True and I understand the caution considering Oracle is involved which are an awful company to do deal with (and their takeover of Sun was a disaster).
But really, this is a concern for distros. Not for end users. Yet many of the Linux users I speak to are somehow worried about this. Most can't even describe the provisions of the GPL so I don't really know what that's about. Just something they picked up, I guess.
Licensing concerns that prevent distros from using ZFS will sooner or later also have adverse effects on end users. Actually those effects are already there: The constant need to adapt a large patchset to the current kernel, meaning updates are a hassle. The lack of packaging in distributions, meaning updates are a hassle. And the lack of integration and related tooling, meaning many features can not be used (like a/b boots from snapshots after updates) easily, and installers won't know about ZFS so you have to install manually.
None of this is a worry about being sued as an end user. But all of those are worries that you life will be harder with ZFS, and a lot harder as soon as the first lawsuits hit anyone, because all the current (small) efforts to keep it working will cease immediately.
That is due to licensing reasons, yes. It makes maintaining the codebase even more complicated because when the kernel module API changes (which it very frequently does) you cannot just adapt it to your needs, you have to work around all the new changes that are there in the new version.
You have things backward. Licensing has nothing to do with it. Changes to the kernel are unnecessary. Maintaining the code base is also simplified by supporting the various kernel versions the way that they are currently supported.
That's the impression I got at first as well. However, then I realized a really big proportion of people I'd contact this way would say they'd love to meet up but either repeatedly decline suggestions to meet up or even ghost me. I feel like the positive response is just out of general politeness, not willingness to reconnect.
> It’s okay to be the one who initiates...The only issue with always being the initiator is that no reciprocation is a bit of an… issue to our social brains.
It's also about gauging whether the other person cares about you. I carried out the experiment where I stopped texting people with whom I was always the contact initiator. Years later, they still haven't written a single message to me. To me, it's clear that those people never cared about me, I was just their plan B for a saturday hangout in case their real plans fell through.
Thanks, I misremembered. However, the microarchitecture is a bit "weird" (really HPC-targeted), with very long latencies (e.g., ADD (vector) 4 cycles, FADD (vector) 9 cycles). I remember that it was much slower than older x86 CPUs for non-SIMD code, and even for SIMD code, it took quite a bit of effort to get reasonable performance through instruction-level parallelism due to the long latencies and the very limited out-of-order capacities (in particular the just 2x20 reservation station entries for FP).
> Try paying for healthcare or your kid’s college without savings. In a modern context, investing, and wealth-building can be acts of love and protection — not greed.
Only because the present (American) system is set up as such.
Exactly. But we're talking about the present, aren't we?
And with all its flaws, the present isn't all that bad. Capitalism has been a powerful instrument for economic growth and financial liberation. Declining global poverty rates, more opportunities, etc.
China’s economy has been responsible for approximately 75% of the global poverty reduction since the late 1970s [1]. It seems like we should credit socialism not capitalism with the reduction in poverty.
Today we enjoy countless benefits due to workers’ movements of the past. These benefits were fought every step of the way by the business class. It’s highly ironic to attribute all this to capitalism.
Rip 4chan. For all the bad it did, 4chan also made at least one real contribution to science [1], specifically to the study of superpermutations (aka the Haruhi problem), which was cited by genuine academics. We should try to remember it by that.
Given a set of characters, find the shortest string with all permutations of that set. With 2 characters a,b the answer would be "aba", length 3 (not 2! like you suggested).
If that's not how it works, where's the line for what is fraud and what is not? Once you move away from the "code is law" principle, companies have the perverse incentive to define fraud as "any transaction that results in negative PnL for me", which is exactly what happened here.
I am well aware that "code is law" has no weight in actual law. The point I tried to raise was, given the following sequence of events:
1. You deploy a smart contract to the ethereum blockchain
2. I interact with your smart contract in some manner
how do we define whether the manner of interaction in step 2 is fradulent or not?
"Code is law" is one interpretation by crypto enthusiasts to define under what conditions interacting with the blockchain is fraud; in their definition, it's never fradulent.
Let's assume "code is law" is nonsense, as many comments here say. Then, under what conditions do we define interacting with the blockchain as fradulent? What is fraud and what is not fraud?
Edit: In the blockchain we can even formalize this. The ethereum blockchain at block K has a certain state S_K. I submit a certain transaction/set of instructions T to the blockchain which is mined as block K+1. How do we define a function isIllegal(S_K, T)? (Assuming block K+1 contains EVM instructions from my transaction T only)
> Let's assume "code is law" is nonsense, as many comments here say. Then, under what conditions do we define interacting with the blockchain as fradulent? What is fraud and what is not fraud?
The thing is, laws can have issues and bugs as well, just like code! And we have courts to judge not just when someone outright breaks a law but also when someone is skirting on the edges of the law.
Take Germany's "cum ex" scandal for example. Billions of euros were effectively defrauded from the state and on paper the scheme appeared legally sound, but in the end it was all shot down many years later because the actions of the "cum ex" thieves obviously violated the spirit of the law.
The only difference is that blockchains are distributed worldwide and there is no single entity that can be held accountable and forced to execute or reverse any given transaction.
You’re never going to find a binary function that tells you if something is legal or not, in the end it’s up to a human judge to decide. But imagine setting up a search engine and I enter “ Robert'); DROP TABLE INDEX; --” as a search term. Would you say that’s a crime? That’s a perfectly fine thing to search for, right?
