The prat responding to the free offer of help for monitoring certificates is a great example of the passive hostility that _used to be_ a hallmark of open source and Linux snobbery.
Why would you even both responding except to declare "I am better than thou?"
Please don't use epithets like this on HN, regardless of whether they're in the discussion here. The first words in the “In Comments” section of the guidelines are “Be Kind”. Please take care to do that in all comments on HN.
The guy asking if it's FOSS has never contributed to the project, I wouldn't read too much into it. Also, F-Droid uses Cloudflare and other non-FOSS stuff for mirrors, so I doubt they would care too much about their free monitoring not being FOSS.
F-Droid is on a free tier of an open core, but not fully FOSS product. A product that is publicly listed on the stock exchange, at that!
They're throwing stones in a glass house.
It's not like their purity gets them anywhere. Google is kicking open software (already hidden and scare walled) off their platform soon and nobody will have F-Droid without permission from Google.
It's better to be pragmatic and focus on the battles that matter. Like the one against Google.
F-Droid isn't throwing stones, that's someone entirely unaffiliated with the project. F-Droid's hosting and infrastructure makes use of many projects and products that are not FOSS.
Things are "scare walled" because things are scary. Just because something claims to be OSI-fucking-open-source doesn't mean anything.
It's better to be pragmatic. Agreed. The developer community needs to get its shit together if it wants to have carvouts compared to the other ~99.9999% of users.
> Things are "scare walled" because things are scary.
It's 100% about power.
Imagine if websites were scare walled. If Microsoft had owned the Internet, that might have happened. Websites can do "scary" things, after all.
You can buy guns and knives and drive 60 miles per hour. You can give your banking information away. So many things scare the user less than Google does. Not to mention you have to go five settings deep to untick a setting to even enable it.
Again, I reiterate: It's 100% about power.
We should stop being afraid, we should stop trying to "protect the children", and we should stand up for our rights.
ehh i think it's different when they're offering an otherwise paid service specifically for open-source projects. like Cloudflare with Project Alexandria
Being entirely based on FOSS is the #1 overarching priority of the entire F-Droid project and always has been. The person who blatantly didn't even bother to check the organization they're talking to, and offered up unsolicited spam for a pointless service... is the one engaging in snobbery.
I didn't know FDroid used entirely FOSS services. Strong disagree that when offering up something free to help with a problem that's clearly being had one must first do a deep dive on the org. This conversation could be as simple as "hey we like FDroid and would happily help support it by providing our service for free to make sure this doesn't happen again", "No thanks, we only use FOSS'.
I think for a service that hosts only FOSS mobile apps, it's a pretty reasonable goal to also try to host and monitor the service using only open source tools. They may not be able to be able to do that 100%, but it's fair to ask.
It's funny, because I had the opposite reaction: I found it a little bit distasteful that, while I'm sure the guy had a genuine desire to help, he's also using F-Droid's issue tracker as a means of advertising his product, as presumably there are other people who might see that issue report and have need for it, and become a paying customer.
(To be fair, this isn't brazen spam; the "ad" is targeted and offered in the spirit of help, and if they offer perpetual free usage for open source products, he's not trying to extract money from F-Droid. But still.)
> Why would you even both responding except to declare "I am better than thou?"
Maybe don't take the most uncharitable interpretation of something said by a random person on the internet who you don't know? Someone who at least has the bona-fide of volunteering their time to help keep a valuable open source project online? Perhaps the F-Droid project does actually have a stated policy of using open source hosting/monitoring tools, and he was genuinely asking in case he missed something, and would actually like to use that service if it is indeed open source.
I think it's pretty weird to assume good faith with the Oh Dear guy's advertisement, but assume the unpaid volunteer helping run F-Droid is a holier-than-thou prat. But hey, of course, capitalism and hustle are the most important things!
> is it FOSS? I don't see any evidence that it is
Sounds like he thinks they said Oh Dear is FOSS but they just provide free accounts for Open Source projects.
Or is he talking about F-Droid?
