I disagree. You don’t have to be far left to oppose oligarchy, corruption and crime.

I honestly don’t under understand why Systemd’s addition of an optional age verification module was such a big deal. This is a smart move that helps manage risk while having no real impact on anything. I feel that this article aligns with my perspective on the issue (particularly the 2nd/3rd to last paragraphs).

However, I would like to emphasize a somewhat tangential point raised by this opinion piece:

Developers from all over the world may contribute to Debian, but all of its financials and trademarks are managed by Software in the Public Interest, domiciled in New York State. Fedora is part of Red Hat, owned by IBM, and we all know IBM. Arch Linux’ donations are also managed by Software in the Public Interest. The Gentoo Foundation is domiciled in New Mexico. The FreeBSD Foundation is domiciled in Boulder, Colorado. The NetBSD Foundation is domiciled in Delaware. Ubuntu is a Canonical product, a company headquartered in London, UK, a country with strict age verification laws for websites and applications. Hell, even Haiku, Inc. is domiciled in New York State. I could go on, but you get the gist: all of these projects manage their donations, financials, trademarks, and related issues in the United States (or the UK for Ubuntu).

This is not a sustainable approach. You can’t have much of open source be legally tied to the United States; a country that is almost certainly going to be dominated by oligarchs, chauvinists and regressives at least for the next ~30 years.

No disrespect to sane Americans, but if you live outside of the US you do need to take a more sober perspective on such matters. Especially considering the general human tendency to avoid rocking the boat.

That being said, a dependence on the US is a liability for any society that values freedom, democracy and having a happy society.

And open source is arguably an Achilles Heel against the American model, one that they can’t beat that easily.

Funnily enough “The Gods Themselves” themselves is my favorite Asimov novel. It’s very memorable. Doesn’t feel like an Asimov novel.

I would honestly go with “The Caves of Steel” as a “benchmark” Asimov experience, the first novel in the Robot series.

If you want to go for something a little bit outside of the Robot / Foundation series (and you’ve already read or reread “The Gods Themselves”), I would go for “The End of Eternity”.

I hate that too.

I didn’t know that the “The Man in the High Castle” (supposed to be based on a novel by Philip K. Dick) show was just about the setting and they came up with their own story. I was so pissed off after watching the first episode.

I was actually wondering why they even went with “The Man in the High Castle” since it’s a strange and superficially depressing novel (even by the standards of PKD). There are much better choices for a series or a movie based on PKD’s work.

That’s why I didn’t bother with the Foundation series (I am a big Asimov fan). I don’t mind a re-interpretation of a literary work, but it has to be creative and mind bending while conceptually (and philosophically?) engaging with the themes from the literary work.

I use LLMs for work (low priority stuff to save time on search or things that I know I will be validate later in the process) and I can’t stand the writing style and the constant attempts to bring in adjacent unrelated topics (I’ve been able to tone down the cute language and bombastic delivery style in Gemini’s configuration).

It’s like Excel trying to chat with me when I am working with a pivot table or transforming data in PowerQuery.

While I am aware that it’s a common crypto shill term, I think by this point crypto has fallen out of the mainstream, so their usage of terms doesn’t really matter.

And as others have pointed out, the term FUD has been used at least since the birth of WWW/modern internet.

Isn’t the show unrelated to the books beyond the setting and some characters?

I hate Electron apps with a passion.

They are always so heavy and inefficient. I sometimes run complex video encoding/upscaling tasks in the background that push my computer to it’s limits (for hours on end) and you can really get a feel for which applications are badly made. Electron apps always perform worse even if what they are doing is relatively simple.

And there are always weird edge cases with OS integration with Electron apps. Sometimes it’s done well, other times not so much.

No, there isn’t.

I would love if there was, but beyond basic use cases, Excel is significantly ahead of the competition.

For what it’s worth, HEVC seems to have much better hardware support than AV1.

AV1 encodes are also extremely rare when it comes to unofficial content releases.

Because Snap has less resources for a long legal fight than Google, Amazon and so on…

It’s not that bad.

I am guessing the AI framing is why this post got so many downvotes. Even though this is the most neutral (harmless?) use case imaginable: porting over a long abandoned open source app from 15+ year ago without any intuitional involvemen (commercial or otherwise).

This sort of petty acting out benefits no one.

That being said, I would rather deal with the unproductive attitude towards AI, than wirh the shills on Reddit. So many regaressives parroting PR copytext.

Robin Liu, the OnePlus executive who recently dismissed rumors of the company shutting down, has now resigned and returned to China. OnePlus has confirmed the news, further stoking rumors about the brand’s future in key global markets.

Looks like they are indeed exiting markets outside of China.

