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Submission + - CERN Open Sources Its KiCad Component Libraries

ewhac writes: CERN, a long-time Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad ("KEE-kad"), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It's gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics fabricators (rather than the traditional step of converting the layouts to Gerber files). Over the years, CERN have also developed their own symbol and footprint libraries to support their own internal electronic designs. Last week, CERN released those KiCad component libraries, containing over 17,000 symbols, under the CERN Open Hardware License (permissive version).

Comment Not sure that was the best crowd to speak to (Score 4, Insightful) 193

While she's not wrong, saying it to graduates....Not the best idea.

It will be transformative, and not everyone will benefit. Some are getting screwed right out of the gate. The demise of the Newspaper industry seems an app comparison. That was just a little slower in its disruption. And journalists could migrate to new media outlets. But now even that is at risk. And it's not just them.

If everything that can be affected is, many entry level jobs will be gone. People with valid entry level skills can be replaced. And there are corporations already laying off people, prematurely in my opinion. The economy doesn't work if people can't make money for their work. And if the people don't have money, bad things can/will happen.

I'm currently safe in my position, currently. But I'm not taking that for granted. My experience helps me at the moment, but, you get an AI in here, let it read all our docs, and explore the system...who knows?

The best I can say to the kids currently in college, get in front of it. Learn how to use it appropriately, use it as a tool and it can help. To me just like a hammer, using it correctly, it's helpful, in correctly, you can hurt your self, ruin a project. But putting your head in the sand, and pretending it's nothing, that will hurt you.

Comment eBay is Now eStop! (Score 1) 97

Welcome to the all-new eStop! We know you have concerns, so let us put them to rest straight away.

The site will not change. We respect the investment you've made in learning and navigating the site. However, if you're feeling curious or adventurous, feel free to check out our [new site design prototype]. (This design will become the default landing page in mid-2027; the old site UI will enter maintenance mode for only the most critical bugs.)

To thwart LLMs and other bots, new default limits on bidding have been imposed. Accounts may only bid on a given item no more frequently than once every 20 minutes. If your circumstances require more frequent bidding, have a look at our [eStop Pro Membership Plan] for only $9.95/month (billed annually; no pro-rated refunds), which will allow unlimited bidding frequency. And for members who want to have more than 20 items on sale simultaneously, take some time to review our [eStop Bulk Vendor Programs], charging only 25% of gross sales, or $3600/year + 20% of gross sales.

And to help with "doomscrolling" for that one specific thing you're looking for, we've also partnered with Anthrop\c and X's Grok to help curate your buying experience, surfacing the items most likely to interest you.

(All terms are subject to change without notice.)

Comment ISDN: It Still Does Nothing (Score 1) 95

(a/k/a Innovation Subscribers Don't Need)

It still amazes me that, as late as the 1990's, and well after 56kbit modems were prolific, ISDN was being offered up by the ILECs as "broadband," at metered rates that made Ma Bell's long distance charges look like spare change.

Happily, it wasn't too long before ISDN was put out of everyone's misery when DSL showed up. And now, finally, after fifty years of pissing about, fiber is finally being pulled to the premises.

If you really need ongoing ISDN support, you can pull the source code from an old Git commit and update it. But I feel quite comfortable in opining: ISDN support will not be missed.

Comment Re: How do you develop that skill (Score 1) 150

Ditto. I'm in ERP. So Claude's knowledge may not be as complete there as say C++, however, It's still decent. Decent enough to help me work thru issues.

I had it write a simple program for copying some settings and setting up some outputs. Stuff that's documented but is a pain to do, mistakes happen...I figured it was a good test. I worked with it for about 4 hours, starting with nothing. Explaining the changes needed and the need. Wrote a beauty of an ABAP program. Simple, complete, documented. $10. If I had to use the offshore resource. it would have been 2 or 3 days. And maybe close to what I needed? Definitely more than $10.

I'm more interested in Saving our on site, employee programmers than the offshore contractors. I'm going to have to train them correctly on using it. It can code, but stupid is a stupid does. You can hurt yourself good if you're not careful.

Comment A Surprising Result From This Crew (Score 1) 91

Given that the Roberts Court is one of the most corporate-friendly in history, this decision comes as something of a surprise.

Nonetheless, it appears to be largely concordant with the so-called "Betamax case" from the early 1980's which established the principle of significant non-infringing uses as a defense and, despite passage of the DMCA, still largely informs the contours of contributory infringement.

Submission + - Python `chardet` Package Replaced with LLM-Generated Clone, Re-Licensed

ewhac writes: The maintainers of the Python package `chardet`, which attempts to automatically detect the character encoding of a string, announced the release of version 7 this week, claming a speedup factor of 43x over version 6. In the release notes, the maintainers claim that version 7 is, "a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet." Problem: The putative "ground-up rewrite" is actually the result of running the existing copyrighted codebase and test suite through the Claude LLM. In so doing, the maintainers claim that v7 now represents a unique work of authorship, and therefore may be offered under a new license. Version 6 and earlier was licensed under the LGPL. Version 7 claims to be available under the MIT license.

The maintainers appear to be claiming that, under the Oracle v. Google decision which found that cloning public APIs is fair use, their v7 is a fair use re-implementation of the `chardet` public API. However, there is no evidence to suggest their re-write was under "clean room" conditions, which traditionally has shielded cloners from infringement suits. Further, the copyrightability of LLM output has yet to be settled. Recent court decisions seem to favor the view that LLM output is not copyrightable, as the output is not primarily the result of human creative expression — the endeavor copyright is intended to protect. Spirited discussion has ensued in issue #327 on `chardet`s GitHub repo, raising the question: Can copyrighted source code be laundered through an LLM and come out the other end as a fresh work of authorship, eligible for a new copyright, copyright holder, and license terms? If this is found to be so, it would allow malicious interests to completely strip-mine the Open Source commons, and then sell it back to the users without the community seeing a single dime.

Comment Yet Another Reason to Leave Discord (Score 1) 82

Sounds like Micros~1 doesn't want to deal with actual people, much less the consequences of their own boneheaded decisions.

Of course, if Discord had a backbone (and ethics), they would summarily remove the filters, and smack Micros~1 for making them look bad. And if Micros~1 gave them any back-talk about it, they could reply, "Well, it sounds like you should set up your own rules on your own globally accessible chat network. I hear you already have something along those lines. Something called... Teams, I think?. Knock yourselves out..."

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