This is a misconception, we absolutely do know how LLMs work, that's how we can write them and publish research papers.
The idea we don't is tabloid journalism, it's simply because the output is (usually) randomised - taken to mean, by those who lack the technical chops, that programmers "don't know how it works" because the output is indeterministic.
This is not withstanding we absolutely can repeat the output by using not randomisation (temperature 0).
I agree with Harry in the linked comments. Especially considering who ran the survey. If the results somehow didn't support the intended conclusion, to support what's mentioned in the last three paragraphs, you would never hear about it.
"In the 2000s, AEI was the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism.[5] Irving Kristol, widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, was a senior fellow at AEI and the AEI issues an 'Irving Kristol Award' in his honour.[58][59] Paul Ryan has described the AEI as "one of the beachheads of the modern conservative movement"
I think that might have been an own goal on that link. The comment on the article sums it up nicely. Also can you trust the data source - a government body that wants to enact more control?
If there's independent studies great, especially world wide (the US can be a bit insular), but as someone in the UK I dont see anything but disdain for ID checking age-gating.
Even other political parties are saying they'll roll it back if they get in power, which if they're betting the farm on that policy, must have considerable public influence.
They're there for the money as nobody else would listen to this kind of thing day in day out for free.
Your money stops - poof your therapist vanishes, not even a personal follow up call asking if you're ok, and I know this to be true from secondhand experience.
You can't heap your problems on friends either or one day you'll find they'll give up speaking to you.
So what options do you have left? A person who takes money from you to listen to you, friends you may lose, or you speak with an AI, but at least you know the AI doesn't feel for you by design.
MCP is flawed but it learnt one thing correctly from years of RPC - complexity is the biggest time sink and holds back adoption in deference to simpler competing standards (cf XML vs JSON)
- SOAP - interop needs support of DOC or RPC based between systems, or a combination, XML and schemas are also horribly verbose.
- CORBA - libraries and framework were complex, modern languages at the time avoided them in deference to simpler standards (e.g. Java's Jini)
- GPRC - designed for speed, not readability, requires mappings.
It's telling that these days REST and JSON (via req/resp, webhooks, or even streaming) are the modern backbone of RPC. The above standards either are shoved aside or for GPRC only used where extreme throughput is needed.
Since REST and JSON are the plat du jour, MCP probably aligns with that design paradigm rather than the dated legacy protocols.
How is this browser specific or mentioned to be browser?
The technologies can be purely "enterprise integration" of backend services.
When was swagger (openapi) for example forbidden to be used for RPC?
E.g. an endpoint that doesn't just support a crud op but take an event with an operation to execute?
Perhaps if somebody were to shut down your favourite online shooter without warning you'd be upset, angry and passionate about it.
Some people like myself fall into this same category, we know its a token generator under the hood, but the duality is it's also entertainment in the shape of something that acts like a close friend.
We can see the distinction, evidently some people don't.
This is no different to other hobbies some people may find odd or geeky - hobby horsing, ham radio, cosplay etc etc.
> We can see the distinction, evidently some people don't.
> This is no different to other hobbies some people may find odd or geeky
It is quite different, and you yourself explained why: some people can’t see the distinction between ChatGPT being a token generator or an intelligent friend. People aren’t talking about the latter being “odd or geeky” but being dangerous and harmful.
I would never get so invested in something I didn’t control.
They may stop making new episodes of a favoured tv show, or writing new books, but the old ones will not suddenly disappear.
How can you shut down cosplay? I guess you could pass a law banning ham radio or owning a horse, but that isn’t sudden in democratic countries, it takes months if not years.
Gamers threaten all kinds of things when features of their favorite games changes. Including depth threats to developers and threats of self harm and suicide.
Not every gaming subculture is healthy one. Plenty are pretty toxic.
I'm kind of surprised it got that bad for people, but I think it's a good sign that even if we're far from AGI or luxury fully automated space communism robots, the profound (negative) social impacts of these chat bots are already kind of inflicting on the world are real and very troublesome.
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