'Source Available', not Open Source. It says so right in the README. The distinction is very important, since there are some who intentionally try to cause confusion between the two.
While I prefer open source over source available, I appreciate the fact that the intention here is clear from the start. I don't like the rug pull of converting an open source project into a source available project in the middle.
I couldn't read the entire article due to the paywall. But you have to hand it to the WSJ for publishing such an opinion piece when the entire world is suffering from an energy crunch caused by the ill-concieved misadventures of some bloodlusting mad men. Don't they have anything more important to worry about? Something like,... I don't know - health care, housing, food, education, child care and pensions for the masses? Do they instead want to provide yet another unsympathetic oligarch with the economic incentive to lobby the government into even more bloody and destructive wars?
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 explicitly prohibits stationing of nuclear weapons and other WMD in space. While it doesn't prevent conventional weapons from being fielded, what is the threshold for what is considered as mass destruction, given the lethality of today's conventional weapons? (Consider thermobaric weapons, for instance.) But the bigger question is, do we even want to go that route, given the genocides and the massacres of children that's happening around the world now? The current warfare isn't revolutionary enough?
Forget wars and fantasies like space datacenters. How far along are we to landing a starship on Mars or even just the Moon for which they were contracted and paid in bulk by NASA? You can accuse me of being an armchair critic (I was involved in the development of a mid heavy launcher). But I don't care. I haven't seen another launcher that hasn't entered orbit after ten development missions. The 'fix as you go' approach can be stretched only so far in any development, much less for a space launcher.
The lunar launch plan for Starship is frankly quite ridiculous, given how many Starships have to be launched for just one mission - the fuel depot, dozens of refueling flights and finally the lander! How did the nation that landed humans on the moon forget to ask fundamental engineering questions like payload capacity and cryogenic boil off rates in space? And that isn't even the hard part. They're talking about in-space refueling as if it's like going to a gas station. Even the cryo liquids floating around under micro-g inside the tank pose its own challenges. And on top of that, you have to worry about purging, chilling and sealing the transfer lines. Meanwhile even after seeing how the Apollo and Artemis missions work, how did anybody think that it's a great idea to propel the entire second stage of a two stage rocket into the moon's orbit?
I think everybody is reluctant to ask such questions fearing the ridicule "What do you know more than the smart guys at SpaceX?" But history keeps proving that convincing explanations matter more than credentials or authority. So far, that silence has enabled the transfer of public funds into private coffers. But now it threatens to disrupt the peace and stability of the world, as they try to repurpose an underperforming project to do what they like the most - bomb innocent civilians. Are we not ready to draw a line for what these oligarchs are allowed to do to pocket public money?
The working and poor population of the world are under enormous stress of unaffordability of every necessity including food and energy. Children are dying like flies due to famines and wars. And WSJ goes promoting war hawks who are scouting the world for the next country to bomb, invade and massacre. This is extremely disgraceful in my opinion. At some stage, we're going to have to define hard limits on this oligarchic greed.
The writing was on the wall when they tried to implement invasive telemetry on users, following an investment offer. They did walk back on it due to community backlash and boycott. But if history has shown us anything, corporate retreat happens only on account of loss of good will and brand value. Once the intent is established, they'll keep looking for other ways to satisfy it. The only difference between that incident and Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub is that the latter was a much louder signal about what was to follow.
Are you not aware of the techno-authoritarian ambitions of the silicon valley tech bros? It isn't much of a secret these days, after they published a few books detailing their aspirations, a bit like Project 2025. There are even public videos where they express their disdain for competition and democracy. A few prominent individuals in this cabal are publicly known. Mr. Lawn Mower here is at the forefront of it and it also includes the owners of many AI and surveillance companies. And they're all actively associated with extreme right wing governments.
Look at the known uses of AI by governments these days. Targeting of immigrants in Minnesota and selection of targets in Gaza and Iran to blow up. And look at the companies contributing to them. Some of the usual suspects are all present and contributing models, data centers and intel inputs.
Is it possible that some of the richest people are collaborating to subdue the rest of the population for their benefit? Does this sound like a conspiracy theory to you? Good! This sounds too fantastic and alarmist even to me. Skepticism is warranted. But the evidences are not mere speculations or leaps of faith. Many are well known facts reported by mainstream media. Besides, this isn't the first time that the greedy and egomaniacal individuals have banded together to consolidate wealth. You already know what they mean when they talk about 'absolute free speech', 'free market capitalism', etc. You've also seen their birth defect of missing empathy in action. And it doesn't help that many of them have an unhealthy obsession with apocalyptic prophecies of several religions (meanwhile, they never seem to notice the nice parts - ever). So a nightmare scenario isn't entirely inconceivable.
