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Comment Simple answer: "No." (Score 4, Interesting) 59

The answer is a simple "No.". Don't allow them. The vast majority will fail to meet reasonable criteria for acceptance, which is enough of a reason to reject them. For the rest, even if they're acceptable in terms of quality, the sheer cost of reviewing every pull request in detail and sorting the minority of acceptable requests from the swamp of slop will itself damage the project, diverting maintainer time away from feature work and fixing bugs, badly enough that it's not worth it. I think this sums it up nicely:

Why should I spend my time reading something you didn't care enough about to spend time writing?

Comment correct incentives (Score 1) 151

Well, there have to be correct incentives for someone to be in software, I got into it because I liked the idea of being able to control a machine, to be able to tell a computer what to do and it would do it.

Would I have the same interest in it 40 years ago if controlling the computer meant writing in human language that is imprecise and nuanced and receiving back code that I couldn't start to comprehend? Maybe, maybe not, I am not sure actually. If there was still a way for me to do this without the AI I probably would have gone that route but how many people today would do it? I mean people are telling Agents to write their letters for them, not code, just letters. People are telling agents to do all sorts of things, all of which probably saves some time, make some errors, creates some problems while solving others, it is just that none of it is actually understood by the user.

How many AI users understand how any of it works? But that was the point, to understand how the thing works to be able to control it.

It is similar to car mechanics, people who like to tinker with cars, how interesting is it to tinker with a car where you are not allowed to understand half of it and you cannot fix most of it, if something breaks you have to order an entire replacement part because it has a built in computer interface.

Comment Graduated overkill (Score 5, Interesting) 43

Perhaps it's time to apply the same methods here that helped deal with spam back in the day: start threatening the ISPs that don't deal with users infected with proxies with having all netblocks belonging to them blocked unconditionally. That works by shifting the complaints from people the ISP doesn't get paid by (the services being scraped) to people it does (it's users who can't access services). We even have the tech needed already: DNS-based RBLs. Condemn providers who host scrapers who don't provide useful user-agent strings or don't comply with robots.txt to the same fate.

We don't need regulations to do this. The services belong to the people who run them, and they've got pretty much free rein to take actions to protect themselves. Is it severe? Yes. Is it disproportionate? Also yes. But then, to avoid it they just have to do one easy thing: not be assholes. If they can't manage that, are we obligated to shoulder the costs of letting them freely be assholes? IMO, no.

Comment Re:Magic 8 Ball, am I stupid? (Score 3, Insightful) 23

They don't. They think of them as something that happens on their computer, with only them involved. They know, in the abstract, that there's a server somewhere, but the implications of that don't really sink in. The same problems applied to e-mail since forever, but everyone dismissed it as something that didn't matter since they didn't use email. Now, though, we're seeing the result of the third-party doctrine starting to hit home in ways the average person does need to care about thanks to the ubiquity of the cloud. Chatbot logs, search histories, email records, Flock cameras, Ring doorbell cameras, ALPRs, documents stored in cloud services, social media histories, messaging service histories... everything involving records stored long-term in the hands of third parties is starting to affect ordinary people in ways they can't ignore. I suspect at some point the law is going to have to change.

Comment New coach, same game (Score 1) 96

They're still playing the "Try to get IBM to pay us to go away." game. It didn't work the first time around. This one's even more futile because this particular argument was dealt with during the original case and IBM proved that the code they contributed to Linux wasn't code belonging to Project Monterrey at all but completely different code IBM wrote themselves for a different product. But I suppose, given the people behind this, lack of pattern recognition skills is a given.

Comment Re:Yeah, pretty much this. (Score 0) 194

This is a love tap, fists will be thrown later. One thing can and should be done, we need to start adding aerosols into the atmosphere, the higher the better. Adding Na compounds to jet fuels would introduce just enough aerosols in order to start reflecting a tiny amount more of solar radiation than what makes it to the surface of the planet. 1-2% reflection is all we need to start reducing the temperatures. Of-course we will have to keep doing it until we figure out a more permanent solution.

Comment sideloading control and 3rd party stores (Score 2) 38

Google is now adding more rules to make sideloading more difficult while Apple never provided a way to sideload an app in the first place. People need to be able to build and load their own apps without permission from the OS manufacturer, a phone is a computer with specialized hardware, we do have ability to build and run apps on our own hardware.

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