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The corporation is owned by the foundation, and does most of the browser development. If you want the browser development to continue, it is a concern.
The corporation is owned by the foundation, and does most of the browser development. If you want the browser development to continue, it is a concern.
This sort of thing is increasingly making TSMC a monopoly as a fab. Due to the extreme economies of scale, fabbing looks like something that is hard to do well under the capitalist model. Perhaps a good time for some of the larger nations of the world to start publicly owned fabs (that publish their research instead of hoarding it) instead of ending up with the whole world reliant on one company that will eventually be able to name its price.
It could also go the other way and someone could sue Google or other companies. Web browsers and ad blockers run on the client not the server, generally with the authorisation of the owner of said client system. It is a technical measure to prevent unauthorised code (i.e. unwanted ads) from running on the system, imposed by the owner of the system. Anti ad blocker tech is really an attempt to run software on someone’s computer by circumventing measures the owner of said computer has deployed to prevent that software from running, and has not authorised it to run. That sounds very similar to the definition of computer fraud / abuse / unauthorised access to a computer system / illegal hacking in many jurisdictions.
Maybe technically in Florida and Texas, given that they passed a law to try to stop sites deplatforming Trump.
https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess125_2023-2024/bills/3102.htm
“The owner or operator of a social media website who contracts with a social media website user in this State is subject to a private right of action by a user if the social media website purposely: … (2) uses an algorithm to disfavor, shadowban, or censure the user’s religious speech or political speech”.
In May 2022, the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled to strike the law (and similarly there was a 5th Circuit judgement), but just this month the US Supreme Court vacated the Court of Appeals judgement (i.e. reinstated the law) and remanded it back to the respective Court of Appeals. That said, the grounds for doing that were the court had not done the proper analysis, and after they do that it might be struck down again. But for now, the laws are technically not struck down.
It would be ironic if after conservatives passed this law, and stacked the supreme court and got the challenge to it vacated, the first major use of it was used against Xitter for censoring Harris!
GitHub are not some bastion of righteousness - they are literally owned by Microsoft. And they work hard to stop people from getting too much Open Source from them, with rate limits and the like, so essentially gate keep.
I think CSDN probably want to gatekeep their clone even harder, but in general having archives of GitHub on the Internet is a good thing.
Would you say its unfair to base pricing on any attribute of your customer/customer base?
A business being in a position to be able to implement differential pricing (at least beyond how they divide up their fixed costs) is a sign that something is unfair. The unfairness is not how they implement differential pricing, but that they can do it at all and still have customers.
YouTube can implement differential pricing because there is a power imbalance between them and consumers - if the consumers want access to a lot of content provided by people other than YouTube through YouTube, YouTube is in a position to say ‘take it or leave it’ about their prices, and consumers do not have another reasonable choice.
The reason they have this imbalance of market power and can implement differential pricing is because there are significant barriers to entry to compete with YouTube, preventing the emergence of a field of competitors. If anyone on the Internet could easily spin up a clone of YouTube, and charge lower prices for the equivalent service, competitors would pop up and undercut YouTube on pricing.
The biggest barrier is network effects - YouTube has the most users because they have the most content. They have the most content because people only upload it to them because they have the most users. So this becomes a cycle that helps YouTube and hinders competitors.
This is a classic case where regulators should step in. Imagine if large video providers were required to federated uploaded content on ActivityPub, and anyone could set up their own YouTube competitor with all the content. The price of the cheapest YouTube clones (which would have all the same content as YouTube) would quickly drop, and no one would have a reason to use YouTube.
would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark
And in the efficient market, that’s how much the service would cost for everyone, because otherwise I could just go to a competitor of YouTube for less, and YouTube would have to lower their pricing to get customers, and so on until no one can lose their prices without losing money.
Unfortunately, efficient markets are just a neoliberal fantasy. In real life, there are network effects - YouTube has people uploading videos to it because it has the most viewers, and it has the most viewers because it has the most videos. It’s practically impossible for anyone to compete with them effectively because of this, and this is why they can put their prices in some regions up to get more profit. The proper solution is for regulators to step in and require things like data portability (e.g. requiring monopolists to publish videos they receive over open standards like ActivityPub), but regulatory capture makes that unlikely. In a just world, this would happen and their pricing would be close to the costs of running the platform.
