Railing against age verification while an orange man is sending the military into your cities, destroying your way of life and antagonizing the whole world against you is priceless.

Of all the early computer start-ups, Apple is the only "started in the garage on a shoestring budget and passion to create something everyone would love" that I can recall hearing about. Were they they only ones to get started like that?

And I see so many people already trash-talking Jobs... business sense without a great product has nothing, but tech genius without business never takes off. Both are necessary! It takes a good product and a good salesman to make a successful brand. Apple was fortunate to have both, it was their recipe for success.

Open Source has changed radically.

Consider how IBM / Red Hat are actively overriding the licenses of the software they distribute.

Consider how coding LLMs copy without attribution open source snippets found by their company spiders. Are there license terms? Yes. Are they being ignored on an industrial scale? Yes.

Consider how Google locks up Android code by making closed source play services effectively essential. This is straight out of the Microsoft playbook when they made IE deliberately essential to control the web.

Consider how web sites use modified open source tooling without sharing their added code back.

We live in a different world. And yes, it's infringement, not stealing like I said. But licensed code is not given away like you say, it's licensed for particular uses with limitations. So we're even.

Noooooooo! It took me 15 years to purge that from my brain! I don't want it back! Vade retro parve munde!

These 10,000 year projects are really interesting challenges. Another one is the Long Now's clock project

An interesting data point is that humanity doesn't have written records older than about 5,000 years, so we have never witnessed the continuously changing communication methods used by the human race over a period of 10,000 years.

I expect that current world languages will drift so much that halfway through, the writing will already look like incomprehensible scratchings, not unlike cuneiform looks to us today. To future people, our radioactive warning signs may still be visible, but utterly meaningless and irrelevant.

"Open Source" has been co-opted by tech companies for 25 years by now. The phrase no longer means what it used to mean, and the current generation of developers is uneducated in the finer points.

Can the community get back to the old ways? Perhaps, but I don't see an easy path from here. The GPLv3, which was rejected, was the strongest attempt at protecting common code from direct corporate exploitation. The BSD style licences were never going to achieve that kind of protection, and they clearly haven't.

We are now well into the era of stealing source code for profit, and routine AI plagiarism. Ironically, the blatant behaviour of the AI companies could be used as a rallying point for a new community, but only time will tell if there are talented individuals willing to do the legwork.

What about the past? Obligatory reference.

Given the amount of cash they are extracting from the public is unsustainable, this was always going to be on the cards. The only question is what the mechanism for change will be.

You're off base. There are sites that can interest you so much that you feel addicted (the correct word might be infatuated). Then there are sites that are engineered to force universal addiction as fast as possible. That's Facebook. That's Meta.

The difference is simple. The former sites are organically addictive to some people. The latter sites are designed by employees who are specifically hired to manipulate all their visitors.

Problem wide open. Microsoft already thought of this solution at least 25 years ago.

They implemented warnings by interrupting the code, opening a pop-up window with two options: proceed or bloc?. I'll give you a guess how that panned out.

There is only one outcome when users are repeatedly interrupted for security reasons. They learn to press yes without even reading the message, while being annoyed by the interruption. Black hats love that.

Child, you do not live in a vacuum. You live in a country with laws. These laws apply to you. Ignoring them will be bad for you. Don't do it.

There are two issues here.

1) Ads are evil, they are a form of propaganda.

2) LLMs are ideally suited to be ad machines, unconstrained from reality.

OpenAI is desperate for revenue, to claw itself out of the gigantic debt hole that Altman has created. Whether this will work is unlikely, but the advertising move will produce much revenue initially. It will also make it obvious that LLMs are a waste of time, eventually, and a form of spam that should be outlawed.

That was a crime problem, not a prohibition problem. Turns out when you let criminals run around with impunity for years, you get bad behaviour. But if you shoot them or prosecute them promptly, even if it's for tax evasion, things get better. Who knew?

No, no, and no. Do not confuse patents and copyrights. Two entirely different kettle of fish. Both are elements of the intellectual property stack. Yet they work entirely differently.

If you want change, maybe educate yourself on IP laws, then work to change these laws. Venting on slashdot won't do any good.

There's a meta-implication though, which is that reinforcement learning based AI training also cannot achieve the kind of existential fear that humans get when they are threatened with consequences for serious offences.