Those of us that maintain/maintained *BSD has absolutely been contributing back to it. And so has most of the companies that have used code derived from it.

Your lack of understanding of the licenses and their economics shows through. I think you've been hanging out with copyleft FUD providers, since you're repeating copyleft FUD. Companies will contribute changes back to BSD codebases - just not always *all* changes. But more changes than if they instead got a source license for something else, like QNX or Windows. As a former BSD developer, my clear impression is that since the formation of Free/Net/OpenBSD the vast majority of relevant proprietary changes have been offered back to the open source projects. And by "relevant" I mean "changes that had a meaningful chance of being merged back into the mainline project".

Relevant changes not being merged back (e.g. that FreeBSD hasn't accepted the changes from MacOS) has typically been due to lack of review capacity rather than the changes not being offered.

Because he had been taken in by rms' propaganda about how the GPL increases freedom, as most of us was before we thought really really hard about it. Many haven't thought hard enough about it yet to change their minds.

This hides the cost of the GPL. A more appropriate formulation is

"If you want to force companies to give back all changes they make to your software at the cost of having them unable to make use of your software and contribute back at all in cases where they could only give back some of their changes, use the GPL."

I was a FreeBSD developer back in the day. I have worked for companies that made changes to open source software, both as the person doing those changes and in other situations where my team utilized open sourced code and other internal teams made modifications to it. My experience is that companies want to give back anything that is not strategic, and the changes they make to BSD-licensed code bases (really, all code bases) are mostly utilitarian rather than strategic. They want to give back for several pragmatic reasons: It avoids maintenance costs for their changes, it is good PR, their engineers feel good about doing it, and it creates a good relationship to the upstream project, meaning that if they need help, they're likely to get it.

In my experience companies contribute more to BSD/MIT licensed code bases than to GPLed codebases. It is very seldom that it would make sense for a company to make a change to a codebase under GPL and give it back and it would not have made sense to give it back under BSD/MIT. It may be different from individuals. Some individuals believe companies deriving from BSD/MIT-licensed code bases and don't give all their changes back are exploitative, and thus those individuals avoid working on BSD/MIT-licensed codebases.

Of course, if we convince people that companies working on BSD/MIT codebases is typically not exploitative, then the individual part will also impove.

If you've never had a boss like this -- a lazy narcissist -- you're lucky. But if you have, the pattern is familiar and unmistakable:

* Doesn't understand the issues.

* Doesn't do his homework.

* Believes he's a genius whose "gut" overrules people who do understand and do do their homework.

* Plays his subordinates off against one another.

* Highly susceptible to information from random sources: thing he saw on TV, or heard on the golf course.

* Not particularly fussed about contradicting himself because he doesn't care about being right, but does care about being in charge.

* The more chaotic he can make things, the more in charge he feels.

* Has a cynical view of the people he works for but has a genuine gift for flattery when it suits his purposes.

Once you've seen this up close it's really obvious when you come across it again. You can't *not* listen to a lazy narcissist boss because he absolutely will try the stupid shit he says he will. But you can't count on him either, because he has no commitment to anything other than how he looks and feels *right now*.

Neither. Commerce didn't drop it, it got taken away and given to DoJ, but not because Commerce couldn't handle the invetigation of where the chips were going. The case goes to DoJ because we're talking about criminal charges of smuggling, corporate fraud, violation of national security statutes. Also because the Commerce investigation was tained by potential political interference. And possibly because it ran afoul of a counterintelligence operations siloed in the DoJ -- although by this point the cat is so out of the bag everyone must assume they've got a FISA wiretap warrant on them.

However, the *effect* may be to slow the progress of the investigation and delay any actions being taken.

The first reason for this is that criminal investigations are slower, the standards of proof higher, and potentially involve a criminal trial. Commerce could simply make an administrative law determination that put Megaspeed on some shit list and come to some kind of agreement with NVIDIA.

The second reason is that putting this into DoJ's hands is putting it into a department that has had staff turnover and loss of institutional knowledge, strife between career personnel and political appointees, and difficulty replacing lost employees. It's also led by lame-duck appointees, facing turnover in the next administration. So if they don't make progress in the next two years, allowing for transition delays, it could be years before anything gets accomplished. By then a lot of people will have left their jobs, memories will get hazy, evidence will go missing, and defensive positions constructed.

So while the investigation hasn't been *killed*; it has been delayed so long that it's effectively in suspended animation. It's not possible for Commerce to sanction anyone because the investigation is out of their hands.

Money may be an aphrodisiac but come on, Jensen, look in the mirror. There's limits to anything.

I think my point didn't come across. My point was this: The laws in question aren't coded into the cash - they're enforced separately. The fact that e.g. Bitcoin doesn't code in direct support for those laws doesn't mean the laws don't apply, nor that they shouldn't apply.