So the people paying higher regional prices are paying money in a just world they shouldn’t have to pay, while those using VPNs to pay less are paying an amount closer to what it should be in a just world. That makes the VPN users people mitigating Google’s abuse, not abusers.
Yes, but for companies like Google, the vast majority of systems administration and SRE work is done over the Internet from wherever staff are, not by someone locally (excluding things like physical rack installation or pulling fibre, which is a minority of total effort). And generally the costs of bandwidth and installing hardware is higher in places with a smaller tech industry. For example, when Google on-sells their compute services through GCP (which are likely proportional to costs) they charge about 20% more for an n1-highcpu-2 instance in Mumbai than in Oregon, US.
that’s abuse of regional pricing
More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers to best exploit their near monopoly. The abuse is by Google, and savvy consumers are working around the abuse, and then getting hit by more abuse from Google.
Regional pricing is done as a way to create differential pricing - all businesses dream of extracting more money from wealthy customers, while still being able to make a profit on less wealthy ones rather than driving them away with high prices. They find various ways to differentiate between wealthy and less wealthy (for example, if you come from a country with a higher average income, if you are using a User-Agent or fingerprint as coming from an expensive phone, and so on), and charge the wealthy more.
However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.
High profits are a result of lack of competition - in a competitive market, they wouldn’t exist.
So all this comes full circle to Google exploiting a non-competitive market.
they have ran out of VC money
You know YouTube is owned by Google, not VC firms right?
Big companies sometimes keep a division / subsidiary less profitable for a time for a strategic reason, and then tighten the screws.
They generally only do this if they believe it will eventually be profitable over the long term (or support another part of the strategy so it is profitable overall). Otherwise they would have sold / shut it down earlier - the plan is always going to be to profitable.
However, while an unprofitable business always means either a plan to tighten screws, or to sell it / shut it down, tightening screws doesn’t mean it is unprofitable. They always want to be more profitable, even if they already are.
When people say Local AI, they mean things like the Free / Open Source Ollama (https://github.com/ollama/ollama/), which you can read the source code for and check it doesn’t have anything to phone home, and you can completely control when and if you upgrade it. If you don’t like something in the code base, you can also fork it and start your own version. The actual models (e.g. Mistral is a popular one) used with Ollama are commonly represented in GGML format, which doesn’t even carry executable code - only massive multi-dimensional arrays of numbers (tensors) that represent the parameters of the LLM.
Now not trusting that the output is correct is reasonable. But in terms of trusting the software not to spy on you when it is FOSS, it would be no different to whether you trust other FOSS software not to spy on you (e.g. the Linux kernel, etc…). Now that is a risk to an extent if there is an xz style attack on a code base, but I don’t think the risks are materially different for ‘AI’ compared to any other software.
Blockchain is great for when you need global consensus on the ordering of events (e.g. Alice gave all her 5 ETH to Bob first, so a later transaction to give 5 ETH to Charlie is invalid). It is an unnecessarily expensive solution just for archival, since it necessitates storing the data on every node forever.
Ethereum charges ‘gas’ fees per transaction which helps ensure it doesn’t collapse under the weight of excess usage. Blocks have transaction limits, and transactions have size limits. It is currently working out at about US$7,500 per MB of block data (which is stored forever, and replicated to every node in the network). The Internet Archive have apparently ~50 PB of data, which would cost US$371 trillion to put onto Ethereum (in practice, attempting this would push up the price of ETH further, and if they succeeded, most nodes would not be able to keep up with the network). Really, this is just telling us that blockchain is not appropriate for that use case, and the designers of real world blockchains have created mechanisms to make it financially unviable to attempt at that scale, because it would effectively destroy the ability to operate nodes.
The only real reason to use an existing blockchain anyway would be on the theory that you could argue it is too big to fail due to legitimate business use cases, and too hard to remove censorship resistant data. However, if it became used in the majority for censorship resistant data sharing, and transactions were the minority, I doubt that this would stop authorities going after node operators and so on.
The real problems that an archival project faces are:
This is absolutely because they pulled the emergency library stunt, and they were loud as hell about it. They literally broke the law and shouted about it.
I think that you are right as to why the publishers picked them specifically to go after in the first place. I don’t think they should have done the “emergency library”.
That said, the publishers arguments show they have an anti-library agenda that goes beyond just the emergency library.
Libraries are allowed to scan/digitize books they own physically. They are only allowed to lend out as many as they physically own though. Archive knew this and allowed infinite “lend outs”. They even openly acknowledged that this was against the law in their announcement post when they did this.
