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.

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...

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" =/

Is there a guideline somewhere on how these groups run fully anonymous infra?
Do they get IP blocks lent by someone? Wouldn't they need a real name and card to pay for hosting, DNS, etc?

Opening a French video out of the blue and hearing some weird English translation no one asked for instead of simply adding subtitles is such an awful example of American exceptionalism...
I'm not necessarily going to set my browser to every language I want to hear with subtitles, but auto-voice translation is just wrong.
If you managed to get to Youtube, you can read and choose to activate it if you want, but stop with this English-centric view.

doubt (x)

Thanks for your questions, Freenet caches data but it isn’t meant to be a long-term storage network. It’s better to think of it as a communication system. Data persists as long as at least one node remains subscribed to it. If nobody subscribes (including the author), it will eventually disappear from the network. So yes, if only your node subscribes then the data will only exist there and won’t be available when your machine is offline. But if other nodes subscribe it will be replicated automatically and remain available even if your node goes offline.

Not from 2023, the linked video is from last month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Yeah, I'd call that sentence more... vapid and awkward, like much corporate speech, than tortured. It's not like it's unparseable; the meaning is fairly clear -- it's just pointless in the context presented. It serves no constructive purpose for the reader, being a vague attempt to invoke a nonspecific sense of nostalgia, likely to distract people from the frustration of the shop being closed? Corporations churn this slop out with or without LLMs

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

You can lament all you want, Ken Fluffernutter, but I will not work to pay for your vacation. That's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen.

No amount of definition twisting and and grandstanding will change the fact that no, I will not pay for your plane tickets and parcel deliveries.

The taxes I pay are extracted from my income. And my income is compensation for the time I spend working away from my family, breaking my back or numbing my brain and a return on the the skills and education I spent years and many thousands of bucks to get. With the costs of living and housing rising sharply, it's difficult enough as it is. I will NOT spend a single dime on taxes to pay for the vacations of other people.

Not happening, Ken. Pay for your own stuff.

Where did you learn to use a calculator? I didn't even check your sources and values, because the math, logic and subject area knowledge alone are terrible enough.

First, maths: you're off by one order of magnitude. 26,8 billion dollars for 16,4 million flights is 1'634 USD per flight. So it's 1,6k per plane, not 16k.

Second, logic: you've duly noted that only 55% of those 16,4 million flights are passenger flights, but calculate them as if they're all passenger flights with 104 pax average per flight, even compounding rounding errors as you go, omitting the 45% cargo-only flights and pretending that shippers for cargo don't need to pay for air traffic security.

Third, subject area knowledge: there are no true scheduled "passenger-only flights" in commercial aviation. What laypeople call "passenger flights" are actually only flights where some air cargo capacity is used by passengers and their luggage. Especially on transcontinental and long-haul flights, "passenger planes" carry an extraordinary amount of air freight and their profitability is hugely dependent on that as well. Making the airline passengers pay the entire flight security tax of that flight would mean the cargo shippers ride tax-free. That's not what we're after.

Cargo shippers, commercial operators, producers, assemblers, too, have their choice of using long-haul trucking, trains, air freight, boats, pigeon carriers or switching to localized production, bulk transport, to and from just-in-time logistics etc.. If company A wants to avoid setting up a warehouse near their production facilities to store all the bits and pieces they need on-site and with sufficient stock to allow for bulk transport, that's their prerogative. Only they can know if the capital assets locked in raw materials are too much compared to just-in-time logistics buying and transporting only the part that's actually needed right now. And air freight costs and air traffic costs play right into that. If company A wants to do just-in-time logistics and company B and C optimize their logistics, localize their production, keep reserves on site? Guess what, A pays the air traffic safety tax, B and C don't.

Same thing. And we can't count the number of boxes or metric tons of cargo vs. passenger counts and the number and weight of their luggage to even properly estimate the actual cost per passenger.

To re-use your simplification to get the absolute upper bound of that tax: if all those 16,4 million flights were passenger-only, air cargo didn't exist like you pretended, and all the flights had 104 passengers on average, then the cost would be 1,6k per flight or 15,71 USD per flight per passenger. Fifteen bucks per flight, at the very maximum, if air cargo didn't exist or was tax-free. And 104 passengers per plane is an absolutely ridiculously low number that applies only to the US domestic market. It doesn't even include the transcontinental flights coming and going to the US, because those are wide-body twin-aisle aircraft that have a LOT more than 104 seats. The top 10 current wide-body aircraft models for long-haul routes have over 200 (737) or over 800 seats (A380). Except these two extremes, most other types carry between 300 and 400 people. They're not flying 70% empty for that "104 passenger on average" number. If airlines actually allow to fly their planes half-empty, that's not a problem for the taxpayer to fix.

No taxation without representation. No taxation to correct or support voluntary and luxury decisions by others. You want it, you pay for it. End of story.