This would not fund the people you want it to fund.
Bad or borderline actors would be so much better at creating whatever metrics you're basing things off of that the actual value creators wouldn't stand a chance.
As for me that's a risk I'm willing to accept in return for the freedom of the code.
I'm not going to deliberately write code that's LIKELY to do more harm than good, but crippling the potential positive impact just because of some largely hypothetical risk? That feels almost selfish, what would I really be trying to avoid, personally running into a feel-bad outcome?
I think it would be most interesting to find ways to restrict bad usage without crippling the positive impact.
Douglas Crockford[0] tried this with JSON. Now, strictly speaking, this does not satisfy the definition of Open Source (it merely is open source, lowercase). But after 10 years of working on Open Source, I came to the conclusion that Open Source is not the absolute social good we delude ourselves into thinking.
Sure, it's usually better than closed source because the freedoms mean people tend to have more control and it's harder for anyone (including large corporations) to restrict those freedoms. But I think it's a local optimum and we should start looking into better alternatives.
Android, for example, is nominally Open Source but in reality the source is only published by google periodically[1], making any true cooperation between the paid devs and the community difficult. And good luck getting this to actually run on a physical device without giving up things like Google Play or banking apps or your warranty.
There's always ways to fuck people over and there always will be but we should look into further ways to limit and reduce them.
> Open Source is not the absolute social good we delude ourselves into thinking.
Historically the term "Open Source" was specifically developed to divorce the movement from the "social good" ideas that were promoted by Free Software.
That's where I stand. I don't do Open Source to make the world better. I do Open Source because I believe that makes my software better.
I'm not an activist. I'm an engineer. Nothing wrong with activism, all the power to the people doing it, but the licensing I chose for my code doesn't take it into account.
You can easily print bricks that work. They will just require more force to assemble than normal because you have to make them slightly undersized to make up for the lower tolerance.
Just think of how many 3d prints you've seen that consist of multiple parts friction for together.
> Just think of how many 3d prints you've seen that consist of multiple parts friction for together.
I've seen probably 10s, ranging from amateur-who-just-unpacked-their-printer to acquaintance who runs a business doing 3D printed products, and none of them come close to the experience of lego bricks, so far I'm not sure I'd actually call it "work". Stack 10 of these "custom" lego bricks and place them next to another stack of 10, and they almost certainly won't be as aligned as proper lego bricks, not to mention the whole thing will fall apart a lot easier.
Also: try taking them apart a hundred times and sticking them together again. If the parts initially stuck together strongly, chances are one of the parts will break down.
Why wouldn't you want it to be a computer? Then it can be connected to your devices AND also do the job itself in a situation where it's awkward to connect to a device.
If already needs a computer in it to drive menus / modern display protocols. Having that computer be powerful enough to also decode content is barely an extra cost.
A rooted piece of trashy IOT is trashy IOT. It's an acquired taste, the excitement of putting a black box insecure linux device on the home network to add to your home infra admin duties.
Rooting gets you additional means to reverse engineer the proprietary software system but doesn't automagically lighten the box.
It's all relative of course, maybe you view anything you can Ghidra as not-black-box. (though this is kind of tangential to rooting - for a many/most devices you can get a hold of the blobs to reverse engineer without rooting anything)
Do you have to upgrade your computer when you upgrade your router?
This entire subthread is not computer-literate. Your monitor contains a computer. A dumb display contains a computer. Your keyboard contains a computer.
You can strip the software down on them so they do nothing but take commands and drive whatever electronics you have attached to them, but it will still be software on a computer. If there's a lot of RAM and a fat processor, like on a rooted smart TV, I might (but not necessarily) make it do a little more than that.
Modularity and separation of concerns can extend into other domains than software.
For me, it seems so much simpler to keep the two separate. You won't be forced to wash the heating element every time you wash the cup. Can't heat a different cup while the other is in the dishwasher, unless all your cups are self-heating. Normally, the only way for a cup to break is if it shatters, but with an inbuilt heater there's electronics that can break too. And should the cup shatter, now the heater is unusable too, or vice versa.
I have to have a kettle for other purpose (including heating water for other mugs than mine), and no self-heating mug is going to be as efficient as a kettle to heat water.
Furthermore, I also put cold or room temperature liquids in my mug. With a self-heating one, I would be carrying the heating parts for absolutely no reason.
Same goes for a TV.
By keeping things separated, I can decide what I do which each device and manage their lifecycle separately.
If the device reading video files is included in the TV, I can't plug it to another TV or a projector or even take it with me to use it elsewhere.
While I've upgraded three times my video playing device to follow tech evolution, I've kept the same TV to plug them in.
I have a multi-purpose kettle that I can use to boil water, heat the room, cook a small amount of food, or use as a sand battery for when its cold in the desert, where the kettle is designed to operate as long as there is a handful of material to burn.
It is fair to observe a separation methodology, but I also have to say, in some cases multi-purpose devices have their place.
If, say, the self-heating mug involved solar harvesting, I'd put a couple in my kettle bag, for sure.
You can make coffee with a kettle, but if you are making enough coffee often enough, it does make sense to bundle a second kettle into a dedicated coffeemaker, even if you are reducing the functionality of it by doing so.
It's a thing and it's convenient as a smart TV is convenient for people who don't care much.
But as a "power user" of a TV, I want to compose my own setup.
In the same way, "power users" of coffee don't use a coffeemaker. They use things like French press.
(I use instant coffee myself in my non-heating mug so in this comparison I would be the person not owning a TV and watching everything on their phone?)
Arguably the outcome you’d want there is to be able to add your own kettle to the coffee maker, so you can have the best value/option for you if you want it. Want a cheap thing or none? Fine. Want one with remote start and modded temp controls or whatever? Fill your boots. Got a new coffee part but like the existing kettle? Reuse it.
This applies less for some physical items, I know some people are already preparing to explain why it’d be harder to make or dangerous or something but that would miss the point. Computers are incredibly easy to swap out, we already have so many ways of doing that.
Maybe I want a fast computer. None. Maybe I want to upgrade later. Maybe in a year there’s a faster cheaper one. Maybe mine is just fine right now but I need a new screen. Why do I need to bundle the two things together? There’s a simplicity for users unboxing something but there’s not (I think) an enormous blocker to having something interchangeable here.
This provides absolutely zero advantages to the oven or to the microwave. It does cause a lot of stupid, easily foreseeable problems:
- There's only one control panel, and if the oven is currently active, some of the microwave controls get disabled.
- The microwave is awful in various ways -- regardless of whether the oven is active -- which wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, because microwaves are very cheap. But...
- It's impossible to replace the microwave, a $50 device, without simultaneously replacing the oven, a $2000 device.
The same reason I don't want anything else in my life to be a computer. A computer is one more component that can fail and take down the whole product. I want my computer to be a computer and that's it.
How about the abdysmal security Smart TVs either have right of the shelf or for certain after they are no longer kept up-to-date? I don't want to worry having my TV act either as botnet or spying device (many come with microphones and cameras nowadays). I rather purchase additional device that has decent security that I can attach to the TV if I need to.
I won't be alive for the era when we're able to bio engineer beings that have eyes in their hands, but you just gave me a new idea to sit down with ChatGPT and have a nice chat about.
Also,
now that I've typed that out, "sit down with ChatGPT and have a nice chat about." is a helluva thing to say.
Why are people assuming they did store it after the process was completed?
With the relatively low number leaked here it could have been information collected actively during an ongoing breach, not a dump of some permanent database.
Bad or borderline actors would be so much better at creating whatever metrics you're basing things off of that the actual value creators wouldn't stand a chance.
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