immibis2

The people working for Unreal/Unity/Godot. Nobody writes search engines any more - except for Google et al. Nobody writes advertising systems - except for all the advertising businesses.

If it has a pittance of cache, then mechanical sympathy might not mean cache-friendliness. Linked lists were mechanically sympathetic on uncached systems - it cost the same to access any byte of memory, so you might as well go directly to the one you wanted.

Game jams aren't software projects - they are jams. Indeed you need a bunch of people to have a jam of any type. A project can spawn from a jam, but it isn't the jam.

this wasn't flagged, you just wrote [flagged]

That's literally what a blog post is, yes.

Is that all that relevant? Surely even if AI becomes financially unsustainable in the next two years, it's still rational to use it right now while it's VC-funded.

Several points:

You need to build a thing first. Community doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. License doesn't matter if you don't have cool software. I'm seeing people forget this principle a lot recently.

The best thing you can do to promote free software is to make good free software. I was recently invited to sign a European digital sovereignty petition (which I am not eligible to sign). Know what helps much more with that? Making European digital sovereign systems. Instead of petitioning the government to switch MS Office to LibreOffice someone would have to actually put in the effort to find out why the government doesn't use LibreOffice, and fix that. (It's probably not because it doesn't run on their computers!)

You have to use copyleft licenses or else the software quickly becomes unfree, if it's actually worth anything. This doesn't happen to most non-copyleft free software because it's not worth very much, not because it doesn't happen.

A community of users doesn't have much value. Any forum or Discord guild or mailing list is secondary to the actual software and it actually being used. Plenty of successful software has no "community" - sudo, for example. Plenty of software with a "community" is not successful. Some software is successful and has a community, like Blender.

A community of developers is only valuable if they're doing valuable things. The Fediverse chat group that shared the link to the European digital sovereignty petition - no useful Fediverse software seems to be coming out of the people in that group. It's all about ivory-tower protocols that won't possibly work in the real world, and stuff like that. No actually working software.

We also have to stop over-estimating the worth of free software just because it's free. Good free software is good software which is also free software. No software is bad, bad software is also bad. Some random code you wrote and published somewhere on the internet usually isn't very useful, and that's probably why it doesn't have a community. Don't try to create a community first - that won't make the software any better. You have to make good software, that can spread by word of mouth, first and then you can have a community after that. Think about the number of random little programs on the internet, now think how many are installed on your computer - not a very big percentage, but the ones that you do have installed, many people have installed. Those are the useful ones.

In most projects the original creators remain the main developers no matter how many other contributors join. Late contributors having a significant effect on a project is the exception, not the rule, and when it happens it's actually an undesirable power inversion since the original creator retains unearned influence - see the PolyMC incident. There is no way to become the chief developer of a project other than having created it. If you think you can rewrite the whole thing and make it better, don't "join the community" - make a fork (which makes you part of the community, but that is not the main goal!).

If you're actually doing the majority of the work, offering a dual license is not unethical. We are forced to live in capitalism whether we like it or not, and we should be trying to squeeze money out of capitalist entities - lord knows they're good at squeezing money out of us. To not play that game is to lose by default. This isn't incompatible with being nice to people who are not money-squeezers, if you dual-license. A community fork can legally continue as AGPL-only. (You don't necessarily need a full CLA either, you just need people to agree their code will be in your commercial version. Programmers treat licenses and CLAs like satisfying the borrow checker, but that's not how they actually work.)

Something like: An LLM can encode a query into a vector to match against a vector database of indexed pages.

You have to actually engineer that though, you can't just throw random stuff into ChatGPT and expect good results.

You don't want Google to be a direct keyword search. Well maybe sometimes you do, but not usually. Text search is not fundamental to the Google user experience - DWIM (do what I mean) is fundamental. The ideal user experience is that you type in what you want and the machine finds it or does it. LLMs designed and deployed properly are infinitely better at this than keyword search engines are, despite being less predictable.

Example search: video card game with the robot guy

AI overview [correct]: The video card game you are thinking of is likely Inscryption, which features a mysterious, robotic-looking or masked scrybe (like P03, the robot scrybe of technology)

If it was actually the best result for you, they wouldn't need it to be an ad.

The fact that this was ever more than half should make us extremely suspicious of the whole search engine. Almost all of that money is coming from paid manipulation of search results.

Me personally, I use my bank card, which I assume registers as Mastercard.

I also have the option to pay by scanning a non-QR non-SEPA-Instant code generated by my bank app, through some other third-party system.

At some stores, but not the supermarket, I have the option to pay by SEPA Instant. It's more common with online payments, but a store could also accept it. The main problem is that SEPA Instant payments aren't always instant (thanks to USA-imposed KYC/AML rules), and if one isn't, then I'd have to come back later to collect the goods, or pay twice and hope to get a refund later.

To save others time: it's a cartoon where Putin's in everyday situations and gets out of his responsibilities by saying "I have a nuclear bomb". First scene: Putin is sitting at a restaurant table and asked to pay. He says "no". Waiter says "but sir you have to pay." Putin says "I have a nuclear bomb." Waiter says "Okay sir, enjoy your dinner."

Second scene: Parking warden catches Putin in a disabled space, says "I have a nuclear bomb", warden leaves him alone.

Third scene: Putin's playing a card game and making up the rules, opponent objects, Putin says "I have a nuclear bomb", opponent lets him do whatever.

Fourth scene: Putin cuts to the front of a line, says "I have a nuclear bomb", but the person he cut in front of (apparently Biden) says "I also have a nuclear bomb", but Putin says "but I have a nuclear bomb and I'm crazy", and the guy lets him stay at the front of the line.

There's a good comment too: "Missed opportunity. At the end, in line, when [Biden] points out to Putin, "Look, I have a nuclear bomb too," the others in line should have gotten angry with him, saying things like, "You see, you're a bully?", "What are you doing, threatening? Reckless!", "You're provoking him!", and Orsini should have appeared and said, "This is how we risk escalation!" "

They get awareness of AI annihilation and capitalist annihilation instead...