Go to an ER or UC and have them dress a wound for you. They will use a healthy dose of petroleum jelly and generally tell you to stay away from antibiotic ointments.
... because if _use_ of a product creates a liability for the maker, you are very quickly headed toward liability for gun manufacturers. [ed: this is very much discussed in the decision, by the by]
Expect to see heavy lobbying from the music and video industry to create some kind of "Know your Customer" regime internet service providers in order to create such a liability.
I wouldn't call this a slam dunk for privacy or liberty, given what it is going to force the various actors to do in response.
Something I’ve been curious about for a while is why more universities don’t get involved in sponsoring critical projects. In theory it could provide an interesting non-academic path for students and professors and, as you’ve pointed out, the funding model of the U would make sense here.
I’m curious… would you consider having a “faculty” of “tenured” maintainers who receive livable funding and support based on a history of significant contribution? I could imagine something like “named chairs” and professorships you see for some tenured folks in academia. This could be useful for key project leaders, and contributors. In addition, any kind of function to train and develop the next generation of maintainers?
This would very much make sense and generate direct real world products. However, I fear academia is in itself a very competitive space for resources that doesn't necessarily want to open up for outsiders.
Well universities have no qualms about making private relationships to help subsidize private research. Let's not worry about problems that don't exist or are trivially solved.
I live in Cambridge, MA there are dozens of these relationships going on; big tech offers lucrative access to cutting edge hardware in return for closed research.
Just more insidious ways on how big tech requires massive amounts of welfare to exist and persist.
Ah yes, they totally subsidize public research with no strings attach. Right up there with cigarette companies subsidizing public health research. Or oil companies subsidizing public research. Or all the other various industries funding research that somehow always seems to agree with what they want, weird right?
Good lord. Why do you think these greedy entities that have devoted their entire lifespans fucking over consumers, competitors, nations, and children are suddenly having a change of heart and aren't enforcing their will upon researchers?
While that may have felt good to write, I'm not sure that it changes the fact that this sounds like private funding of public research, rather than as was stated, public funding of private research.
Your comment I was replying to, as an aide-mémoire:
> I live in Cambridge, MA there are dozens of these relationships going on; big tech offers lucrative access to cutting edge hardware in return for closed research.
> Just more insidious ways on how big tech requires massive amounts of welfare to exist and persist.
Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status? Or, in the case of a state-run university, this raises all kinds of issues regarding how tax money is being given away to random schmoes instead of benefitting the public at large.
So, yeah, there's plenty of reasons why they don't do that.
Open source wouldn't have a funding problem if people would stop being so averse to just paying for what they use. Maybe... the world should stop expecting something for nothing.
Using the model of the university and various tenured profs, I'm not sure what you are saying is true. But, perhaps it's a misunderstanding of what I was intending.
I see this more as a way to answer the question of things like the maintainers of OpenSSL or sudo. One approach is to fund the "project" and let it deal with all of these questions. Another approach would be to fund the people themselves. So, have a faculty of expert software maintainers, vetted by the governance structure of the OSE. Within that faculty, you could have "adjuncts" and "residents" who have a time-bound grant and set of obligations. If they are successful and their work continues to be relevant, they could eventually apply for one of a defined set of "tenured" positions. Those positions would guarantee them independence and a stable source of income in order to continue their role as a maintainer.
The goal of this "faculty" would be sustainable OSS maintenance (which involves both leadership and contribution), rather than publishing research and teaching classes. So, similar overall structure and approach, but differing goals.
> Using the model of the university and various tenured profs, I'm not sure what you are saying is true. But, perhaps it's a misunderstanding of what I was intending.
Tenured professors are not engaged in commercial product development.
> The goal of this "faculty" would be sustainable OSS maintenance (which involves both leadership and contribution), rather than publishing research and teaching classes.
> Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status?
Doesn't this apply only to for-profit products? There's plenty of 501c3's with free "products".
It is not about whether or not it is available for free, at cost, or otherwise, but whether or not the activity has the character of commercial product development. It's what the product is used for, not what price it's set at. A 501(c)(3) directly developing, or funding the development, of commercial software is not engaged in charitable, educational, or other exempt activities.
For reference: This is exactly what happened to the Yorba Foundation, and numerous others since then.[1]
There's clearly a change going on in the US government, and it very well may be that organizations such as Mozilla, FreeBSD, and Apache could all lose their 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in years to come.
