Thinking and pontificating about AI safety is literally his job, and Less Wrong is a thing he founded, so whatever else Yudkowsky pontificating about AI safety on Less Wrong might be, it isn't "popping up in the most random places".
IIRC they redistribute the source to their users, so the GPL is respected. The GPL doesn't force you to make your modifications public or available to the original authors (that would be non-free), only that your users should have access to the modifications, also under GPL.
They surely do something like Red Hat that says in a contract you lose access to the GRSecurity patch¹ as a user if you publicly redistribute the source.
> They surely do something like Red Hat that says in a contract you lose access to the GRSecurity patch as a user if you publicly redistribute the source.
GPL 2.0
> 6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
Red Hat prohibits you from redistributing their binary packages, and that's well within the rights of the GPL as it attached to the source with the only requirement on binaries being that the GPL'd source code be made available upon request. Before the CentOS rebase, they went a step further and you could just download SRPMs right off their FTP server without even being a paying customer.
In the case of GRSecurity, in their FAQ [https://grsecurity.net/faq] they even acknowledge that their customers have a right to share the patches.
Q: Does grsecurity have a free version for evaluation only?
A: Grsecurity fully complies with the license of the Linux kernel, the GPLv2. Since grsecurity is delivered as a source code patch, it is not possible under the terms of the GPL to offer a free version under an actual restriction that it be used only for evaluation purposes. Any customer receiving a grsecurity patch receives all the GPL-granted rights and responsibilities, including the right to redistribute patches in their possession or even to sell them to others.
They may allow their customers to redistribute the patches and then decide to stop providing further updates to customers that use these rights. I can see this faq being still literally right. They just don't mention this fact.
But this last Q&A states between the lines that no, they wouldn't provide a free version for evaluation only because if they did, you could freely redistribute the patch since they can't impose you to keep it secret because of this very paragraph of the GPL you quote, and they don't want this because that would break their business model.
That's not proof they actually tell their customers they will stop providing them further updates if they redistribute the patch, but this only reinforces my belief they do. This is exactly how they manage to keep there code non-public.
The GPL doesn't and can't force the GRSecurity project to provide updates to their customers under any circumstances.
This faq does not lie and is technically correct, it just "forgets" to mention that customers are tied to such a contract.
Not a customer and their access agreement isn't public, but terminating a contract in retribution for redistributing their patch would be a violation of the GPL's "no further restrictions" clause and thus they would be in breach. If they're pulling a stunt like that somebody with big enough pockets only needs to file a lawsuit.
I don't think that's true. "If you redistribute we stop collaboration" is not a restriction on the source code the customer has access to.
I think this clause doesn't mean what you mean. This clause means that the GRSecurity project can't license their modifications under a more restrictive license than the GPL. Which the GRSecurity project respects, customers do have access to the modifications under the GPL license.
I mean... what tech do people interact with most? Consumer fucking tech.
Someone said it better below
"You know why people hate the tech industry? Because they've wedged themselves into everything, and made it suck more, in pursuit of glorious advertising profits."
The world is much better than it used to be, you’re just more aware of all the present evil because the evidence is so much easy to gather, disseminate, and search for.
Nobody was aware of the extent of police criminality before everyone had a camera in their pocket, as just one example.
The developer time is saved by not writing multiple apps, fuck the end user, who cares about their time?
Seriously, I have to really think about when was the last time there wasn't some degree of unnecessary friction in an application. It really feels like being an end user of modern tech is like being in an abusive relationship.
> It really feels like being an end user of modern tech is like being in an abusive relationship.
I've come to realize that a lot of modern developers consider users of their tech to be little more than cattle. The tech is cattle feed, meant to fatten and ensnare the user, so they can be sold off and slaughtered.
There's really only one party in that kind of relationship that benefits.
+1000. But in my experience the trend started not with developers, but with the other people around them: Product Managers, Designers, Engineering Managers, Steve Jobs wannabes. There was an obvious disdain for users, and they were seen as complete dunces that should be shepherded to whatever new functionality happened to pop up their heads. There was also a complete disdain for the medium: designers used to print design choosing too rigid designs that didn't really work that well on a screen, and only adapting when the market started punishing them.
At first programmers were able to resist all that and have a voice, but lately it seems that the only prestige we retained was the salary, so we must play the same tune as the rest of the band. Agile was an attempt at being "self managed" and have a bit more independence, but that was also corrupted and lots of devs hate it with a passion too, so we're mostly back to practicing non-iterative, Steve-Jobsian-gut-feeling-centric development. Programmers have bought into that toxic mentality too.
