It could be that. What it definitely was, though, is that Sony thought they could make more money selling to data centers than to the public.

The shifting of language is a large part of the design process. The textual portions include instructions (and leave space on the large tablets) to add new languages to the tablets, so they can be a form of "Rosetta Stone" for future generations to understand the messages.

https://wipp.energy.gov/librar...

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.

Sure, you don't want to pay full sticker price, because that's the sucker price. You have to waste a day of your life haggling with the dealer so that he can charge different prices to different customers. If you buy straight from the manufacturer under a no-haggle system, they have to offer the same price to everybody. So it's likely to be quite a lot less than the sticker price of a dealership-sold car. The manufacturer still wants to segment the market and milk more money out of less price-sensitive customers, but they have to do it by selling more luxurious trim levels.

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.

My thinking too... the fact that current storage media is short-lived doesn't seem to me to be a big provide since the ability to read said media is also short-lived. Data needs to be kept "fresh" by migrating it to current storage means. Otherwise you end up with stories like NASA finding some thought-lost Apollo data tapes but lacking any means to read them.

If the data is important enough that it needs to be kept for centuries, then it's important enough to migrate to current data storage formats as the technology advances.

An exception that comes to mind is the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (https://www.wipp.energy.gov/ )that had the design goal of storing radioactive waste deep underground and marking the site such that the site's warnings would be understandable and readable 10,000 years into the future. Since the message was sent going to be transferred to new formats and had to last so long, it had to be readable with no aid of technology.

Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks

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.