Cash has also opted out of what you deem "normal legal controls". A blockchain entry is like physical possession of cash. It fully determines who can manipulate the cash, but it doesn't determine legitimacy of possessing that cash.

Try to put two flappy pieces of linen in exactly the same place, and then tell me that they can't enforce any laws. Try to transport a flappy piece of linen from one side of the earth to the other in less than one second, then tell me they can't enforce any laws. Try to put make $6.3 billion worth of flappy linen formatted as $100-bills weight less than 60 metric tons, then tell me that they can't enforce any laws.

The laws are different, but they're there.

I have to think a bit to organize why and advantages and disadvantages of this, so I thought I'd share.

I define "tokenizing shares" as using a distributed blockchain with universal ability to transact as a way to trade shares.

Advantages of tokenizing shares:

* Universal access to fractional trading, not just inside a single trading platform. (Most likely, anyway.)
* Near zero transaction costs outside the spread. There are trading platforms that offer $0 commissions for regular retail customers, but there's still regulatory fees and these could potentially be skipped. (NOTE: There is likely a larger spread on a distributed ledger than a regular exchange, due to slower transactions. See below.)
* Ability to trade 24h
* Access to purchasers that don't want to or cannot use traditional platforms (e.g, crypto fans, people in developing countries). This may be stopped by "Permissioned ledgers", where there contracts that stop the transfer of stocks into a wallet unless it's on a whitelist.
* Resistance to total failure (due to the distributed nature of the setup)

Changes with good and bad sides:

* Slower trades; expect max speed of milliseconds rather than 1us
* Thus, a loss of the ability to do HFT (High Frequency Trading), which means that we lose the information transmission and market making ability of HFTs, but we also lose their ability to do front-running and decrease their ability to cause flash crashes and similar
* Loss of ability to shut down the trading. This remove an abusable tool of power, but it also lose a tool used to stop bad situation (like flash crashes), which is used to deal with bad market situations (like flash crashes due to trading software bugs), to avoid insider trading when major news is about to hit, and to deal with regulatory concerns.
* All trades are final. In the regular market, trades can be reversed by the courts or banks if done quickly (clearing in the US is in one business day, in Europe it's mostly two business days); in an anonymous, immediate clearing system based on a final distributed ledger, trades can't be reversed. This removes some types of risk, but adds in risks of theft (as we've seen with cryptocurrency) and makes mistakes more difficult to reverse.

Disadvantage if both on a regular exchange and a blockchain:

* The slower trades on the blockchain will lead to latency arbitrage. To avoid losses from price sniping, the blockchain market has to have wider spreads. Market makers will also typically provide limited liquidity in the slower market, to minimize the amount of loss the times they do get sniped.

Disadvantages of stocks on a blockchain in general:

* The distributed nature of the blockchain will allow frontrunning: A retail investor place an order in a market, and a frontrunning company with faster routing setup will then buy the stock elsewhere at a lower price, and re-sell it to the investor at the higher price. If there are distributed validators for transaction order, frontrunners may instead use techniques to bribe the validators (e.g, they may run validators themselves, and have their purchase jump the queue). The net result of both is that instead of negative spread going as profit to the retail investors, it goes to the frontrunners.
* It provides larger liquidity pools for criminals and terrorist organizations to do money laundering; e.g. Russia may be able to move billions around outside sanctions (though there are protocols in place that try to stop this)

Disadvantages for this particular blockchain at this time, for the companies that are resistant to getting on it:

* It is cheap to say no now, and they can't say no later
* There is little time to evaluate
* There is likely some level of legal risk

That's a quick attempt to sort my thoughts - they're not strongly researched for this particular blockchain, though I did a couple of searches to fill in details that I wasn't certain about.

That's nowhere near true. The current system is administered by regulated entities that have a decent amount of information about most owners. Are there ways to play the system? Yes. But it's nowhere near the same level of anonymity and flexibility as making stocks into tokens that can be freely transferred to anonymous accounts.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

> Also, it was pretty racist with the whole English thing.

The "whole English thing" is about having someone that it is possible to communicate with in English. I'm fairly sure they would be OK with speaking English through a translation system, as long as it didn't get in the way of the communication.

Also, as someone that is from a non-English-speaking country: Somebody that isn't able to operate in English is unlikely to be able to do good open source work. English is the language that is used to communicate about programming globally, and anybody that does not tap into that communication is at a very large disadvantage. The overall situation is unfortunate, and it can be argued that the situation is systemically racist - but it isn't individually racist to require the ability to operate in English. Fortunately, AI tools are continually making it easier to operate in languages you don't speak, so this disadvantage will become less and less of a problem.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.