Copy + paste small business tyrant investment. Like a ghost kitchen. They all just copy each other because it returns a consistent profit.
There is probably some kind if grotesque item in the menu as a “draw”, too. The Tower of Cheese. The Bacon Bun. The [town name] challenge, a dish made of 34 kinds of flesh. Get in here, techbros! Get your grub.
A single hand pie filled with brown sits in the center, slowly crumbling to bits
You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.
This is something I’m very familiar with.
As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).
This is largely the case, yes. Research universities do the basic research that industry then turns into a product and makes piles of cash from. And you are also correct that subsidizing STEM education is a subsidy for industry. It very specifically is meant to do that. It displaces industry job training and/or the companies paying to send their workers to get a degree. It also has the benefit of increasing overall supply in theur labor market, which helps drive down wages. Companies prefer having a big pool of potential workers they barely have to train.
We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.
That’s good!
In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.
I think your approach is better. I also prefer to write better-quality code, which for me entails thinking more carefully about its structure and interfaces and using best practices like testing and CI.
If the government is the US (federal), I think you are technically supposed to release your code in the public domain by default. Some people work around this but it’s the default.
But anyways, the example you’ve given is basically that you’re paid with government funds to do work to assist industry. This is fairly similar to the people that do the work for free for industry, only this time it’s basically taxpayersl money subsidizing industry. I’ve seen this many times. There is a whole science/engineering/standards + contractor complex that is basically one big grift, though the individual people writing the code are usually just doing their best.
I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus.
Perhaps it makes the world a better place, perhaps it doesn’t. This part of the industry focuses a lot on identifying a “social good” that they are improving, but the actual impact can be quite different. One person’s climate project is another’s strategic military site selector. One person’s great new standard for transportation is another’s path to monopoly power and the draining of public funds that could have gone to infrastructure. This is the typical way it works. I’m sure there can be exceptions, though.
Anyways, I would recommend taking a skeptical eye to any position that sells you on its positive social impact. That is often a red flag for some kind of NGO industrial complex gig.
Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.
Well you’re paid so of course it wouldn’t be that.
Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.
Sometimes the industries will open bug reports for their free lunches, yes. A common story in community projects is that they realize they’re doing a lot of support work for companies that aren’t paying them. When they start to get burned out, they put out calls for funding so they can dedicate more time to the project. Sometimes this kind of works but usually the story goes the other way. They don’t get enough money and continue to burn out. You are paid so it’s a bit different, but it’s not those companies paying you, eh?
You aren’t harmed by closed source derivatives because that seems to be the point of your work. Providing government subsidy to private companies that enclose the derivative product and make money for their executives and shareholders off of it.
Oh no I mean that there are companies that just don’t care about licensing and plod ahead hoping it’s never an issue. Like having devs build a “prototype” that they know uses AGPL code and saying, “we will swap this out later” and then 6 months later the “prototype” is in production.
Personally, I make a lot of my personal projects’ code closed because I specifically don’t want it to be useable by others. Not for jerky reasons, but strategic ones. IMO common licenses don’t achieve what a lot of people hope they do.
Software licenses don’t change ownership. That requires transfer of copyright, like with contributor agreements.
Though I am aware that a small set of people seek less copyleft licenses because they think they’re better. They are usually wrong in their thinking, but they do exist.
I’m not sure what you are referring to about ontologically bad. Has someone said this?
Yes you can. You just change the license that lives with the code.
What it changes depends on the project, how it’s used, who uses it, etc. It’s really a social question of how people might interact with your project differently.
The MIT license guarantees that businesses will use it because it’s free and they don’t have to think about releasing code or hiding their copyright infringement. The developers I’ve seen using that license, or at least those who put some thought into it, did do because they want companies to use it and therefore boost their credibility through use and bug reports, etc. They knowingly did free work for a bunch of companies as a way to build their CV, basically. Like your very own self-imposed unpaid internship.
The GPL license is also good for developers, as they know they can work on a substantial project and have some protections against others creating closed derived works off of it. It’s just a bit more difficult to get enterprise buy-in, which is not a bad thing for many projects.
TSA is security theater that fails over 90% of real-world tests. It just wastes a ton of time, jet fuel, and people’s energy who could be doing jobs that actually help others or even just hanging out because that would literally be a more productive use of their time.
Flip it around a little: we need to take control over production to eliminate this pointless and even pernicious waste. There is such massive waste in this system, so much energy and resources and lives dedicated to harmful or wasteful activities, that never really touches a consumerist perspective.
