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Comment Potentially Good (Score 1) 75

The Public Markets have rules and laws that incentivize very destructive and predatory behaviors. Corporations behave like psychopaths to hit quarterly numbers for 'fiduciary duty' laws.

Private assets don't have these so they can build real companies with an eye on the future.

But private companies don't have nearly as much access to capital because all the investment money goes into retirement because of stupid tax laws which goes into psychopathic public companies.

And then Blackrock / State Street / Vanguard collude to tell these companies how to behave socially and politically, often against the interests of everyone else in society.

Of course this could be done poorly but the idea has merit. Congress is most likely to screw it up, but who knows, maybe they won't.

That's peak optimism for 2026.

Comment Re:Guessing (Score 2) 50

This is a weird situation.

If the license is changed it's no longer AGPL, it's a unique license.

If the license has restrictions then the copyright is violated by not adhering to the license.

The above makes it sound like both parties want to have it both ways.

I would just give the Russians proper attribution but the European governments hate Russia so much that they couldn't possibly do that. This is a problem with having governments run open source projects.

In the en it's probably going to be like Russian gas which they sanction except for not freezing to death in the winter, when they just look the other way and stay alive to hate the Russians another day.

The whole damn thing stems from some royal cousins hating each other in the 1830's. America was designed to "eff that noise" but every stupid American politician wants to act like a European so Americans get dragged into their stupid wars and other zero-sum games.

Open Source software is supposed to be a non-zero-sum game and the licenses are supposed to create the conditions for that. Maybe FSF should consider a v4 to improve the situation. Anybody seen Eben Moglen lately? Last I heard some whackadoodles at FSF were mad at him. Maybe a post-FSF license is needed.

"Play nice, children."

Comment Re:Soaring RAM prices (Score 1) 105

Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.

I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.

I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.

And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.

I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash plugin loaded too.

FWIW that old machine would take about 15 minutes to encode a 3 minute mp3 file and my current machines does it in about six seconds. So the hardware gains are real.

Maybe ML will actually be able to find some optimizations that are too cumbersome for humans to manage.

Comment Re:So it was illegal (Score -1) 64

Sorry but it's 2026 and this just means embarrassed conservative.

True.

Biden constantly reached out to conservatives

Because Biden could out-conservative any five Republicans combined.

He appointed a very moderate AG

"Moderate" also just means "embarrassed conservative."

even with the very obviously illegal Mar-A-Lago documents

Bzzt! Sitting presidents have total declassification powers. Trump could take and unilaterally declassify anything he wanted, period. And Trump did work with the Feds to secure them in a locked room in a residence with around the clock secret service protection. Now do VP Biden storing classified documents all over unsecured places, and Hillary with her illegal email server. Which she set up just two years after savaging the Bush Administration for using private email.

Comment Re:Writing in clay (Score 1) 40

If you want the epoch of the "Clay Age" I suppose it would be about 2900-3100 BCE, in the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia. They started writing in cuneiform script on wet clay tablets that dried and became a hard record.

Interesting. Mythologized an eon later, "Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat, the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.

—Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (c.1800 BCE)"

Those address the first application of spoken language to writing. Just to confuse matters a bit more, "The first writing can be dated back to the Neolithic era, with clay tablets being used to keep track of livestock and commodities." (per the wiki. I'll have to look more into this, I don't know if I've seen anything about it.) I have read that Egyptian hieroglyphics were originated for accounting. (Allegedly for beer, but I read about this in a "history of beer" article, so YMMV.)

Comment Re:What about the future? (Score 1) 40

I wish we had Feynman's insights around now. Besides the science of the small, here's what he had to say in '04 about what we have come to call AI today:

"Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to
the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting---if they could be made to be more
complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make
judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about
to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we
would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features"

Comment Re:Is that because of the monopoly? (Score 1) 78

My personal take after reading The Idea Factory (really good book btw) was that it was actually a combo of a monopoly with close government accountability that produced some remarkable results.

Basically, Bell had a monopoly, and in anti-trust hearings ~early 1900's it was argued that it was necessarily a monopoly from a technical perspective in order to have standardization of communication across the country. Congress reluctantly agreed, and granted Bell the ability to maintain the monopoly under the constraint that they must continually show that continuing it served the public interest.

Bell Labs was a big part of that - funneling profit into Bell Labs, and providing research and development that helped create the entire information age absolutely served the public interest (development of the transistor and cellular networks being two of the largest innovations coming out of that institution).

My personal take is that what we really saw was an unusually effective success story of checks and balances. Bell had strict accountability and a burden to prove that their existence served the public interest, and the courts and congress served as a check on business practices that would have really abused that monopoly. At the same time, you didn't have the situation we have with NASA, where congress is actually trying to impose rocket designs on NASA - that's very different, where instead of congress serving as accountability, congress is trying to drive pork into their districts. We should be striving for the Bell Labs model in more places IMO - business is allowed to do what business does best and works to maximize profit, and then government acts as accountability to make sure the profit motive isn't driving abusive behavior and the organization still serves the public interest. Big, powerful institutions in business and government should be set up to provide accountability to each other.

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