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Comment Re:Was not expecting them to admit that (Score 1) 8

>arguing it unfairly advantages startups

Way to say your dealers suck.

They had to say it that way, because the more accurate statement is that the dealership law unfairly advantages existing automakers. It's not about the dealerships being good or bad, it's about the fact that setting up a dealership network takes a lot of time and money and requiring it is a good way to keep new competition out.

Comment Re:The old guard bribed these restrictions (Score 1) 8

into place to protect their oligopoly. Some blame it on "socialism" when it's really crony capitalism.

The correct term is "regulatory capture". Private businesses use the power of the state to protect, subsidize or otherwise benefit them and harm competitors and potential competitors. It's extremely common and the more pervasive the regulation is, the more common it is. Red tape and government procedures benefit entrenched players who have built the institutional structures and knowledge to deal with them.

This isn't to say that all regulation is bad... but a lot of it is. There was never any consumer benefit to banning direct sales. All regulations should be thoroughly scrutinized for their effects on the market, direct and indirect.

Comment Re:Good but they 'summarized' al the science. (Score 3, Insightful) 32

Anything that wasn't action, drama, or comedy was largely dropped and almost all of the science was quick summary explanations.

I think that's necessary. Providing explanations of depth comparable to the book would require a 10-hour movie. Squeezing the story down to feature length requires cutting a lot of exposition. In many books there's a lot of description that can be replaced with visuals, but it's pretty hard to do that with a lot of the science.

Comment Re:It's inevitable (Score 0) 167

it is LGPL2 or later. So LGPL3 applies. So the anti tivoization clause applies.

That's the opposite of how that works. It's LGPL 2 or later. That means you can follow the terms of redistribution from either license. Either. Or.

Sure. But it won't be your usual Linux distro.

It will do the same jobs. Most of the software on which we depend predates the GPL3 and/or uses an even more permissive license without an anti-tivoization clause.

Comment Is that because of the monopoly? (Score 3, Interesting) 56

The most fortunate part of Bell Labs' situation, however, was that in being attached to a monopoly it could partake in long-term thinking... Without competition nipping at its heels, Bell Labs engineers had the luxury of working out difficult ideas over decades.

Was it the monopoly that made the difference? Or was it simply management smart enough to not only not kill the goose, but also to feed it? They had wins, they got more funding, they had more wins, repeat until they no longer got more funding and stopped getting wins. What's probably more important than why they succeeded is what happened at the end.

Comment Re:Installer level disabling (Score 1) 167

Installer level disabling of the installation of systemd, please.

If you're a Debian derivative user, it's called Devuan.

Otherwise...*

* Note: Removing systemd from a systemd-based system is madness. There's a reason Devuan exists, and it is that simply changing the init system on Debian results in a lot of breakage, which best illustrates the biggest problem with systemd.

Comment Re:the issue is putting it in systemd (Score 1) 167

systemd is an integral part of many Linux systems. Adding the birth-date to it is the issue here. It's not the right place.

Yes, that is literally the entire ethos behind systemd.

It's crazy to expect a distro maintainer in a sane country to need to yank it out of there manually

Yes, that is literally the entire situation with systemd.

This change literally could not be more on brand for systemd.

Comment Re:It's inevitable (Score 1) 167

A Linux distro (even preinstalled) cannot be closed source and/or unmodifiable by the end user, the GPL3 made sure of that.

The Linux kernel is GPL2 and glibc is LGPL, and you can construct a complete userland without any GPL3 components. Also, you seem to be under some weird misapprehension that the federal government will follow the law, which it has never done across the board.

Comment Re:advice to children (Score 2) 167

Slavery and many other such things were once legal.

Amendment XIII
Section 1: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction".
Section 2: "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation".

Emphasis mine.

Comment Re:LLMs can't explain themselves (Score 1) 40

One issue with the overall architecture (which is just statistical prediction) is that it can't really provide useful insights on why it did what it did.

I think you're describing the models from a year ago. Most of the improvements in capability since then (and the improvements have been really large) are directly due to changes that have the AI model talk to itself to better reason out its response before providing it, and one of the results of that is that most of the time they absolutely can explain why they did what they did. There are exceptions, but they are the exception, not the rule.

It's interesting to compare this with humans. Humans generally can give you an explanation for why they did what they did, but research has demonstrated pretty conclusively that a large majority of the time those explanations are made up after the fact, they're actually post-hoc justifications for decisions that were made in some subconscious process. Researchers have demonstrated that people are just as good at coming up with explanations for decisions they didn't make as for decisions they did! The bottom line is that people can't really provide useful insights on why they did what they did, they're just really good at inventing post-hoc rationales.

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