OpenAI’s notion of “fair use”: military and weapons

Those type of companies are getting so f*****g disgusting.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/12/openai-changes-policy-to-allow-military-applications/ https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036397/openai-is-softening-its-stance-on-military-use

Google loves open source likely for another reason than you do.

Google loves open source when they can capitalize on it.

That is, when a big community works on code that Google can use for free to build their monopolistic infrastructure. They love a global community which works for them for free. They might even foster this community as far as it serves their purpose or for image reasons.

However, if they’d truly love open-source, they could open the source code to their core services. But they’d never ever do that. For this reason they also ban the AGPL license internally (https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy). The AGPL license would force Google to open their code which relies on AGPL licensed projects. Google hates that.

Google does clearly not stand for the ethical values people usually have in mind when talking about open source. For example when something is competing with them, they’ll hate it. Like ad-blockers or browsers which don’t block ad-blockers like Google chrome does. The core business of Google is about surveillance and advertising. To maximize the profitability of this, then need to violate freedoms of their users (like the freedom to use their service while blocking ads). This is in direct conflict with the ethical values often implied by free and open-source software.

So if somebody tells you “Google loves open-source and contributes a lot”, think about what it really means.

gitlab.com is a for profit service/company. They have an open-source community edition of Gitlab which you can run on your own server. Codeberg is a non-profit association running the open-source software “forgejo” for you. At Codeberg you can become a member and then you can vote for important decisions and make proposals. People also care about ethics there. Nobody cares about profit. Codeberg runs on donations from members. I think some people feel more respected at Codeberg because the governing body of Codeberg is a subset of its users. If Gitlab cares about you, then probably because a bad user experience would be bad for business.

Selling railway infrastructure to car manufacturers is generally a bad idea. That’s how the car industry contributed to killing public transportation in the US.

Public transport is their competition. Killing it brings profit. Very simple logic.

It is completely creepy. Think about who is behind Open AI. That’s a mixture of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (Palantir), Microsoft and others. A right-wing, anti democratic, anti-human and purely profit oriented group. The name “Tools for Humanity” is complete sarcasm. What they do with Worldcoin smells like a modern attempt of colonization. Collecting biometry, subverting critical infrastructure (financial systems), making fake promises, blinding poor people with shiny metal balls and a little bit of money in some cases.

This can be stopped though! The Kenyan government apparently banned the project - for good.

Yeah sorry, confused things. It’s comes closer to a Mastodon thing. The point is that a big corporation like Facebook does not need to use AGPL code as long as they can just re-implement it. Compared to the total codebase used at Facebook, re-implementing something like lemmy or mastodon does not sound like a big deal. (That’s not an argument against using the AGPL)

Unfortunately it’s still possible to rewrite a VC-backed clone and start making incompatible changes. Think about Facebook’s “threads.net”. They sure did not take Lemmy source code.

Glad to hear. I just don’t get how a fascist gets elected to be president. What’s the mechanism? I can think of only three explanations:

• people are unaware or misinformed
• people have nearly no influence
• people actually want fascism

I really hope so.

I heard that indeed the Italian government did not do a good job teaching their kids about fascism. In other places such as Germany and Switzerland (and many others, I hope) most students get to know how fascism works and how harmful it is. At least when I was in school, this was part of the teaching program. But in Italy? Apparently not.

This sounds really bad and I’m afraid it’s even worse than it sounds. For example, end of 2022 Italy introduced a law which bans certain types of harmless assemblies (rave parties) of more than 50 people (participants can be put to jail for up to 6 years). This is paving the road for cutting possibilities of people to protest against their government. (Imagine, there is a a protest and somebody plays music. The government will see a rave party.) Yet the Italian government seems to have no problem with 3000 neofascists visiting the hometown of Mussolini. And now this.