Some very general space communities communities:

https://mander.xyz/c/space
https://sh.itjust.works/c/spaceflight

They are both pretty active by Threadi standard.

This is a stupid reason to fork systemd, this is an optional features. I can think of totally reasonable use cases/situations where such an optional makes a lot of sense.

Mind you, while I don’t have children, I have no intent to restrict their usage of the internet. Teaching them critical thinking and providing them a broad cultural exposure seems like a much more productive approach.

Nah, American companies cannot be relied upon by definition. Even if the people running one are fine (and many are), they are still based in what is essentially a pro-crime, pro-corruption jurisdiction.

I’m curious on what your solution to the Nvidia problem is? Just stop selling to the market whose sales increased? Then the next, and the next?

For one, you need to understand whether Nvidia is acting in good faith or not. If they are not, then one needs to create legal incentives for them to start acting in good faith.

A basic evaluation of sales dynamics is done irrespective of sanctions (remember how the example I described was tied to defining a functional bonus system). Nvidia has an understanding of their sales flow into Singapore. If you have a long standing partner that sees an increase in shipments that aligns with internal demand forecast (which are developed anyways), there is no red flag.

If you suddenly have an unknown entity placing orders larger than the total sales in Singapore for the last quarter. That is a clear red flag. You need to ask them who their end-customers are and whether they have validated that their own end-customers aren’t working on sanction workarounds. If they don’t cooperate, then you blacklist the entity and owners and don’t send them any more shipments.

If Nvidia (or a suspicious new distributor) isn’t doing, then they are acting in bad faith.

And it’s already been pointed out that the Ubiquiti hardware in question requires no activation at all. In fact I don’t believe any Ubiquiti hardware inherently needs internet, never mind activation.

That’s why my example referred to a competitor of Ubiquiti (i.e. you don’t actually need activation data to run the calculations as described in my reply to you).

What outlined is just one tool in a toolkit that is regularly used outside of any sanction compliance.

Sales (especially for high-margin high tech items) isn’t done an intuition basis since as far back as the 60s/70s. With modern tech you can very much track your sales flow and identify suspicious sources that are almost certainly working on sanctions work around.

It’s all a matter of motivation (and lack of incentives).

I curious, do you have any information to suggest Ubiquiti has been acting in good faith?

Here is a high-level discussion:

https://piefed.social/comment/9903594

But going beyond that, forgot about Ukraine for a second.

Let’s say you are a competitor of Ubiquiti and you want to develop a bonus structure for your regional teams. You want to know the return on your marketing spend, how well the regional sales teams are developing relationships with retailers, B2B and other source of revenues.

To do that you need to know your real market share. You know your own numbers, but if share is a component of your bonus structure, you need to have accurate numbers for your competition (your sales going up by 15% is a massive failure if the rest of the regional market truly grew by 30%, it means your teams are failing).

To do that, you have several source of data. Roughly speaking you have two basic measures ([1], [2]):

• [1] Shipments into a region/channel. Units that were sent to a geography (not sales, just shipments)
• [2] POS transactions (syndicated providers offer this albeit it’s less comprehensive on a global geography basis than [1])
• [3] You’re going to always have a delta between the two measures ([1], [2]) above, because you have things like B2B sales, government sales, shipments into the regional distributor channel and so on. These numbers are also available on a regional basis from market data providers.

That being said, you have situations where ([1] - [2]) clearly does not equal anything close to even the highest estimates of [3]. That’s when you know shipments into a region are actually being diverted into another country (other countries?).

If the difference between ([1] - [2]) and [3] for your competitor is huge, you want adjust this in your regional market share calculations and bonus payouts. Because otherwise your regional team might be busting ass like no tomorrow and their performance is being undercounted because your competitor is not actually selling a large part of [1] in the given region, the units are going elsewhere.

Believe it or not, this can be a very sensitive topic. People tend to get very pissed off if their bonuses are impacted (especially if they work hard to grow their regional business).

And that’s if you don’t have access to Ubiquiti datasets; our thought experiment positions us as a company that is trying understand shipment to POS/sales transactions for our competitor; Ubiquiti.

If you are Ubiquiti, I assume (this was true in tech product segments where I have worked) you also have the benefit of being able to track geographic activation of your products (I am assuming it’s possible to update Ubiquiti devices?) and potentially their serial numbers; so you can track which shipments are being diverted to which geography. With some more work and tracking, you can figure out what’s going.

There are some other approaches to triangulation that are used that I am not going to cover here (assuming you are a competitor of Ubiquiti).

Do you see why I said what I did?

I understand. Nor am I naive enough to think it’s even possible to completely address money laundering or sanction workarounds.

It’s almost certain they have a lackadaisical (if not out right malicious) approach to limiting shipments that end up in russia. I am genuinely curious, is there a reason to believe otherwise?