For example, the for-profit healthcare insurance system in the US. If you fired 90% of them, ran a central insurance option through the government, and then paid every single person you fired the same just to do whatever they wanted, you’d actually make the system better and more efficient. That 90% are not just redundant, they are there to put up barriers for needed healthcare because that makes the company money.
The more you analyze any industry, the more you will find these attributes. The product that doesn’t need to exist and only does because of some other deficiency driven by capitalism. The massive bureaucies dedicated to monitoring workers so they don’t unionize, the massive bureaucies that must be duplicated across 50 companies because they each have to do accounting and taxes and payroll and answer calls even though they make the same widget.
On top of all of this is war and related imperialism. Entire countries are thrown into chaos, with this economic system as the root cause. Why is Venezuela so heavily sanctioned? Simply because they nationalized their oil industry so that the money made would go to Venezuelans. This ran against the capitalist imperialist ownership of Venezuela’s resources so they did their very best to destroy the country using economic means. Think of all the people forced into poverty because of this. Think of what they could have built instead. Now think of Iraq, its infrastructure bombed to nothing. We should center the people, but also think of all of the resources it takes to build a power grid, a clean water system, desalinization plants, roads, etc. All of that rubble because Iraq stepped outside the domination of US Empire, itself just an extension of global capital.
Through this we will decrease consumption as well, it is the natural outcome of not maintaining so much redundancy, of destroying so much of what is built, of being able to focus on real problems and developing real solutions rather than forcing humanity into pointless tasks.
Israel is a Western project.
In terms of who the propaganda is meant for and works on, it’s really an internal-facing apparatus handing down false or misleading information and narratives (and censoring true or clarifying information and narratives). The peddlers are ruling class interests that usually span Israel and Western countries, not existing in just one. Large corporations, the military, your local cops, PR firms, think tanks, lobbyists, etc etc.
While Israelis have a pretty fucked up culture and I’m not letting them off the hook, the primary divide in terms of who is creating propaganda vs. consuming it is ruling class vs. everyone else.
Bunch of Redditors hete getting stoked for this war to be down to the last Ukrainian.
An area amounting to about 6 km by 6 km. Still an excuse for cheerleading and manufacturing consent for escalation. One of the villages is like 6 houses.
This was literally what Bandyerites, i.e. fascists that assisted the Nazis and did ethnic cleansing all on their own, used as a rallying cry.
Kherson and Kharkiv are both examples of Russia giving up territory with minimal losses. Kherson was a very famous preemptive withdrawal, with Russia going back on its statements that it would protect the people there. I feel bad for the people there who believed it and tried to build back a functioning society, as they were then subjected to UA’s fascistic extremist militants that have wide berth to determine a very low bar for being a “collaborator”.
Control maps don’t mean much by themselves. A party taking a large strip of mud gets very different media treatment depending on who you read and which party gained it.
That is the common narrative among Americans and Redditors, but it is, as to be expected, based on an uncritical acceptance of numbers and stories from untrustworthy sources, sources with an obvious interest in keeping support for the sending weapons and other military support to UA. This post, for example, coming from Pravda UA and just passing along the message from the MoD. No critical look at any of it from liberals, just cheerleading based on vibes.
Most signs indicate that UA is taking heavy losses while RUS occasionally cedes (and then often takes back) territory. This has been the pattern of the war. In addition, UA military statements are not generally credible, so always take a skeptical eye to these things - particularly from an English-language tabloid uncritically repeating MoD propaganda.
Reminder that USAID is used cynically as a form of leverage for US interests, it largely funnels money back to private industry in the US, and it is heavily involved in absurd propaganda that calls (US-supported) military coup governments democratic and (US-opposed) governments the usual series of adversarial clichés (hand-picked successor authoritarian strong man etc etc). The US State Department has its own positions on the war and groups in Ethiopia and you would have a good chance at being right if you guessed this was targeted to undermine the groups they do not want in charge.
Really though this just warrants skepticism, we can’t definitively tell the exact strategy yet.
I would recommend using this as an opportunity to build out and use a backups system. Whenever I get a new laptop, for example, I just make a(nother) backup on the old laptop and restore whatever I want to the new one. If there are any files I want that are normally excluded from backups, I either tweak my rules to include those files/put them in a different directory and repeat the process or just make a new manual external backup copy temporarily.
If you have good backups then your new drive can be populated from them after creating new partitions. Optionally, you can also take this opportunity to reinstall the OS, which I personally prefer to do because it tends to clean up cruft.
Also, if you go this route, your data on your old drive is 100% intact throughout the process. You can verify and re-verify that all the files you want are backed up + restored properly before finally formatting the old drive for use in the NAS.