acoustics

Seems to be alphabetical

It's your project, to the extent that you own the copyright. You are free to switch the license on your project, etc. If anyone tries to shame you for this, you should pay no mind. (Edited to add that you are also free to abandon it, and you could do that with a clear conscience.)

Likewise, users are free to continue using open source software without payment or donation, to fork the project, etc. If anyone tries to shame them for this, they should pay no mind.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it.

What does bother me is when the projects pivot to claiming that users now have a moral obligation to financially support the project. There is a kind of dishonesty in this move.

It's not that a successful project "should be free", it's that its success depended on it being free. If they had said all along that they'd eventually ask users to pay, that would be honest... but then they wouldn't have seen much of that adoption in the first place.

That would be a completely insane thing to do. I suppose it's possible, but I really doubt it.

"Let's widely publicize a tort/crime that our computer systems did, and then cross our fingers that nobody ever sues us or does even the most basic investigation that would immediately uncover our criminal conspiracy."

In the insane corporate crimes you read about (maybe FTX, or the eBay stalking scandal), they were trying to cover things up, not heap public attention on it for months.

> The Right/Republicans have always touted free speech.

> The Left have always been a bit more 'censory'

Not "always", and not even now. It's always contingent and situational. Same goes for nearly every clause in the Bill of Rights.

At various points the left has been associated with the fights against obscenity laws, against Cold War loyalty oaths, against blacklisting, against bans of books.

At various points the right has been associated with the fights against desecration of the American flag, against the teaching of human evolution in schools, against depictions of sex in media, against anti-war demonstrations.

Lots of people are saying agentic cyberattacks are a marketing hoax. The argument is that either AI is not capable enough to carry out these attacks, or that it would not carrying out these attacks without nudging from the labs, or even that somebody told it to do cyberattacks and the companies are baldly lying. My question is: what evidence would cause you to change your mind about this?

I'm not even saying it's an incorrect position. But to take the claim seriously and act accordingly, it needs to be falsifiable.

AI boosters and detractors alike often hedge their claims so that whatever ends up actually happening, they can say they were right all along. When that happens, the discussion boils down to people saying "yay AI" and "boo AI" at each other without exchanging any substantive information.

Really? I thought Maps was pretty constistently up to date with GNIS changes.

What would be a valid basis for relabeling a shared body of water for US users?

Would it be based on popular usage? The procedure by which it changed? Maybe we distinguish between bicameralism and presentment, an executive order, and the discretion of a bureaucrat. Or do we normally take the government database at its word but treat this as a sui generis "this guy is being an asshole" exception?

Not trying to interrogate you specifically. I am pondering these questions myself. I don't like that the name changed but I'm hard pressed to think of a good neutral policy that doesn't also sweep up a bunch of (far stickier) renaming situations around the world.

jj has made me much more comfortable using non-linear DAGs in my trunk-based development workflow. Several changes with the same parent, changes with several different parents, etc.

I used to have a habit of imposing an unnecessary ordering structure on my work product. My stack of changes would look like A -> B -> C -> D, even if the order of B and C was logically interchangeable.

jj makes DAGs easier to work with because of how it handles conflicts and merges. Now I feel empowered to be more expressive and accurate about what a change actually depends on. In turn, this makes review and submission more efficient.

At internet scale, this would roughly be equivalent to not doing any warning or detection at all.

Scalable systems need to use heuristics to catch threats. Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged.

There is a policy argument as to the right balance of concerns here. But there is a clear trade-off to make.

How is any kind of antivirus or threat detection software supposed to operate on this standard?

Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.

And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.

It seems that many people lean into the "community" aspect of open source. In real communities there are webs of mutual responsibility. If you use open source to fill the role of community in your life, it makes sense psychologically that you would project moral stakes or obligation onto the maintainers. But this is really not fair to the maintainers who don't view their work that way.

> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage.

Agreed. Boards like this are helpful for getting RISC-V to the next stage, where it could make sense for more users.

I'm not sure if it's true that the leader is less powerful.

In many countries, it seems that the leader has near total control over candidate selection, and dissent is punished ruthlessly.

In the US, it's easier for a member of Congress to openly dissent against the President's agenda. This was a major thorn in the side for e.g. Joe Biden.

Some Republicans today fear dissenting (though of course, most are enthusiastically on board), but I'm not sure that it would be any different in a place like Canada or the UK.