The problem with powerful surveillance technology is not with capturing criminals under current definitions of criminality. The power of ubiquitous surveillance accelerates a society's transition to authoritarianism.

The problem is that increasingly authoritarian societies have a tendency to criminalize formerly legal reasonable behavior, tightening their control over their livesto^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcitizens long after events have been recorded and saved.

In a rational world, using surveillance technology could *under strictly limited controls* be beneficial. Humans have a nearly perfect record of allowing extremely irrational psychotic freaks to take power where that power can be wielded without sufficiently tight controls.

I agree that the name is not worth the confusion.

My first thought on seeing the name was, "Someone is still working on mkLinux?" I think it would be possible to run multiple kernels on the Mach microkernel, but kernel development was never my thing.

> But on the flip side, nobody would still remember how to compile code for it, so maybe not

Oh, I think I might remember or could figure it out rather quickly. I remember developing for KDE on a Performa 6100(?) back in the day and the compile of the entire KDE suite taking 3 days or so. I still have the machine with an out of spec 72MB of RAM sitting in my attic. I haven't touched it in 2 decades, so it's probably dead or needs batteries at least. mkLinux is still on the hard drive since I never wiped it.

Cheers to you, dgatwood, and to nester for your fine work.

> The problem is when it costs MONEY to develop

It usually does, but we've somehow made free software for most tasks, and we maintain it. In some ways we do it better as free software.

Sometimes. And sometimes, development is faster with restricted sharing and per-copy fees. If faster development was the only issue, then maybe restrictions on sharing could be ok.

But there are other things like how much everyone should be able to know about the software that increasingly runs our lives, like whether people should be able to verify the security of some software, or audit the response to a security incident. Free software makes society better in those ways.

Also, you mention maintenance. We should keep in mind that the cost of maintenance is increased when only one person is allowed do the maintenance. So high costs is an argument for wanting money, but it can also be an argument for using a lower cost path, such as allowing everyone to do the maintenance, either for free or in a competitive market.

He advocates sharing, and the GPL allows sharing.

He says to ignore laws that block sharing. That means ignoring some parts of copyright law. Some other parts of copyright law are fine. There's no contradiction.

(And if someone has a follow up question about sharing everything, no, he doesn't advocate for sharing everything. Some stuff is personal, for example. He's in favour of sharing generally useful technical information, such as the source code of software that has been given to you.)

Nice, the Zenmuse L3 is $18k, the DJI Matrice 400 drone to carry it $11k. So it won't be long before surveyors and the like will be selling its services.

Rats, as an architect I was hoping it might be useful to the general construction industry, but not at 3m accuracy.

For the Irish language course the recordings of native speakers were taken offline in 2023. The AI replacements are nonsensical.

This story is about AI generated courses, not voices, but my post was still (accidentally) on-topic: when they previously used AI to increase volume of content, they were ok with quality being thrown out the window.

The AI generated courses might be low quality, and the original (English) courses might also go downhill because the type of exercises they produce may now be restricted to the type of things that their AI is able to reorganise for other languages. E.g. it might go further in the direction of vocabulary memorisation.

Isn't it that they call it "español" in Latin America, and "castellano" in Spain?

Unfortunately, the voices are really bad.

It's a pity they don't also make available the old courses, with audio from native speakers.

The same way that you implement a language that does look like Common Lisp: macros, specifically reader macros.

FSF's Zoe Kooyman and Krzysztof Siewicz will give a presentation on Sunday 2nd of Feb:

"FSF's criteria for free machine learning applications"

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedu...

It'll be streamed. Well worth tuning in for. A recording should be online soon after.

That itty-bitty asterisk is carrying a lot of weight.

I wonder if any betting sites have set up a pool for this project?

FYI, it would be wonderful if true. I just do not believe it, being of the generation that knew "fusion is only 30 years away and always will be".

This is the definition of fascism according to Mussolini:

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."