At the end of the day though, 501(c)(3) status is a purely US concept, doesn't apply to international organizations internationally, and doesn't necessarily mean that you "can't" do what anyone is discussing here. It just means that folks gonna have to pay taxes and "donations" can't be written off on the taxes of donors.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, not pursuing tax-exemption/charity status is a more honest approach. It certainly doesn't precluding doing any of what has been discussed, it just changes the financial efficiency.
Amodei says yes - each model pays for its training. But they're scaling up investment for each new run, so they're still happily in the red.
And also that may be the case for Anthropic who have fewer free users, a large enterprise business, and less generous rate limits on their subscriptions. I don't know if OpenAI or Google have commented. I suspect OpenAI is in a worse position given their massive non-paying consumer base.
Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents.
The only real solution is to keep children off of the internet and any internet connected device until they are older. The problem there is that everything is done on-line now and it is practically impossible to avoid it without penalizing your child.
If social media and its astroturfers want to avoid outright age bans, they need to stop actively exploiting children and accept other forms of regulation, and it needs to come with teeth.
Social engineering is the most effective strategy, because iOS screen time controls are so buggy that eventually parents throw up their hands in exasperation and enable broader access than they would otherwise choose.
I use it, I am quite familiar with the bugs. The app controls randomly duplicate themselves and change in scope. It would almost be comical if it had not been happening for so many years to so many people. Apple knows, does not care.
When everything is turned off by default, iOS Screentime is very effective. It also has effective tools for to grant certain exceptions, facilitated by Messages. It also distinguishes between "daytime" and "downtime" for the purpose of certain apps and app attributes, like the contact list. For example, we have ourselves, grandparents and the neighbors as "all the time" contacts but their friends as daytime only. They don't retain their devices at night but it is possible for them to pull them from the charging cabinet.
> Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents.
We could mandate that companies that market the products actually have to deliver effective solutions.
Cue blog posts about section 230 and how it’s impossible to do hard things and parents should be held accountable not companies, meager fines, captured bureaucrats, libertarians, and on and on…
Yes, but how on earth is their malicious compliance at providing parental controls a good reason to go for the surveillance state that hurts absolutely everyone?
Social media operators love the surveillance state idea. That's why they aren't pushing against this.
I even cancelled YT Premium because their "made for kids" system interfered with being able to use my paid adult account. I urge other people to do the same when the solutions offered are insufficient.
16 is a bit steep but I do generally agree with your sentiment. I wish there were more educational home computers like there were back in the day like the BBC micro. I have a startup idea to make something like that (mostly as a dumping ground for my plethora of OS-software and computer education ideas) but don't currently have the resources and have doubts on how successful something like that would even be in this day and age. I'm only 18ish (Not giving my actual age for privacy reasons but it's within a 5 year margin) and feel like my peers would rather be locked to platforms and consume than learn to create and actually use computers despite there being a very obvious need (I once had a 20 year old look at me like I had 2 heads for asking them to move something into a folder)
> Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.
If you make such a restriction, they'll secretly buy some cheap "unrestricted" device like some Raspberry Pi (just like earlier generations bought their secret "boob magazines").
Parents should have an allowlist of devices to be able to join their network. And then they can require root certs or something for access outside of a narrow allow list. There's a host of ways to solve both problems. Just remember to check for hardware keyloggers on your (the parents') devices, as kids could use them or try evil maid attacks, etc. if they feel totally encaged.
I think they should. Theres a fine line between beneficial and detrimental. I had a 3DS growing up and could browse the web with its very gimped browser, and I think something like that is actually very good for a child (able to access the internet and view simple and informative sites while being too limited to access social media and the like)
I'm kinda baffled about the Switch store's quantity of dating/whatever adult-ish games.
I don't really want to turn on age-based filters (to the point that I've never investigated if they even exist) but at this rate, there's hardly anything worth looking at in the recent feed.
The target demographics for Nintendo products have shifted from kids to.. kidults? Most kids nowadays play on phones or in rarer cases PC/Xbox, Nintendo's lost much of their cache (in my visible experience) save for children parented by the "mindful milennial" types
I hope they do pass a law like that, because it'd give my kids a gigantic advantage over the kids who had no access modern technology and the free flow of information until the age of 16. If you want to leave your kids completely unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my guest.
Today's young people are already technologically retarded (in the literal sense) and barely know how to use Microsoft Word or navigate with a file explorer, this would make the problem significantly worse.
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