Hi, I came across this thread and it's something which has raised a lot of concerns for me since Google's announcement. There's a discussion of how it hurts the open-source ecosystem at https://www.reddit.com/r/selfh... and Google's announcement is at https://android-developers.goo...

I like the idea of writing free, open source utilities for others to use. Users having to jump through even more hoops to sideload, or me having to pay money and reveal my identity to Google, get in the way of this --- especially if one of the things I've thought about is e.g. writing a tool to help LGBTQ+ people find locations where they can be reasonably safe in the current US geopolitical climate. That is exactly the sort of utility where the DoJ would make claims I'm some sort of subversive "antifa threat" and demand Google release my identity to them for harassment. Plus, the time where that utility would be most useful -- if someone suddenly has to go someplace unfamiliar on short notice (e.g. getting a call that a relative who lives a few hundred miles away in MAGA territory is getting emergency surgery), having to wait 24 hours to sideload the app if you don't have sideloading currently unlocked, just to find out which rest stops are safe to stop at or not on your drive, would be incredibly unfortunate!

I'm not saying improving app security is a bad thing, and at least Google didn't pull a "We Own Everything And There Is No Way Out Of Our Grip" like they could have, but the options they provide are not nearly good enough. It seems like they only thought about (1) average uninformed users who install things randomly, (2) big commercial developers [who still can get compromised and end up pushing malware, or might even include malware intentionally: just look at LG's McAfee situation, the infamous Sony BMG CD rootkits, etc etc], (3) independent developers who have identity documents Google is willing to recognize [what about the identity document fiascos going on right now with Ukrainian towns Russia is occupying? what about areas occupied in the Middle East by various regimes? what about the way cops confiscate homeless peoples' belongings including ID cards, but you need an ID card to get your belongings back?] plus extra cash [and $25 USD is a lot in some impoverished places, limiting the ability of people in such places to help themselves by becoming app developers], (4) students and hobbyists who only need to share their app with a small group of testers [limiting your ability to test scalability!], and (5) power users who are patient. If you don't fit into the scenarios they planned for, you might be out of luck. And I recognize that the vast majority of legitimate use cases do fall into those above categories, but there are legitimate use cases which don't. They could have at least had a series of open community fora to get feedback on other use cases and plan additional options, but they did not.

It's great that they thought about a few different use cases, at least. But that's not nearly enough!

Could I find an ally to register as the "developer" and publish such an app? Sure, but is that how it *should* be? I would now be dependent on someone else to manage the Play Store listing, which limits my ability to build. Could I spread the word to people who might need such an app that they should unlock sideloading indefinitely just in case? Sure, but maybe that creates new risks for them (and -- what if the option to unlock sideloading indefinitely gets taken away at some future point? Google gets to dictate all the changes here, and users have little recourse if they disagree with the specifics of the implementation)

I just want the guaranteed ability to say "hey, what about XYZ situation, which I or a friend have personal experience with? can you provide a way to handle that?" but I don't. There's no form to fill out to request some sort of special accommodation for an unusual situation, and there probably should be. When you have billions of users, planning for the needs of 99.99% of them still hangs hundreds of thousands of users out to dry. I know trying to accommodate more edge cases isn't as profitable, and having a large enough support team to hear people out when they have an unusual need requires a ton of extra staffing, but smartphone usage has become a critical utility rather than a luxury in much of the world. Google has an immense amount of power over numerous aspects of the lives of all sorts of different people, and if they want to continue to make money from that situation, they need to be prepared to deal with the complexities of it all.

in an unregulated market (what consumers need), new businesses are able to create new competition if there is money to be saved for consumers.

Yep. Open weights is closer to having precompiled binaries only (though you can do a little bit more with open weights). All training data with labeling, plus a detailed build log including any special fine-tuning logs, is needed, especially to help show how the final weights were arrived at (since there can be randomness involved). Unless someone else can both replicate your final output plus make their own changes to it, it's not fully open source.

We're entering the exciting age of AI-powered cybersecurity attacks. I imagine it won't be too long before something like a malware worm which polymorphs to evade detection and adapts itself as new CVEs get published, able to utilize tuned edge models, shows up. Wireless IoT could mean we end up with physical "e-quarantine" zones, wherein devices keep attacking anything in radio range...

in the free market businesses form and compete for consumer money with other businesses, it is the competition that is pro consumer. Unions, like any other political formation, exists to protect special interests, preventing businesses from competing to the best of their ability and pushing prices up - anti consumer.

