'd wanted to sidle up to Jared Purdue and explain why Florida's state investment fund should underwrite part of the cost of a space propulsion facility near Cape Canaveral, I was at a small event nowhere near Florida where I totally could have done that recently. But if I have no expectations that commercially sensitive data will be protected I'm almost certainly not going to consider following up by sharing financial projections and plans and evidence for his staff to review (and yet would be free to proceed if he can make things happen based purely on 5 minutes conversations or suitcases stuffed with cash) . I suspect Florida voters would prefer their DOT to be able to have that proper follow-up though (or would if the plant was likely to happen in the next 2 years and likely to end up in Florida...)
If the public wants more insight into what governments are doing to attract business you get that from budget transparency, formal review processes, publicised state support thresholds, independent anti corruption monitoring etc and of course PR about success stories, not by placing all written correspondence with businesses into the public domain, a measure which will severely limit their ability to [selectively] attract business. First thing I'd want the government to do to attract business is to respect the same confidences everyone else does, and that means where the new plant might be is non public information.
Likewise Elon can threaten or offer campaign contributions to a governor over the phone and probably does so, but if he wants to actually do the responsible thing and email lots and lots of arguments and evidence to try to persuade a governor that vetoing a bill is a bad thing, it's probably reasonable to assume that some of that is commercially sensitive (ironically if it's financial or technical details redacted from long emails is actually material to changing the governor's mind, it's probably because the case is better than the generic "yay Gigafactory, yay looser autonomous test regimes" arguments that get trotted out). Better to have a paper trail only suitably cleared people can see than nobody prepared to leave any paper trail at all.
And yeah, it's Elon, so there's probably other stuff that has nothing to do with his companies redacted too, but that's another issue entirely
You are putting "attracting businesses" as a bigger priority than public accountability of the government elected by the public? Why even have the farce of a democracy if the purpose of government in your view is to attract businesses?
There are mechanisms for businesses to share confidential information with government officials, and keep it under wraps if the release of them could undermine their businesses, use these mechanisms instead of trying to make government communication opaque to the public in the name of "attracting businesses".
More government transparency is never, ever, a bad thing, the few exceptions where it might require transparency to be reduced need to be very clear cut to avoid being abused (as is common in the USA to call "national security" and redact a shit ton of stuff), the less transparent your government is, the bigger chances it's just being corrupted, no one wants that.
> You are putting "attracting businesses" as a bigger priority than public accountability of the government elected by the public? Why even have the farce of a democracy if the purpose of government in your view is to attract businesses?
If you're going to respond to day old threads, at least try to engage with arguments in good faith. If someone (reasonably) suggests that what the government does to attract businesses is a matter of public interest, then naturally my reply is going to point out that not sharing all their commercially sensitive plans and positions is a good start. At no point have I even hinted that attracting business is government's highest priority. It isn't, but nor is "indiscriminately publishing every email ever sent to a public official" automatically a higher one.
There are indeed mechanisms to share confidential information with government officials. One of those mechanisms is that commercially sensitive information shared with public officials gets redacted from emails shared in the public interest. Like all mechanisms it can be abused, but the public is still better off from knowing the general gist that Elon had a lot of email exchanges with the governor, some of which have been published and some of which redacts stuff that was either sensitive business detail or very embarrassing than they are if a similar exchange took place through unofficial channels instead.
I don't have much to add here, I think we've reached the point where nuance is necessary, and "it depends" comes into play. This Abbot / Elon _seems like_ an abuse of confidentiality for competitive reasons, which itself can bring a bunch of other problems (like insider trading). But overall of course there are reasons for secrecy, and probably mechanisms to minimize that, like does the government REALLY needs to know details that would compromise competitiveness to make decisions? But we would go back to "it depends".
Anyway that's a lot for simplistic HN threads, and I enjoyed your replies.
Sorry it seems naive to you. But if someone is going into business with me (a part of the public), I expect to be able to see EVERYTHING that business has communicated with "the public" (which includes me). Like the other commenter said: I do need to know where the government plans to allow the next gigafactory or falcon 9 launchpad.
As far as whistleblowers and other such information, it's a nice deflection, but it's obviously irrelevant to this topic. I didn't claim anything about how the government should publicize everything, I made claims about what the government should share regarding business deals. Steelman, don't strawman.
And as far as your fear-mongering about everyone suddenly insisting on off-the-record conversations, A) it's a laughable premise; most people don't mind their business with the government being public on account of knowing what "public" means and B) anyone who tried to use off-the-record interaction as a means to circumvent public scrutiny would leave a trail of their behavior that could be relied upon in trial or legislative debate to evidence a law broken or a loophole to be made illegal. Simple as.
