Just a regular Joe.
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1·11 days agoAdblocker, engage!
7·15 days agoMany 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.
Boomerang-Fu ?
1·30 days agoHmm. You are right, but they might not need it for every region. Steam is probably big enough that existing regional companies would come to it and be eager to form partnerships. They could become more of a payment processor aggregator, focused on a low risk market segment. And of course they can do CCs directly too - that’s the easy part.
The challenge will be to get consumers on board. I know that I groan every time I need to enter my CC details online these days.
They would face anti-competitive behaviour from Peepal though. So it’s a risk.
Internally, they are probably already working on ways to appropriately segment their catalog based on payment provider. “Sorry User, you cannot purchase title X using Paypal. We recommend $Competitor instead.”
It sounds like some payment processors are treating mastercard’s contractual requirements as a hard risk in this case - maybe it’s justified, maybe not. Try getting corporate lawyers to be risk averse in the finance world. Mastercard doesn’t seem to want to soften their wording but talks platitudes in public statements. Shrug.
They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hacker
“The media’s definition of the real term malicious cracker. A hacker used to be a well respected individual who loved to tinker with gadgets.”, plus a few other definitions.
162·2 months agoIt’s time for Steam to launch their own payment processing company, and apply pressure directly on the card networks and the future competition.
It won’t be nearly as profitable as their current business model, but sometimes industries need a shakeup.
Judges usually don’t know this stuff, but they primarily work with systems and software supplied by the state…whose experts should know what they are doing.
My bet is that this guy decided to work on personal equipment, probably in violation of the rules. Being a judge, he’s unlikely to be sanctioned for it, and will certainly learn from the experience. If anything, there may be some internal discussions which we’ll never hear about.
Law is an area where AI can add value, though… searching through past rulings and legal opinions is tedious, and anything that can assist to find needles in haystacks would be welcome. It shouldn’t be used to write legal judgements or arguments though…
DMOZ forever!
Is this the right room for an argument?
It sounds like one should be building deliberate AI workflows with extra checks (automated or human in the loop) that make careful and cost efficient incremental progress toward a measurable goal.
Sounds like hard work… when we could just build 1,000,000 MCP servers instead. (raises pinkie to corner of mouth)
11·2 months agoThere are so many time-saving things that can be done with a little bit of scripting. It’s one reason why excel is so abused. Now that the bar to real scripting is dropping significantly, and we’ll see more and more people solving their own small problems rather than relying on others or suffering through repetitive work. Good stuff.
It doesn’t mean that they are ready to design, build and maintain reliable software or services…
We’ll see more APIs and libraries being used directly by end users, though.
AI agents are a counter-force to this, letting LLMs interact directly with APIs, meaning users don’t have to even touch code.
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. ;-)