Businesses are pro-consumer by definition, unless they are government subsidized. Being anti-union (as I am) is being as pro-consumer as possible. Unions push prices up, consumers want lower prices, unions are anti-consumer.

I believe it was well fitting, completely generated by AI.

From an anarcho-capitalist and Austrian perspective, the attack of these subjects is severe. The core criticism is that welfare economics often dresses political value judgments in mathematics and presents the result as scientific optimization.
The Austrian objection starts earlier than the libertarian one.
There is no measurable quantity called âoesocial welfare.â
You value a steak dinner. I value the money more. We trade. Both reveal, through action, that each prefers the new situation.
Economics observes the voluntary exchange.
Now a welfare economist writes something like:
Social welfare = Aliceâ(TM)s utility + Bobâ(TM)s utility + Charlieâ(TM)s utility.
The Austrian response is: what units are you adding?
Utility is ordinal. You prefer A to B. This does not mean your satisfaction is 17.3 units and mine is 12.8 units.
You cannot scientifically establish that taking $1,000 from one person causes less lost utility than giving the money to another person creates.
You can support redistribution as a moral or political position. But calling the resulting calculation a social welfare function does not transform the moral judgment into an objective measurement.
âoeSociety choosesâ is dangerous language.
Individuals choose. Individuals act. Individuals own things. Individuals bear costs.
âoeSociety decided to spend $10 billionâ usually means a political process selected an expenditure and taxpayers were compelled to finance it.
From an anarcho-capitalist perspective, aggregating millions of people into a fictional decision-maker hides the essential question:
Who decided?
Who pays?
Who benefits?
Who refused?
What happens to the person who says no?
Social choice theory deserves some credit here. Its own results expose serious problems with turning individual preferences into a coherent âoewill of the people.â
The Condorcet paradox shows that majority preferences can cycle. Arrowâ(TM)s theorem shows that no general ranking system satisfies several attractive conditions simultaneously.
The anarcho-capitalist reaction is almost sarcastic: you spent decades proving mathematically that there is no coherent social preference ordering, then continued discussing how experts should optimize social welfare.
Pareto efficiency is much narrower than political rhetoric suggests.
Pareto efficiency has a legitimate analytical meaning. The trouble starts when economists move from voluntary exchange to hypothetical compensation.
Suppose a regulation gives Group A benefits economists estimate at $100 million and imposes costs of $60 million on Group B.
Some welfare analysis says the policy produces a $40 million net social gain.
The libertarian response is simple: Group B lost $60 million. Did anyone ask them?
If A gains $100 and B loses $60, saying âoesociety gained $40â treats separate people as entries in one accounting ledger.
An anarcho-capitalist rejects the premise. A benefit to one person does not cancel an imposed loss on another person merely because an economist performs subtraction.
The knowledge problem destroys the fantasy of optimization.
This is the Austrian argument associated especially with Friedrich Hayek.
Economic knowledge is dispersed. Prices contain information produced by millions of independent decisions. Preferences change. Local circumstances change. Resources have competing uses.
A central analyst does not possess the information needed to calculate the âoeoptimalâ allocation.
A market does not require one person to know everything. Prices coordinate plans without a central mind directing the entire system.
Welfare economics often asks, âoeWhat allocation maximizes welfare?â
The Austrian response is, âoeYou do not know the relevant preferences, opportunity costs, entrepreneurial discoveries, future alternatives, or counterfactual prices required to answer your own question.â
The calculation problem is worse without genuine market prices.
This is the argument strongly associated with Ludwig von Mises.
A bureaucrat deciding whether resources should produce railways, hospitals, housing, batteries, or server farms needs meaningful prices for capital goods.
Those prices emerge from exchange, private ownership, profit, and loss.
Without genuine market pricing, planners are not optimizing. They are allocating according to administrative rules, political pressure, historical budgets, lobbying, and guesswork.
A spreadsheet does not solve the economic calculation problem. More computing power does not solve a missing-price problem.
âoeMarket failureâ analysis often compares reality with an imaginary perfect market.
This is one of the strongest libertarian criticisms.
The usual pattern is:
Real markets have imperfect information, transaction costs, externalities, monopolistic tendencies, and unequal outcomes.
Therefore, government intervention might improve the result.
The missing step is institutional comparison.
Government officials also have imperfect information. Regulation has compliance costs. Voters are rationally ignorant. Agencies seek larger budgets. Politicians respond to concentrated interest groups. Regulations create unintended consequences.
The relevant comparison is not:
imperfect market versus perfect government.
The relevant comparison is:
imperfect market process versus imperfect political process.
Once you make that comparison, many clean textbook conclusions become much weaker.
Social choice theory accidentally supplies ammunition to libertarians.
This field is less inherently collectivist than welfare economics.
Social choice theory demonstrates that collective decision mechanisms have deep structural problems.
Majority rule can cycle.
Agenda setters can influence outcomes.
Strategic voting changes results.
Different voting systems produce different winners from the same underlying preferences.
There is no neutral mechanism for converting individual rankings into a single collective preference under all desirable conditions.
A libertarian conclusion follows naturally: if collective choice is structurally problematic, reduce the number of decisions imposed collectively. Leave more decisions with individuals, families, firms, voluntary associations, insurers, cooperatives, charities, and contractual communities.
Social choice theory often asks, âoeHow should everyone collectively choose one option?â
The anarcho-capitalist asks, âoeWhy must everyone choose the same option?â
That question cuts much deeper.
The deepest conflict concerns consent.
Mainstream welfare economics often focuses on outcomes.
Anarcho-capitalism focuses heavily on means.
Suppose forced redistribution produces a statistical improvement under some selected welfare function. The anarcho-capitalist still asks whether coercion became legitimate because an economist assigned weights to different people's utility.
From this perspective, the central problem with much welfare economics is not bad arithmetic. The problem is a category error.
Economics studies choices, scarcity, exchange, prices, production, and consequences.
The moment an economist says, âoeThis distribution is socially better,â a moral judgment has entered the analysis. The economist should identify the ethical assumptions instead of presenting them as a technical output.
The harsh Austrian verdict would be this:
Welfare economics starts with subjective individual preferences, admits they cannot be directly measured or meaningfully added across people, constructs a mathematical social welfare function anyway, inserts political judgments into its parameters, and then announces an âoeoptimalâ social outcome.
Social choice theory is more interesting because much of its best work demonstrates why the phrase âoesociety prefers Xâ is often logically unstable.
The anarcho-capitalist alternative is less ambitious and more disciplined: voluntary exchange, private property, freedom of association, decentralized decision-making, and liability for harms. Instead of trying to maximize an imaginary aggregate welfare number, allow people to pursue different goals and coordinate through consent.
The strongest criticism is not âoeall welfare economists are socialists.â Many are not. The stronger accusation is that the framework gives technocratic politics a scientific-looking vocabulary. Words such as optimization, social welfare, efficiency, and compensation criteria often conceal the real political questions: whose property is taken, who decides, who pays, and whether refusal is permitted.