You can expect to see it all you like; you won't unless and until you can persuade enough other members of the public to vote for a platform of amending freedom of information legislation to stop redacting sensitive information (unless its a whistleblower identity apparently)
I'm sorry you find it "laughable" and "fear-mongering" that people will switch to off the record conversations. Perhaps you are not aware that government officials already spend most of their day talking to people in unrecorded conversations, with many of those conversations being with representatives of business.
As it is, companies will also happily follow those questions up with slide decks, projections, technical details and requests for information etc which helps substantiate their pitch or their case for funding or their objection to a bill (unless they're actually doing something dodgy, in which case creating a paper trail is counterproductive). They will not send this information if that is expected to be publicly disclosed because they don't want everybody knowing that they are emailing Texas officials about a Texan location before they've even decided if they actually want one or how much they're spending on widgets from which suppliers. Never mind other intriguing possibilities like NASA circulating all the technical documentation SpaceX has shared with them.
If you are truly convinced that 'most people don't mind their business with the government being public on account knowing what "public" means', I advise you to test this hypothesis by emailing some businesses asking them to share unredacted content of emails they have recently exchanged with government officials (a no-effort filter on .gov domains in their own mailbox is sufficient for this experiment). Let us know how many unredacted emails they share with you...
It's hilarious that you seem to think that what you suggested is tantamount to what I suggested. You also don't seem to have actually worked with the government or requested any information via foia requests, based on your descriptions.
In any case, good luck on whatever you're trying to convince whoever your trying to convince of.
Or alternatively maybe I'm the participant in this discussion that's actually raised significant government funding based on sharing sensitive projections and technical detail, met elected officials doing their "we support business and dual use technology for national security" visits and had to reassure VCs that space agency disclosure requirements don't actually jeopardise IP.
Reason I'm able to that is precisely because I know full well that transparency legislation acknowledges that commercial sensitivity is a thing, and that parts of some emails made to evaluate us aren't going to be shared under FOIA legislation. And frankly if it wasn't, it would stop the appropriate email exchanges about business impact of policy changes, not inappropriate conversations people might want to have about campaign contributions. If you want FOIA tweaked to work on the sovcit principle that since the public is paying their bills everything shared with public officials is also public, you're the one that needs to do the convincing.
Let me know how you get on with those emails "most" businesses are happy to share the unredacted contents of.
The thing I love most about the "why am I not just saying the boring, clumsy thing I'm actually thinking, instead of assuming everyone already understands it" rabbit hole is that once you actually commit to it, everything becomes simpler and easier. It takes away the pretense of religion, or anything supernatural, and it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them (which, ironically, doesn't make people think you're dumb, it just makes them introspect about why you would "just SAY that").
Of course, once you circle around to realizing that most human interaction is dependent upon insinuation and assumption (and how that often helps), and that most movies (media, in general) is made for people who haven't figured out how to be a person yet by people who haven't figured out the kind of person they really want to be yet, it lessens the overall takeaways from it. But things are a lot simpler!
> it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them
It’s actually had the opposite effect for me, of making everyone think I’m smarter.
It turns out that a lot of the time when nobody was mentioning the “obvious” solution or how we would avoid the “obvious” problem, it wasn’t because I was too dumb or inexperienced to know the implicit answer… but because actually nobody else in the room found those obvious. They’d not noticed at all.
You have to be careful with this, though. Nobody in management wants to hear why their process for collecting and/or analyzing “metrics” is flawed and renders the whole thing totally meaningless in ways that a slightly-bright high schooler who halfway paid attention is their science classes should be able to spot—in fact, the point was only to pretend to be “data driven”, not to do passable science (that’s way too expensive, companies are interested in doing it approximately never), in practically every case. All that stuff’s fake, and everyone’s just pretending it’s not, so pointing it out is gauche. Just nod along and don’t mention the blatant confounders that plausibly allow that the real trend line goes the other way. Or that to get a useful dataset they’ll need minimum two years of gathering data to even begin to draw conclusions… and we have not been collecting those data, so the timer starts now at best. Nobody cares, you’ve missed the point, which has nothing to do with actually learning things to guide decisions.
I agree with the "get your own domain" part. But I'm done with the faux decentralization of bsky and wouldn't bother with the time and maintenance investment in any of the other supposed "social media" schemes like mastodon or nostr.
Just putting up my own social network on my own domain and treating it like a blog. Whatever else social media pretends to be useful for, I'm happy to ignore.