The trouble is that the publishers are not just going after them for infinite lend-outs. The publishers are arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to lend out any digital copies of a book they’ve scanned from a physical copy, even if they lock away the corresponding numbers of physical copies.
Worse, they got a court to agree with them on that, which is where the appeal comes in.
The publishers want it to be that physical copies can only be lent out as physical copies, and for digital copies the libraries have to purchase a subscription for a set number of library patrons and concurrent borrows, specifically for digital lending, and with a finite life. This is all about growing publisher revenue. The publishers are not stopping at saying the number of digital copies lent must be less than or equal to the number of physical copies, and are going after archive.org for their entire digital library programme.
I looked into this previously, and found that there is a major problem for most users in the Terms of Service at https://codeium.com/terms-of-service-individual.
Their agreement talks about “Autocomplete User Content” as meaning the context (i.e. the code you write, when you are using it to auto-complete, that the client sends to them) - so it is implied that this counts as “User Content”.
Then they have terms saying you licence them all your user content:
“By Posting User Content to or via the Service, you grant Exafunction a worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to host, store, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display and transfer User Content, as authorized in these Terms, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed. You agree to pay all monies owing to any person or entity resulting from Posting your User Content and from Exafunction’s exercise of the license set forth in this Section.”
So in other words, let’s say you write a 1000 line piece of software, and release it under the GPL. Then you decide to trial Codeium, and autocomplete a few tiny things, sending your 1000 lines of code as context.
Then next week, a big corp wants to use your software in their closed source product, and don’t want to comply with the GPL. Exafunction can sell them a licence (“sublicence through multiple tiers”) to allow them to use the software you wrote without complying with the GPL. If it turns out that you used some GPLd code in your codebase (as the GPL allows), and the other developer sues Exafunction for violating the GPL, you have to pay any money owing.
I emailed them about this back in December, and they didn’t respond or change their terms - so they are aware that their terms allow this interpretation.
You can see whether your local federal MP voted for this here: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=chamber/hansardr/27640/&sid=0011 - note the Ayes are voting to allow the debate on the motion (the first step to recognition of Palestine), and the Noes are voting to shut it down and not even talk about it.
The best option is to run them models locally. You’ll need a good enough GPU - I have an RTX 3060 with 12 GB of VRAM, which is enough to do a lot of local AI work.
I use Ollama, and my favourite model to use with it is Mistral-7b-Instruct. It’s a 7 billion parameter model optimised for instruction following, but usable with 4 bit quantisation, so the model takes about 4 GB of storage.
You can run it from the command line rather than a web interface - run the container for the server, and then something like docker exec -it ollama ollama run mistral
, giving a command line interface. The model performs pretty well; not quite as well on some tasks as GPT-4, but also not brain-damaged from attempts to censor it.
By default it keeps a local history, but you can turn that off.
Cars definitely kill wildlife too - estimation methodologies vary, but I’ve seen estimates saying:
Of course, habit destruction and pollution has a huge impact as well.
But roaming pet cats legitimately are a major part of the problem. It is possible to simultaneously replace lawns with tree cover, and reduce the burden of cats. That could also feed into a comprehensive policy of tackling stray and feral cat populations - something which is made harder in suburbs due to roaming pet cats.
As for whether it is cruel: change is a stressor for cats, so a sudden change from outdoor access to indoor-only could increase stress levels, but that is a one-off transition and there could be ways to manage that (for example, by providing a lot of notice of a change and allowing owners to phase out access, or by having a permit system for indoor and outdoor cats, and allowing renewal of existing permits for specific microchipped cats, but no new outdoor cat permits). Outdoor access / hunting outdoors is a form of enrichment for cats, but not the only one possible. Indoor cats can play with toys, and have owners simulate chasing and hunting activities indoors (for example, with ribbons, small balls, chasing cat treats, and so on) to provide similar enrichment. At the same time, the indoors protect cats from stressful situations like encountering or being mauled by dogs, aggressive cats, foxes, brushtail possums, injuries on the roads, and disease.
Yes, but the information would need to be computationally verifiable for it to be meaningful - which basically means there is a chain of signatures and/or hashes leading back to a publicly known public key.
