This website is missing a very important piece of information: why the hell you'd go to the trouble of making these changes.
It just makes this vague and useless statement:
> Make faster, more accessible, more environmentally friendly websites
And nothing else that I could see to back that up.
Exactly how much does it speed up the website by removing a couple of lines of favicon code from the head? My guess is extremely close to zero. Environmental impact of zero. Flick your lightbulb off for five seconds for a similar benefit, then pat yourself on the back, well done, you just did your bit to save the planet for the next month at least.
Without figures to back it up, this feels like a wannabe influencer padding their resume and wasting our time.
> nobody has any choice in whether or not to participate.
You've hit a key point of disagreement amongst philosophers about the idea of the social contract.
Some of them say it's not voluntary because we were all born into a existing society, others say, sure it is, you can just give up all your property and go live in the forest.
Others then reply that disabled people and children can't do that.
But also the idea of living in a forest is not really an option for most people in the modern world. So my personal take is that the social contract is inherently non-voluntary in the modern world.
> Calling it a social contract just sounds too… soft? for what it really is.
Why do you think a social contract implies softness? For most of it's existence the social contract allowed slavery, ritual killing in the form of warfare and duels, and it still allows the death penalty in much of the world.
> Why do you think a social contract implies softness? For most of it's existence the social contract allowed slavery, ritual killing in the form of warfare and duels, and it still allows the death penalty in much of the world.
I think they are saying that the words "social contract" sound more collaborative and voluntary (to them) than what the phrase actually refers to. Your examples would only reinforce that view.
It is a subjective stance on a coined phrase, but given most of our laws were settled by people not living now, and enforced on people not living when the laws were created, and there is no periodic process of ensuring laws reflect the living, the words "social" and "contract" are being stretched quite a bit.
(On the other hand, the meanings of most phrases drift from the nominal meanings of their constituent words.)
But the benefit of living in a society is that those people that _cannot_ survive without the society, _can_ with it. They still have the option to live outside society, they'll just perish. And that sucks. But by being part of society and gaining the benefits thereof, you are agreeing to follow it's rules (or suffer the consequences if you do not).
I would not survive away from society due to medical needs. In exchange for being able to acquire the items I need to survive, I follow the constraints of living in that society. But it _is_ a choice. I could choose to go live in the woods without said benefit; and I'd die.
> But the benefit of living in a society is that those people that _cannot_ survive without the society, _can_ with it
Hence why it's a "contract". Both parties benefit. Society gets to exist, the people in it mostly have better lives than they would living alone in a forest. Admittedly, that's a low bar and we could stand to improving things.
But the point of "living in the forrest is not an option" isn't that the person in question is incapable of surviving there. It is that the society claims ownership of the forrest an will punish you for trying to live there. I mean, try sleeping in your own car in California, or some other US states...
That's just the nature of almost any society: they are actively hostile towards such outliers.
To be fair, this philosophical discussion originated in the time of Locke and Hobbes, and back then it was far more viable to go off and live in a forest, especially if you went to America to do it.
the societies that grew yes.. there were many others that died. Most of the major countries recognized today in the West were originally warlike and held captives institutionally.
>But also the idea of living in a forest is not really an option for most people in the modern world. So my personal take is that the social contract is inherently non-voluntary in the modern world.
This idea is ridiculous because even if you could go live in a forest a large part of the enlightenment was that states grabbed control of the periphery (forests) of their domain. You can no longer run of into the forest. The state will still want you to fit into the existing ownership structures, censuses, taxation regimes, etc. If you commit a crime it will still be decided by the existing courts.
I don’t think something being a contract is reliant on there being a compelling alternative though. But then it’s usually hard to tell what’s important to philosophers.
> I don’t think something being a contract is reliant on there being a compelling alternative though
Legally, a contract must be entered into voluntarily by both parties. If either party is coerced into joining, then it is no longer considered to be a contract. I assume that philosophers use the same meaning of the word contract.
But you’d have to draw a distinction between “I have to sell my company to Microsoft because they’re the only ones with the expertise to run it,” and “Microsoft sent someone to hold a gun to my head until I signed this paper even though I actually have other options.”
In this case it seems more like the former since no one is really actively combing the woods for hermits and forcibly integrating them into society. I guess it’s not unimaginable for something like that to happen, but I don’t think you could say that that’s reason that most of us are part of society. I do guess you could argue that point, but the argument would have to be that society is actively taking away viable alternatives to force people who otherwise would not have to have to join it, not that such alternatives never existed in the first place.
I dare you to name a forest that someone won’t try to kick you out of pretty quickly.
The US has forest rangers, among others, as do most countries. Even in remote Siberia and Alaska, it likely won’t be long before someone defending a mining claim or similar gets you removed or tries to shoot at you, though you might get long enough in some spots to live half a life at least.
Every society I’m currently aware of has something similar going on, and they absolutely are trying to remove opportunities to stay outside of their bounds.
If you don't sign a contract you are not bound by it, and you are not protected by it. If the law doesn't apply to you, that cuts both ways: people can kidnap or murder you with impunity for any valid-sounding or completely-made-up reason.
If you agree to the law, then saying the people tasked with enforcing the law can affect you because you agreed to it is an argument that has some merit.
