Notices by Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop), page 12

@anildash The chutzpah of complaining about wasted time, after spending a decade of very well-compensated time on a project that has made no impact, is … something.

One of the challenges of the moment in tech is that by being so libertarian for so long we have forgotten (never knew?) how to advocate for @blakereid’s “positive regulatory agenda”. But he’s right that the world could be better if we had one. https://mastodon.lawprofs.org/@blakereid/111478109714735976

@thomasfuchs I’m sorry wait what where how?

@jhpot @SomaFMrusty Sci-fi Author: in my book I created the Understanding Nexus as an inspirational goal

Tech company: at long last we have created a tormenting version of the Understanding Nexus from the classic novel Stop Tormenting People and Understand Them Instead

@clacke @jhpot Meh? It’s entirely possible they just didn’t understand the book. Like people missing that Rage Against the Machine was political, lots of not-so-bright folks have managed to read a lot of humane sci-fi and totally miss the humane part. (See also all the AI folks who completely missed the point of Iain M Banks.)

@shannonkay @clacke @jhpot Speaking directly from experience, a lot of them (me) had identities that in large part revolved around reading the books, like others did around music or clothes. Some of us grew up to realize the rockets weren’t the important part. Some… not so much.

@katco @be @josh @shauna @cwebber @root Much depends on the quality and maintenance story of the other protocol implementations. If there’s a lot of money flowing to one implementation, or contracts that specify the tool rather than the spec (which their post suggests may be the case?) it becomes very easy to change/ignore/manipulate a protocol spec.

@cwebber @root Yeah, that’s what I read. Which is basically just pre-announcing a later closed license.

@root @cwebber From their own post, it sounds like the rationale (whether real or misdirection I can’t say) is that Matrix is now being called for in contracts, and they’re irritated that other parties are free-riding to bag those contracts without contributing back to core. Which is reasonable at some level. But the CLA then sort of torpedoes it. AGPL and future decision-making power *to the foundation* would be defensible, this not so much.

Reminder: using other people's work without consent or permission is something we as humans do all the time, and can be ethical in many contexts. Please don't buy into the copyright maximalist position that every use must require permission.

And yes, this is about AI, and no, I am unsure whether AI scraping is ethical. But we cannot let distaste for AI chip away at the small space we've painstakingly carved out for fair, ethical, permissionless use.

@Riedl The Gates Foundation would beg to disagree except they don’t give a fuck what you think

@evan No, but

This was a lot of fun! Thanks, @webmink and @dsearls.

Thought that I won’t be able to get out of my head: I want a deep-dive history podcast, like Revolutions, that goes hard on printing, railroads, the telegraph, etc., and how they have faded into our background while changing everything. I joked it should be “This Era In Tech”. https://cosocial.ca/@evan/111338879154058656

@evan @baconandcoconut Fair enough! If you’re asking the “all else equal, draw straws on the issue…” gah, still a very hard question! But, uh, suffice to say that living in SF deeply affects my priors right now, lol/sob

@baconandcoconut @evan Let me talk to you about state governments and car dealerships!

The correct answer is “depending on which issue we’re talking about, it depends on a lot of things, including the relative competence of specific governments, politics of the specific issue, level and nature of activism, etc., etc., etc.” There isn’t, and can’t be, a one-size-fits-all answer.

@clacke When visiting a decade ago we had excellent ATM luck at 7-11 after all else failed

@mattblaze One of the worst things social media has done to our brains (and I’m not sure this site is any better in this respect) is to convince so many of us that we need to express our thoughts on so many things. I’m not sure how you design against that, though.

@thomasfuchs @siracusa yeah, I’m unclear why the answer isn’t return?

@AlexMorin @BlackAzizAnansi one of the most powerful marketing entities in the world, Facebook, calls it Fediverse in all their Threads documentation. So whether or not that’s right or wrong, until they change their minds or give up on integration, suspect that’s what we get.

(My truly grumpy old man take is that we missed the boat of making the web interactive, and then it would have just been “the conversational part of the web”. Oh well.)

@openfuture @tarkowski maybe this is what will get me to write the long-form version of “licensing is nothing without governance”