One of the seminal early papers on zero-knowledge cryptography, from 2001, by Rivest, Shamir and Tauman (two of the three letters in RSA!), actually used leaking secrets as the main example of an application of Ring Signatures: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-45682-1_32. Ring Signatures work as follows: there are n RSA public keys of members of a group known to the public (or the journalist). You want to prove that you have the private key corresponding to one of the public keys, without revealing which one. So you sign a message using a ring signature over the ‘ring’ made up of the n public keys, which only requires one of n private keys. The journalist (or anyone else receiving the secret) can verify the signature, but obtain zero knowledge over which private key out of the n was used.
However, the conditions for this might not exist. With more modern schemes, like zk-STARKs, more advanced things are possible. For example, emails these days are signed by mail servers with DKIM. Perhaps the leaker wants to prove to the journalist that they are authorised to send emails through the Boeing’s staff-only mail server, without allowing the journalist, even collaborating with Boeing, to identify which Boeing staff member did the leak. The journalist could provide the leaker with a large random number r1, and the leaker could come up with a secret large random number r2. The leaker computes a hash H(r1, r2)
, and encodes that hash in a pattern of space counts between full stops (e.g. “This is a sentence. I wrote this sentence.” encodes 3, 4 - the encoding would need to limit sentence sizes to allow encoding the hash while looking relatively natural), and sends a message that happens to contain that encoded hash - including to somewhere where it comes back to them. Boeing’s mail servers sign the message with DKIM - but leaking that message would obviously identify the leaker. So the leaker uses zk-STARKs to prove that there exists a message m that includes a valid DKIM signature that verifies to Boeing’s DKIM private key, and a random number r2, such that m contains the encoded form of the hash with r1 and r2. r1 or m are not revealed (that’s the zero-knowledge part). The proof might also need to prove the encoded hash occurred before “wrote:” in the body of the message to prevent an imposter tricking a real Boeing staff member including the encoded hash in a reply. Boeing and the journalist wouldn’t know r2, so would struggle to find a message with the hash (which they don’t know) in it - they might try to use statistical analysis to find messages with unusual distributions of number of spaces per sentence if the distribution forced by the encoding is too unusual.
There are ways it could get close to working, but it really becomes more like continuous representative democracy.
For example, you could set things up so that instead of having a fixed size parliament, you have a virtual parliament that can have participation by every voter if they like to vote on the bills. Then, you allow people to revocably grant and revoke delegations of their vote to someone else. You have some laws around delegations - you can’t coerce people to give you their delegation, and as a recipient of a delegation, you only get to know how many people delegated to you, not who. People get to choose whether they will accept incoming delegations - but if they accept them, their vote on issues is public (otherwise secret). People accepting delegations also need to declare minor conflicts of interest, and avoid major ones entirely. You can’t accept money for a delegation - although if you get enough the government will pay you for having enough delegations and actively exercising those delegations. Unlike voting, people can revoke their delegation at any time, and either vote on issues themselves, or re-delegate. Missing too many issues votes without having appointed a delegate could lead to a warning and eventually a fine.
The biggest issue then becomes how to avoid spamming too many bills in a potentially huge virtual parliament - either because it is a fringe issue, or as a filibuster. This could be worked around by having a maximum number of bills per day to vote on (potentially voted on regularly to set), and letting voters optionally rank one or more bills they’d like to progress - which run against each other in proportional voting to select the slate of bills to go to a vote. Voters would not need to read every possible bill, and could discuss outside the voting system to encourage each other to support a particular bill making it to the agenda. A similar mechanism could limit amendment proposals to bills to be voted on.
There’s a lot one side of the market can do with collusion to drive up prices.
For example, the housing supply available on the market right now often fluctuates over time - once someone has a long term tenancy, their price is locked in until the next legal opportunity to change the price. If there is a low season - fewer people living in an area, higher vacancy rate - in a competitive market, tenants often want a long term contract (if they are planning on staying), and the landlord who can offer that will win the contract. The landlord gets income during the low period, but forgo a higher rent they might get during a high period. Another landlord who tries to take a hardline policy of insisting tenants renew their contract during the high period would lose out - they would just miss out on rent entirely during the low period, likely making less than the other landlord.
Now if the landlords form a cartel during the low period, and it is not possible to lease a rental property long term, then the tenants have no choice but to be in a position to re-negotiate price during the high period. Landlords avoid having to choose between no revenue during the low period and higher during the high period, or a consistent lower rent - instead they get the lower rent during the low period (at a slightly lower occupancy rate, but shared across all the landlords) AND the higher rent during the high period.