jongjong

Reminds me of a comment I wrote a few weeks ago where I said that North Korea would become a rich country soon and developers would start moving there to live to avoid prosecution.

Yes and anyway, open source is immoral now because your free work will be absorbed by corporations using AI and weaponized to suppress fellow independent software developers who have to compete against the AI and the corporate-controlled 'open' project; driving down the value of human labor in the process and further entrenching monopolies.

You're not helping fellow developers by giving them tools to 'make their lives easier' anymore; now you're helping people who don't care about software at all and just want to make a quick buck to monopolize the industry using your free labor.

And anyway, the whole market is monopolized at the attention layer now. The only people whose software is going to make any money are suits with business connections; not independent folks. Literally the people who contributed the least to the open source movement will make the most money.

It is the greatest theft of intellectual labor in the history of mankind. It steals not only from the contributors who are conned into working for free, but from their peers through centralization and deprivation of opportunities.

> Copyright has always been a system that upholds the hegemony of the powerful, it enriches corporations at the expense of the working class.

This is not true. I've never heard of a 'working class' person getting sued for copyright infringement. People who run a business to make money from copyright infringement are not working class and those few small timers who are infringing among family and friends would never be pursued; there is a 'fair use' clause after all in the US and the issue is re-distribution, not consumption.

The problem is not that copyright protects the powerful, it's that copyright is not enforced to protect you if you're not powerful. As is the case with AI. The problem is lack of enforcement so the idea that copyrights oppresses the working class is completely backwards.

I'm an open source developer myself. One of my projects has about 6k stars on GitHub. Open source is dead. It was never 'open' anyway because it was always the big corporate-sponsored projects which got all of the attention.

Frankly, open source is immoral at this stage. Just a con to convince gullible fools to give away their time for free for AI to use. Given the new reality, author is essentially unwittingly trying to steal people's time.

I'm not saying this as an insult. I do consider my past self to be a gullible fool, even before AI, though you have to recognize that I was a lesser kind of fool. Now the exact mechanism of theft of your labor is right there in front of your eyes! What a fool you have to be to write open source code now!

There are other ways to make code 'source available' where people can pay a contribution to use the code or participate and can become shareholders of a shared venture or member of a club. Paying contributors is the only moral approach. It's satanic that open source folks have flipped this basic, obvious moral reality on its head and it reveals deeply distorted personal values or a deep misunderstanding of how society functions and a deep hypocrisy around the role of money in people's lives and how it affects their ability to form groups. Many played right into the hands of the people they claim to oppose.

Sorry to hear. That is a very young age to get that type of cancer. Must have been incredibly difficult and traumatic.

When my wife was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer earlier this year, she was essentially prepared to die. She didn't even cry once. Her father had died from the same cancer at around the same age as her (early 40s), in the most horrific way imaginable. Her father used to work for the Soviet military in charge of a team of people who worked on propaganda so he was a strong believer in communism and he was devastated by the collapse of the USSR; his entire world had fallen apart. But then bowel cancer finished him off. My wife was in her teens at the time and she said he was extremely angry and not himself for years until he died. The chemo made him extremely sick, destroyed his body, and he had to have a colostomy bag. Years later, after my wife met me, we experienced a lot of hardship together; just one episode of bad luck after another... Like, almost every aspect of our lives which we didn't control. So by the time she got her cancer diagnosis, it's as though she was expecting it.

It turns out that she has a relatively rare genetic condition which increases the probability of bowel cancer by about 10x... These cancers are known to respond very poorly to standard chemo (and likely explains her father's horrible death decades earlier). This is where our luck finally turned though. We got lucky, possibly for the first time since we've been together. Her cancer turned out to be a kind which is highly responsive to immunotherapy. The most recent trial for the relevant class of drugs showed an unprecedented 100% complete response in about 40 patients (Dostarlimab). Moreover, that same class of (very expensive) drugs became available for her exact case, on the subsidized public list in my country, just one month prior to her diagnosis. After her first month of treatment, the tumor had shrunk by like 50% in diameter. Now, 5 months later, there is no evidence of cancer on the MRI.

I feel like the experience has completely changed my wife's perspective of life in a fundamental way. Before this, she lived her entire life expecting that things never get better and all news is bad news. Systems decay, collapse and people die.

These days I often think about the ancient Chinese tale "The old man lost his horse." It's insane how little control we actually have over the most important aspects of our lives and how something terrible (like a tumor which doesn't respond to chemo) can become a positive (but responds extremely well to immunotherapy). Also, it's quite inspiring to think about how people identified this horrible class of the most untreatable cancers in existence and decided to do something about it, and now it seems like they've become the most treatable of all cancers, with the fewest side effects too. It's a testament to the good things innovation can create when people focus on the worst problems, the worst injustices of human existence.

We can never know who won any election because it's physically impossible to count millions of votes accurately. This is an unsolved problem. The risk of double-counting or missing votes is close to 100%.