that phrase has no meaning, especially in this context. Who is dying of thirst in a desert and is forced to pay a huge premium not to die? Samsung should absolutely get as much money now as it possibly can, eventually the profits will reduce to a trickle, they will need all of this extra fat to survive, good for them. You can build your own memory manufacturing plant if you don't like the prices and think you can sell memory cheaper in this current market, go, do it.

Yeah, my argument against deregulation is probably relevant here: big corporate is just big government by another name, except with even less transparency. Never fully trust any entity which has enormous power over your life; even the most well-intentioned mega-entity is still prone to accidentally ruining lives through bureaucratic oversight. So I would hope people protesting government intrusion would also realize that e.g. Facebook is a de facto global governing structure of sorts...

Though this might work for some things, unfortunately, I think it is susceptible to Nazism. "Does this video make society a better place" could get a "yes" from plenty of people who have just sat through a video telling them how $marginalized_group is the root of all evil and must be "dealt with" =/

The ONLY problem is that not everyone else has done so yet. Government shouldn't be allowed to tax income and profit.

Sure. The reason for stupid ideas, like Lysenko, taking over is lack of competition, which is inherent to communism, In a capitalist system people are searching for ways to make money for themselves, so there are enough competing ideas being tried out with private money. If the money runs out before profits are made, the ideas stop. When government can keep subsidizing bad ideas they don't stop, they just keep getting bigger and more stupid.

Obviously. I am currently looking for a data provider for various IOT devices, talked to all major providers, talking to ton of others. Major providers demand that equipment is approved by their networks, in conversations this is all about keeping cheaper equipment out of the country, that's all.

sure, these are choices that stem out of another choice, namely out of the choice to have private ownership and operation of property. If the factory is private property, then it is operating in an environment that promotes and defends private property rights. This means nobody us forced to work there also, not just that nobody is owed a job there. In this environment competition is inevitable and it is competition for the purchasing power of individual buyers. So the demand and purchasing conditions are at least partially dictated by the totality of individual choices of all market participants. This is a policy choice, this is the choice I personally prefer as well.