If you didn't agree to the law, then the people tasked with enforcing the law can affect you for a different reason: because they can. The natural state of things is basically that people can just hurt each other because they want to, and who's going to stop them? And "anyone" includes the police, and "any reason" includes "because their boss told them to enforce the law on you regardless of some-platonic-version-of-you is some-platonic-version-of-bound by the some-platonic-version-of-law"
Shopee has even worse behavior around reviews. You can't even leave a review past the first few days, and they bribe you with shopee points to leave a review.
The result is people opening the box, going yep, it works, 5 stars, gimme those points.
If it breaks a week or so later? Too late! No way to give feedback.
I use shopee and find the reviews fair. Like everything else, you have to learn how to take the most out of a limited system.
My experience so far has been good. Negative reviews seem fair, and give a good indication of what to expect (maybe I've lowered my expectations from the start).
I just checked and I cannot edit any old ratings. Maybe it's something you can only do through the app?
I can't install the app because I travel between countries and they block my Google account from installing the local app. I'm sure there's ways around that but I'd rather just use the website.
He is just one person. He happens to be the most famous scientist working on this field at the moment it became a gold rush, but it's work built on the shoulders of those who came before, whose discoveries are just as important.
It's not so much that it seems quaint, it's that we are accustomed to short-term, transactional, Wall Street thinking from companies like Google.
For very good reason, because that's exactly how they behave in all other areas. The question remains, why do they appear altruistic when it comes to sharing papers?
I find it hard to believe that it's actual altruism. It's far more likely that it's transactional behavior that just appears altruistic from the outside.
> it's that we are accustomed to short-term, transactional, Wall Street thinking from companies like Google.
Out of all of the companies in the world, I wouldn't put Google near the bottom of the list in terms of stuff they've discovered and released to the world.
It's such a rapidly developing field with much of the progress happening in small labs on the open source models. Eventually, the field will coverage and stabilize. For now, the bet is too be open and supportive, to be close to the progress and be in best position when the dust settles.
People may be altruistic, but in a company setting they may have no possibility for altruism. CEO decisions influence property of others (the shareholders) so he can not freely pursue altruistic goals.
These days the courts give wide latitude to companies to offer virtually any plausible reason why superficially altruistic acts are in fact good long term for shareholder value. Anyone wanting to do what Ford did just needs to keep their mouth shut about the real reasons.
Most likely it's from inexperience with licensing. Many people choose MIT because it's the most popular open source license, without really thinking about how permissive it is and whether they want that for their project.
Maybe someone from this thread could open an issue and suggest they clarify this.
I don't personally know enough about licensing to say whether a sentence in the README.md (saying it can't be sold) is enough to override the LICENSE.md (which says it can be sold).
Personally I'd always choose a copyleft license for something like this.
People do get confused by licensing in general, and even more so about the consequences. Developers are not lawyers.
There are plenty of guides, but most are written by people arguing for a particular license so do not come across as impartial.
IMO people need to ask questions such as whether they want to allow proprietary forks, whether they want anti-tivoisation, whether people using an install over a network need access to the code, etc. and then decide on a license. If you know what you want then it should not be hard to narrow down the choice.
> I don't personally know enough about licensing to say whether a sentence in the README.md (saying it can't be sold) is enough to override the LICENSE.md (which says it can be sold).
It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.
> How would a copyleft license prevent it from being sold?
It doesn't but, it prevents the code from being sold, without the source code attached.
I can pull the code, add some levels, polish this more, call CaveRider, and sell it as a binary. With GPL, you can't do that. You need to add the source to the archive, or make it accessible without any walls.
It doesn't, but whoever sells it needs to contribute back whatever they did with it is almost as good.
It's not quite as good because some games still get griefers who sell versions on some market places without otherwise giving back to the community who maintains them.
It doesn't, but makes it economically unviable. There's hot much point selling something your customers can duplicate for free and give to your other customers for free. grsecurity barely manages it and only because they don't have many customers and make it hard to become a customer.
> letting three of them run free on the codebase seems insane
That seems like an unfair characterization of the process they described here.
They only allowed the agents to create pull requests for a specific bug. Both the bug report and the decision of which, if any, PR to accept is done by a human being.
Right, but it seems like that would just generate three PRs I don’t want to review, given the likelihood the agent went into the weeds without someone supervising it.
I think you're being unfair: try steelmanning. Assume that he is genuinely giving his best and most comprehensive analysis of the situation. It might be a flawed analysis, but at least give credit that it's a genuine effort.
The main flaw of the analysis I can see is that he is seeing patterns that aren't there - being used to analyzing complex international economics, and then being confronted with something as simple as this pump and dump scheme.
This post is claiming Google is winning on every AI front. Search summary is a front on which, as far as I can tell, no one is winning. But Google is one of the worst.
It just makes this vague and useless statement:
> Make faster, more accessible, more environmentally friendly websites
And nothing else that I could see to back that up.
Exactly how much does it speed up the website by removing a couple of lines of favicon code from the head? My guess is extremely close to zero. Environmental impact of zero. Flick your lightbulb off for five seconds for a similar benefit, then pat yourself on the back, well done, you just did your bit to save the planet for the next month at least.
Without figures to back it up, this feels like a wannabe influencer padding their resume and wasting our time.
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