Anyone who implies that it's possible is lying. People could do an experiment; just try to organize 100 groups of people to count only a few hundred thousand votes. You will get a different number every time you count. At that scale, there are too many moving parts. Too many variables; smudged marks (or overly faint marks) invalidating ballots, ripped ballots, fraudulent ballots, accidents leading to loss of ballots, ballots getting wedged inside machines, identity theft enabling multiple-voting, corrupt officials, corrupt media...

Just try to get 1000 random people to agree on any basic, uncontroversial fact. Impossible. Now convince me it can be done among hundreds of millions.

Whenever they do a re-count, they end up with a different number. They have probably never even once counted votes accurately in the history of any nation.

I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of people don't even rinse off the soap.

>> Where did that wealth come from?

Clearly, the money printers. How else could there be such an enormous gap between those last two bars?

Yes but I'm thinking about just the yield on that last bar.

Given that the Shiller P/E ratio is now 40 (under 3% of the value of the assets), the yield is actually a pretty small fraction of that last bar... but even then, I'm saying one year's yield could exceed the worth of all the others if things continue.

But IMO, it's already the case that the economy is centered around the free money/proceeds received by top 0.1%. This is why we saw all that nonsense with COVID, DEI, Wokeism, etc... This is what happens when a small number of elites decide to spend a bit of 'spare change' on politics and social activism. Imagine how bad it's going to get after that wealth has compounded in 10 years...

With this kind of wealth distribution, there's no point doing any job which services regular people. Everyone should become an informant, bodyguard, lobbyist or propagandist for a rich person. That's going to be the only kind of job that pays in the future.

Look at that last bar; consider just the annual yield or interest payment on that wealth; soon, it's going to be more than all other bars combined. If people understood the situation, they would all stop working and start making lists of who these people are and work for them. That's the only logical (legal) thing to do. Every other job or career is a waste of time.

Actually my current machine is 5.5 GHZ with 28 cores but core count only really matters if you have a lot of parallel workloads. Most of my CPUs are idle the vast majority of the time. Raspberry Pi 5's 2.4GHz Quad core doesn't seem so far behind when you consider the physical size difference.

I remember programming ATMEL ATMEGA8s and being amazed as how much I could do with them, so to me, the fact that devices of that size can approach even half the clock speed of a cutting-edge computer, and have multiple cores, is mind-blowing.

This is true but I don't see that alternative approaches prevent an owner class from developing. It just creates a different kind of owner; a more politically-oriented one, with an incentive to manipulate the political system to their benefit to increase their stake in it. People then strive to become stakeholders of the state itself. I don't think that's a better form of ownership.

I'd rather capitalists be distracted pursuing land ownership rather than pursuing ownership over the machinery of ultimate power and control.

If you remove tangible forms of ownership, people will try to claim ownership over intangible things instead, like state power.

The idea of investing my hard earned money to build on land I don't own sounds incredibly foolish. You're completely at the mercy of the counter-party. You don't own it, they own you!

It's kind of insane how the higher end Raspberry PIs are almost as powerful as my PC tower. The price is quite low and developer friendly too. Really great products. The lower end products are awesome too.

It's one of the few products I look at with awe and which makes me feel good about the tech industry.

I managed to build a WiFi temperature sensor (which can be substituted with any analog sensor) which streams its data to a web platform (I also built), encrypted over HTTPS (with CA certificate verification), using a $10 Raspberry PI Pico W; built in a single weekend. I can connect it to my phone's WiFi hotspot from anywhere and stream data to my web platform where it displays a realtime chart. $10.

Maybe, but at least they're not depleting my access to opportunities like platform rents do! In the old days, I could still find opportunities in my social circles to earn money to cover the rents because they still had money.

Platform rents are worse because they extract wealth by centralizing awareness, centralizing opportunities and literally shrinking the pie whilst concentrating wealth for those in the middle. They prevent me from finding opportunities which would allow me to pay the rents which they extract from me and my social circle! My social circle has no money so I can't rely on them! Only way to make money is a bs bureaucratic job working for a monopolist.

It's worse, satanically worse! Mark my words, with the current approach we will be forced to go either UBI route or start charging people proportionally to their incomes using universal digital ID to check. And the 'AI taking jobs' narrative is already in place to provide a phony justification!

Opportunities are depleted systematically from the periphery. "I make my own luck" is bullshit when when the entire system is working 24/7 to ensure you don't get any! The average elite ignores more life-changing opportunities in their inbox, every minute, than I'm exposed to in a lifetime!

Literally, elite rent-seekers took all the money and now there is no more to take! The system is now trying to saddle people will useless debts! Getting them to spend it all on their useless junk (pointless gender studies university degrees, ads for their marketing/lead acquisition startups, fake magic internet money, junk bought on credit cards...)! And then forcing them into bankruptcy for a few years, move onto someone else, then when that first person's bankruptcy period is over, repeat!!! They do the same thing with shell companies; saddle them with debt, funnel the money to the beneficiary company, let the shell default on its debt, then repeat. This is the backbone of the modern economy. It's utterly insane! The system is completely broken!