> You’re never going to find a binary function that tells you if something is legal or not, in the end it’s up to a human judge to decide.
... but the whole point of cryptocurrency, or at least of smart contracts and "DeFi", is to reject that and try to build a parallel system. That's presumably based on a belief that you can write code that behaves the way you intend, regardless of whether you really can do that or not.
So perhaps the judge should decide "Well, you signed up for that when you tried to opt out of having human judgement govern your deals. Have a nice day.".
And in fact perhaps there should be formal statutory law that makes it clear that's what the judge is supposed to decide in any case that isn't itself "borderline" somehow. Which the case at hand shouldn't be.
That's neat, but the bitcoin whitepaper opens with:
> Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.
Why do you think you can dismiss the obvious claim that cryptocurrencies are a form of decentralized finance with a "no, it isn't"?
> Why do you think you can dismiss the obvious claim that cryptocurrencies are a form of decentralized finance with a "no, it isn't"?
They are or can be a form of decentralised finance. That doesn't mean a system that is totally parallel to the legal system. And, again, different people intend different things with it. It's definitely not all "code is law" people.
If I put up a sign „trespassers will be enslaved“ on my property and then force people who trespass to work for me, would that be fine because they knew what they were getting into? You can’t just create your own justice system which contradicts the real one by making contracts.
Alright, please go ahead and define under what legal pretext this guy's behavior might be illegal.
There are other cases where interacting the blockchain is illegal in a very clear manner. Example: if I know an Iranian or North Korean entity has the keys to an Ethereum wallet, and if I send USDT to that wallet as a Western citizen, that is very illegal due to sanctions.
The context is completely different though. Building a normal computer app is not an attempt to do anything without government or legal structures so it makes sense that normal computer apps would be protected by government or legal structures.
It doesn't really make sense for people to build smart contracts that are intended to be an extra-judical agreement where the code enforces the rules and then run to government whenever something they don't like happens. What is the purpose of smart contracts at all if you still need the entire legal apparatus around them?
What does agreeing to a contract that inherently implies trying to work around the need for government in contracts means? What does it say about intent?
If for example, the firm that lost money had been saying "Code is Law" in their previous pro-crypto statements and had explicitly talked about smart contracts being extra-judical it seeems there intent would be to avoid legal intervention entirely and it would require a fairly high bar to argue that any bug could result in a lawsuit.
It may not pass muster with a judge in some backwater, but with one in the Northern District of California or a jury of their HN peers, it might. Laws are what we make them.
Imagine I write a contract and empower an AI to execute it. I put $10,000 in a bank account and write, "I'd like a nice car."
I do this of my own free will, at my own hazard. I know I'm playing this game. I have intentionally elected to use a system that will execute without any further intervention or oversight on my part. Verbally, I state that I am confident enough in the writing of my instruction that I feel secure in whatever outcome it may bring.
The system automatically executes and someone has sold me a very nice remote control car.
Isn’t, in the US system, the definition of fraud built up through a combination of legislation and case law from previous ‘grey area’ cases? I think most laws tend to have some balance between what is easy to define/understand and what is desirable to allow/disallow.
What does one have to do with the other? Fraud is "intentional deception to gain an unfair or illegal advantage, often resulting in financial or legal harm" what does that have to do with code? What could code even do about fraud?
My personal belief is that this was not fraud and "Code is Law" works. Yet, this guy is a perfect example of how intelligence and wisdom are not the same. He was clearly smart and dedicated enough to pull off this sort of trade successfully multiple times in a row, and probably all he had to do to get away with it was keeping his mouth shut. Or at the very least not get convicted by default on contempt of court charges by ignoring a court summons.
Agree, but the wisdom here is in recognising that once you made $65m in seconds at someone else's expense they will try to recoup that amount by any means necessary.
Without GNU, GPL and Richard Stallman, FOSS would not exist in the first place. The GPL forced companies to make FOSS a thing, whether they liked it or not.
I disagree. They got software that’s open under a different license that otherwise would have just been purely proprietary, or not created at all (due to the compounding effects of open source)
> Without GNU, GPL and Richard Stallman, FOSS would not exist in the first place. The GPL forced companies to make FOSS a thing, whether they liked it or not.
I was responding to this, which is more widespread than GCC (although it was one of the first wins of the GNU).
There were various companies who wanted to add on backends and other bits to GCC, but wouldn’t due to the license. That’s one of the reasons LLVM is so popular.
When VSCode et all beging shipping DRM and who knows what in their extensions, then we'll se what with happens with these half-shareware semilibre projects.
Specially when propietary dependencies kill thousands of projects at once.
As with any other achievement of civilization, younger generations will at some point find why previous ones fought for something and how it sucks to loose it.
But when this realization comes, it will be too late.
I doubt that. People often say "without <person that started thing> we wouldn't have <thing>!" but it's nonsense. Someone else would have done it just slightly later.
> Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye? They said unto him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou?
John 3:2
> The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.
John 20:16
> Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.
"which is to say, master" is the part we're talking about here. jesus isnt a modern day rabbi, but was a teacher in the classical sense. makes sense to me. thanks
This is out of an abundance of caution. Canonical bundle ZFS in the Ubuntu kernel and no one sued them (yet).
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