Why hasn't the AI bubble burst yet? Why do high profile men engage in cringy public bromance, followed by a messy divorce and then get back together again discretely? What are all their Mein Kampf style fantasy books and outrageous opinions about? Why did doge vacuum up highly sensitive demographic data that seems irrelevant to them? What's with all those shady and convoluted business deals and money transactions that look as if they're scheming a coup? And why the hell are all of them so obsessed with building fortified bunkers under their backyards?
Forget all that. Trump publicly announced yesterday that the military is building a 'massive complex' under that gaudy monstrosity that he calls the ballroom. Apparently, that hideous structure is only a lid for what's underneath. But I wasn't surprised a bit! The reason? A very smart lady had argued the exact same assertion two months ago! She took the details of the 'private donors' of the ballroom, the construction partners and their spending and purchase manifests, to convincingly argue that they're building a massive AI datacenter underground for the military. The costs were too high for the ballroom and many purchases were unconventional, to say the least. She said the exact same thing back then - that the ballroom is just a lid for an underground facility! I mean, if you are a military with a lethal strategic AI, you certainly wouldn't expose it like a traditional datacenter.
I feel like I'm paranoid just saying all these. But the world we live in today was unthinkable more than a decade ago. I don't want to spread confusion and paranoia. But it's also getting too late to ignore the developments. Just keep an eye for what's happening in this area. It's safer to be an unpopular prepper in this political climate, than be caught by surprise if it comes down to that.
As much as I dislike gatekeeping measures like UK's age verification, you can't deny the genuine problem that exists in this case. But it isn't 'machine bad'. There is no good technology or bad technology. It's the intention of those who wield it, that is good or bad. In other words, it's good people vs bad people with technology.
The issue in this particular case is that those content and their web servers are set up for human traffic. In the worst case, a human consumes a few megabytes of data from the server and then leaves. A few of those visits will convert into a job or business opportunity - a fair bargain. LLM scrapers are not like that. They're greedy resource hogs. They not only want everything you have, a whole bunch of them do it repeatedly and endlessly to your server. There's no possible way to justify the cost of such massive bandwidth consumption for a bunch of parasites that never give anything in return. And what do we get? A crappy user experience from all those sites putting up protection measures. This is the tragedy of the commons.
So who is the culprit? The greedy bunch who created the technology that behaves like this and then benefits immensely from it. Are those bad people? Absolutely! Naturally, we need them and their ill intentioned creations off our shared spaces. This isn't anything new. This game has been playing out in different forms since eternity.
Just FYI. Almost every launcher that offers commercial services has such a user manual. I was involved in preparing one such manual. A collection of these manuals can be quite entertaining for 5 year olds. You should be able to easily find them from the websites of the respective companies or agencies.
Their solution to every problem is to take away more control of the smartphones each time from the users who own them. Meanwhile, I have much less problems with scam and security issues and more freedom with software off FDroid. Makes you wonder if the actual problem is perhaps the one coming up with these solutions and their malevolent intentions behind a thin veil of laughable PR. Besides, I don't get people's habit of justifying trillion dollar corporations that can't seem to come up with any non-dystopian solutions.
Two steps forwards and one step backwards in the never-ending march to dytopia and you celebrate it as a show of your generosity and benevolence! I don't know who you're trying to fool. But I'm certainly interested in finding out, because that person must be both naïve and incredibly powerful if you think that it's worthwhile to pull off a public charade like this.
Says who? The fanbois? What makes you think that ordinary people are any happier with Apple's abuses than Google's? This is not a worthwhile justification for what either one of them does.
This is as pro-consumer as cutting off one's nose to cure a cold. Let me say this for the... I don't know how many times, that security, child protection, scam prevention, terrorism, miniaturization, sophistication, etc are all lies peddled by trillion-dollar megacorps to justify their cash grab, and by despotic governments to justify their consolidation of power over citizens. Nobody wants to know why all those problems still occur despite these unpopular measures. Meanwhile, NONE of those draconian restrictions on users' freedom and privacy are technically necessary to achieve any of those ideals. It's a lie that they convince the people by repeating incessantly.
This is 2026, for God's sake! How long has this grift been playing out? At least two decades? What will it take people, much less the tech savvy ones, to learn that all these are designs of greedy and power lusting minds?
While I prefer open source over source available, I appreciate the fact that the intention here is clear from the start. I don't like the rug pull of converting an open source project into a source available project in the middle.
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