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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Yeah. I do find her “shamanism” to be something to eyeroll at, but her actual work experience shows her running multiple non-profits, and by all accounts she did a decent job at Gnome.

    Clearly her shamanism BS didn’t actually affect her ability to work at Gnome or the other places she’s worked.

    You can be an absolute moron/a crazy person in some areas, whilst simultaneously being qualified to do some difficult jobs.

    Steve Jobs thought a fruit diet would cure pancreatic cancer, but he still had the chops to run Apple. A certain GNU figure that the Linux community loves has some, uh, unusual views on whether children can consent to sex or not, but he was still a great programmer and advocate for FOSS. I have a friend who thought Manchester, not London, was the capital of England, yet he works as an aeronautical engineer (and not for Boeing lol) in a senior design position.



  • I get what you’re saying, but there’s something of a difference between someone studying something for months or years then writing about it, and a language model ran by one of the tech giants scraping media and immediately generating stuff from it, for commercial use, for the profit of the company that owns it.

    It’s kinda like how plagiarising somebody’s book word for word never used to be a crime when it was a painstaking process of manually writing it back out for every copy. When the printing press came out, though? It allowed dodgy businesses to large-scale fuck over authors, and the law had to play catch-up.

    I don’t actually think this proposal is that well thought out, but I also don’t think we should think of AI models or corporations as being people - they aren’t people, and they shouldn’t necessarily have the same rights and privileges that we do.


  • There’s unfortunately no getting around that maintaining a secure and performant web engine is a highly expensive endeavour. There’s a reason why it’s just Google, Mozilla, and Apple left (and Apple doesn’t even try to implement all the web standards).

    If not Google, it’d probably be Bing, or some other extremely wealthy company trying to get something out of Mozilla.

    Every time Mozilla has tried to diversify their income, people complain about them trying to make money/commercialise. I mean I don’t like it either, but they’re in a tough spot.

    They’re seen as evil bastards if they take money, and they’re seen as evil bastards when they try to make money.

    At least with Google there’s a possible antitrust case if they suddenly pulled funding, given their market position, and that gives Mozilla a bit more leverage than I think they’d get with other deals.