Joe

That all goes well until someone uses your platform for scams or CSAM… or when (as the other guy said), infra costs go up. Throw in various privacy regulations, and it can be a frustrating and costly endeavour.

There’s a sweet spot, but I fear it’s quite a small one.

So you want to create a human exploitation / profit maximising system?

Pretty sure those are proprietary algorithms, with some common knowledge foundations that LLMs will happily tell you about.

It’s all simple enough at a small scale, but the challenge is optimizing it for your use-cases, and building for scale & reliability in a cost efficient manner.

Such companies will likely also have top notch software engineers & statisticians, marketing teams, psychologists and lawyers on the payroll, all contributing their part to the perpetuation of human misery in the name of corporate profit.

They have more work to do to be a role model, yes, and the great firewall is a PITA and is used for (fake news) propaganda as well as for protecting its national interest and identity. They do seem to have lost significant focus under Xi, and I doubt it will change for the better under his leadership.

Even if China were to become a leader in soft power and a role model in the future, systems don’t tend to be transplanted wholesale.

If only they’d stop supporting russia’s war of aggression… imagine if China would lead the world in peaceful growth and respect for international law, rather than supporting despots and antagonising neighbours’ fishing boats. The choice of siding with US or China could be relatively simple, rather than a reluctant necessity.

End wars, Xi, and you might even get a nobel peace prize to share with your countrymen and the people of the world.

The US has well and truly abused their position over the years, and is currently unhinged under trump. Give the world a viable alternative, both economically and politically.

Honestly, for human friendly queries, I would have taken a Splunk-query like approach, like KQL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/kusto/query/?view=microsoft-fabric

It’s less likely to annoy an entire industry of SQL users, while appealing to those who use Splunk and similar tools for incident response and ad-hoc analytics.

Whether they really need their own DB for event data… perhaps… but these days you want to get this kind of data into your data lake sooner rather than later. Perhaps it can help with that.

No? It doesn’t seem to be a use case they target.

If you want to use git to store sensitive data, you should encrypt it before committing / pushing it.

I have a second SIM card for my phone number (for a tiny fee) … I need to direct where SMS go, but it rings on both.

You could probably also setup call forwarding from your work phone to your personal dumb phone - there will likely be an extra per-call cost.

And which cloud provider does your new book shop use? Muhahahahaha.

I voted for Kodos, btw.

This was similar to a trick that a few smaller (less serious) hobby-ISPs did back in the days of 14.4k/28.8k modems to take advantage of the “reasonably priced” business plans for ISDN. They’d register multiple businesses at a single address to qualify for the plans, then balance new egress connections across the pool using squid and other magic. Fun times…

How is it being enforced in Australia?

A webcam photo by the website or a specific third party service, ID verification through a “trusted third party” process, or a checkbox to confirm age?

How much information does the website get over and above “user is over 16 years old”, and how much does the government get, if any?

Explain your reasoning, please.

Within companies, I see it as a way to make complex things more accessible to those unfamiliar with them… with a huge risk of breaking the learning process, resulting in a lack of expertise down the road.

That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it were really capable of accuracy and improving itself, but right now it’s like we are driving increasingly fast toward a half-built bridge, hoping it will be built before we get there. I have my doubts.

For some things like first line support - there is huge potential, although it’s usually fucked up. First line support is a job where the brain turns off, scripts are followed, and there is little to no compassion with the customer/user, and language/accents are a significant challenge. Let’s replace first line support with a few good experienced support people who actively work to improve the system. Give them the tools to make 100x or 1000x the impact, with customer satisfaction as the goal.

I find it pretty useful to help get me over mental hurdle of starting something. So it’s faster than me procrastinating for another day. ;-)

https://archive.ph/2rFK4

Adblocker, engage!

Many governments get access to source code for critical systems as a condition for their use / part of contract negotiations. It’s also quite likely that Microsoft and all its services in China is operated as a Joint Venture.

China did have Red Flag Linux (with Government support) for a while, too.

I think you miss the point here, to be honest. Free as in freedom is typically considered more important than free as in gratis - at least in the open source / free software community.

Don’t get me wrong - I love that I don’t HAVE to pay for lots of quality software and tools, but the value is that it is developed openly and collaboratively, allowing me and others to adapt it to our own needs and optionally contribute back.

It’s often the software that would struggle to be successfully supported as an independent commercial product that ends up as open source. It’s natural for building block products like Operating System libraries and tools, UI toolkits, and other foundational technologies. It can also works for bigger or niche projects with enthusiastic developer communities, corporate sponsors, etc. Often companies sponsor existing useful OSS projects to maturity and beyond, as it suits their purposes.

Back to your question though: Who would decide whom receives funds on my hypothetical donation platform? Those who donate, as well as curated lists maintained by the platform and other users of the platform. eg. I choose to donate 50% to Project X, 40% to the “John’s Foundational GNU/Linux Libraries Collection”, and 10% to platform’s choice (which might be used to pay for the platform, then sponsor a competition, a project-of-the-week, etc)

Honestly, if people and companies could just pay $5-10/user/month to support their entire OSS ecosystem, many would. It’s far from that simple though. There is no central fund. If you are lucky, you have a favourite project or two with a registered charity in your jurisdiction, or a BuyMeACoffee, etc. That requires individuals to think and plan, and won’t have companies contributing in the same way.

Similar could be said for news - I’d happily pay $10/month for the news I read … but I am not going to sign up to 30 separate subscriptions just to read 1-2 articles per site each month. Microtransactions would be ideal for news, but the industry is obsessed with subscriber-lock-in. So instead I pay nothing, block ads, and use archive.ph and similar.

I could imagine central donation platforms, which OSS projects can sign up to, allowing individuals to influence where their contributions go. It would be a nightmare to administer globally - so it might have to be regional / jurisdictional initiatives. Allow companies to contribute more and choose centrally, or purchase subscriptions for employees and let them choose. Projects could set goals and redistribute donations over that amount. This could be a good EU funded project, actually.

One of the biggest benefits that I see these days comes from the use of workflow-as-code systems like Temporal or Restate. They make it super easy to add reliability and observability to normal procedural functions - no custom databases, state machine logic, message queues, etc.

I can write straight-forward code like I used to, and if something breaks, I can usually fix it on the go.

https://archive.ph/JkMcR

Boomerang-Fu ?