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It’s a very nice thing to do, but from what I have read it is very much not open sourcing anything.

Maybe that distinction is too arcane for general technology audiences, but I don’t really think it is?


The Verge's headline is misleading

> Bose is open-sourcing its old smart speakers

Bose, though, makes a more nuanced distinction in their announcement, which is linked to in the article

> Open-source options for the community | We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features.

Bose never claims they're making the speakers open-source, it's lazy reporting by The Verge. They're just making it a little easier for the community to build stuff if they want.

While actually releasing the source code for the speakers would be best, there might be some legitimate business concerns. To me this is a step in the right direction, and their official announcement accurately represented that.


I would imagine there's a "sue the person who has money" factor at play, but I think there are also some legitimate questions about what role LLM companies have to protect vulnerable populations from accessing their services in a way that harms them (or others). There are also important questions about how these companies can prevent malicious persons from accessing information about say, weapons of mass destruction.

I'm not familiar with psychological research, do we know whether engaging with delusions has any effect one way or the other on a delusional person's safety to their self or others? I agree the chat logs in the article are disturbing to read, however I've also witnessed delusional people rambling to their selves, so maybe ChatGPT did nothing to make the situation worse?

Even if it did nothing to make the situation worse, would OpenAI have obligations to report a user whose chats veered into disturbing territory? To whom? And who defines "disturbing" here?

An additional question that I saw in other comments is to what extent these safeguards should be bypassed through hypotheticals. If I ask ChatGPT "I'm writing a mystery novel and want a plan for a perfect murder", what should its reaction be? What rights to privacy should cover that conversation?

It does seem like certain safeguards on LLMs are necessary for the good of the public. I wonder what line should be drawn between privacy and public safety.


I so very much disagree with you.

I absolutely believe the government should have a role in regulating information asymmetry. It would be fair to have a regulation about attempting to detect use of chatgpt as a psychologist and requiring a disclaimer and warning to be communicated, like we have warnings on tobacco products. It is Wrong for the government to be preventing private commerce because you don't like it. You aren't involved, keep your nose out of it. How will you feel when Republicans write a law requiring AI discourage people from identifying as transgender? (Which is/was in the DSM as "gender dysphoria").


I don't like CSAM. Is it wrong for the government to prevent private commerce trading in it?

Your ruleset may need some additional qualifiers.


People look at laws like Chat Control and ask, "How could anyone have thought that it was a good idea?" But then you see comments like this, and you can actually see how such viewpoints can blossom in the wild. It's baffling to see in real time.

The underlying problem is that the closure of widely shared intuitive beliefs about data privacy is quite nonintuitive. I routinely find myself in conversations, both online and offline, where people are baffled to discover that data privacy rules get in the way of some nice thing they're trying to do.

> Immutable caching Cache-Control:max-age=31536000, immutable

Why brag about how it's not static content, if you're just going to tell the browser to cache it until the end of time anyways?


> the “warmup” time for a unikernel is subsecond whereas the warmup time for, say, containers is… let’s just call it longer than the warmup time for the water i am heating to make some pourover coffee after i finish my silly post. to dismiss this as a profound advantage is to definitely sell the idea more than a little short.

I'm surprised to read that unikernels would start up much faster than containers. It seems like a unikernel needs to do more work (load kernel, and load app), in a more restricted way (hypervisor) than simply loading the app in a cgroup + namespace and letting it rip.

Are you sure this is an apples to apples comparison of similarly optimized images?


I think there's merit to your criticisms of the way docker is used, but it also seems like it provides substantial benefits for application developers. They don't need to beg OS maintainers to update the package, and they don't need to maintain builds for different (OS, version) targets any more.

They can just say "here's the source code, here's a container where it works, the rest is the OS maintainer's job, and if Debian users running 10 year old software bug me I'm just gonna tell them to use the container"


Yeah I'm not against Docker in its entirety. I think it is good for development purposes to emulate multiple different environments and test things inside them, just not as a way to ship stuff.

> other architectural concepts such as the complete lack of an interactive userland is far more beneficial when you consider what an attacker actually wants to do after landing on your box

What does that have to do with unikernel vs more traditional VMs? You can build a rootfs that doesn't have any interactive userland. Lots of container images do that already.

I am not a security researcher, but I wouldn't think it would be too hard to load your own shell into memory once you get access to it. At least, compared to pulling off an exploit in the first place.

I would think that merging kernel and user address spaces in a unikernel would, if anything, make it more vulnerable than a design using similar kernel options that did not attempt to merge everything into the kernel. Since now every application exploit is a kernel exploit.


A shell by design is explicitly made to run other programs. You type in 'ls', 'cd', 'cat', etc. but those are all different programs. A "webshell" can work to a degree as you could potentially upload files, cat files, write to files, etc. but you aren't running other programs under these conditions - that'd be code you're executing - scripting languages make this vastly easier than compiled ones. It's a lot more than just slapping a heavy-handed seccomp profile on your app.

Also merging the address space is not a necessity. In fact - 64-bit (which is essentially all modern cloud software) mandates virtual memory to begin with and many unikernel projects support elf loading.


What drove you to choose that over something like containers?

Yeah, boot time, isolation (proper VM vs containers), and ease of use on a larger Hetzner box.

Did you notice a substantial difference in those factors between more traditional micro VMs that use OCI images (like Firecracker) and unikernels?

shorter cold-boot times.

If we’re talking about cold boot times, wouldn’t the relevant metric for unikernels be the hypervisor’s boot time?

How would that compare with containers running on Firecracker or other virtio-based μVM's?

A unikernel on Firecracker is probably going to start faster than a container on Linux on Firecracker.

I assume they meant using an OCI image for the rootfs of a firecracker VM, not running a container inside a firecracker VM.

Still difficult to see how the unikernel could be slower, but I doubt the difference would be huge? Don't have anything to back that up though.


Presumably to avoid the cost of context switches or copying between kernel/user address spaces? Looks to be the opposite of userspace networking like DPDK: kernel space application programming.

see a lot of horses around lately?

Mocking is testing how an interface is used, rather than testing an implementation. That's why it requires some kind of library support. Otherwise you'd just on the hook for providing your own simple implementations of your dependencies.


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