And even in better situations, such as my current job, the tasks that cause the most issues, take more developer time and annoy the user the most are always the same: non-idiomatic features (for the web or for desktop apps), often concocted by designers totally disconnected with the audience, who at most did two or three "interviews" where the user said "yeah I could see myself using that".
non-iterative, Steve-Jobsian-gut-feeling-centric development
This is a misunderstanding of Jobs. It’s true that he had a disdain for what users would _say_ they wanted, but he was very focused on providing the, with something intuitive and easy to use. He wanted to make their lives better, and to ‘surprise and delight’.
He was also very iterative. He regularly saw demos of in-production software (and hardware), and would ask for anything from small tweaks to complete rewrites. He was completely unafraid of throwing away work, and would change his opinions on a dime if they didn’t work out.
Sorry, let me rephrase: I don't think Steve Jobs was like that at all.
But the copycats that don't believe in iterative development or in user research love to pretend they got all figured out before it's out for development.
But it became industrialized by business-types. The BOFH thing was personal. They considered (still do, sometimes), users of their systems to be "the great unwashed."
Basically, pests.
Business types look at users as a resource to be exploited to make money.
Basically, livestock.
Different outlook. We try to discourage pests, but we breed and incubate livestock. In neither case, are we particularly interested in the long-term benefit to our users. If anything, the BOFH types are actually working towards the benefit of their "lusers," because that's their job.
I write software that is targeted at a demographic that I actually respect, and sincerely want to benefit with my work (so, naturally, I don't get paid for it).
I'm constantly fighting with "modern software types" that want to treat users of the software that I write as livestock. They -quite literally- can't understand my PoV.
It's fairly discouraging, really. I'm treated like an idiot, because I actually want to help the users of my software.
The only way I see that happening is if it becomes easier to crowdsource donations. When your users are the ones putting bread on your table, they're the boss. Whatever they want they get. But sadly it's hard to crowdsource from programmers because there's so few of us. I love building and sharing software that delights my peers. Not because it's a smart thing to do. If money was the thing I cared about, then it'd be more rational to play video games on Twitch and blog about culture conflict on Substack. Rather coding is something I feel compelled to do and I won't stop even if it destroys me.
It predates the BOFH a bit as well. I am restoring a PDP-10 to operation and the operating system refers to users as "lusers", non-sanctioned users of the system are "turists" who were just there to gawk at things. It's not so much out of disdain for the people themselves as what they were doing with the computer - when computer resources were limited, it was grating to have to wait while unskilled and uncaring people occupied those resources for frivolous or unnecessary reasons.
Edit: Consider being told something along the lines of "Your DNA sequence has to wait, the CEO has important Facebook posts to read..."
> The disdain for "lusers" came from BOFH sysadmin types, well before it was adopted by the non-"tech", business-focused folks.
Based on the definitions in the thread, I'd say the BOFH attitude is more the inverse: it is contemptuous towards users, whereas the modern practice is more condescending towards users.
The latter still has a notional ethos of catering to the user, but the Monkey's Paw corruption caters towards the user's most superficial desires, particularly at a first impression, while de-optimizing for the acclimated or "power" user.
Exactly, the modern practice is condescending. The prevalent thinking is that "users don't really know what they want", so there is zero research, zero iteration, zero respect and a lot of corralling in the application to force users into a (lucrative) workflow.
But the treatment itself is first class, unlike with sysadmins of yore.
I think those are totally different kinds of disdain.
The former is generalized misanthropy plus specific hostility to the individuals who bother them.
The latter is more akin to the feudal lord or the cattle farmer: a lack of empathy plus an eagerness to stuff one's own pockets such that they build exploitative systems.
Sysadmins ultimately just wanted to be left alone to pursue their techie interests. But the MBA types are the opposite. You can't have an upper class without a set of lower classes to provide you with income and feelings of power.
Scott McCloud of Zot fame was an early adopter of the web, I attended a talk from him where he was talking about how frustrated he was that the 3 panel format had persisted to the web, when there were so many ways to use space creatively.
He later adapted that talk for his "understanding comics" Ted talk. Worth a watch if you love the medium
I've got all his books and he's even linked to one of my comics in the past. http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ if you're curious.
It's pretty cool on a decent-sized screen, it was designed around the size of the iPad I'd just gotten when I started it. Not so cool on a phone. Try it on both and you'll see what I mean.
And Cook mocked the US because we didn't have the right tooling to make screws for his Mac pro, he went all over the news and kept spewing how bad our industrial sector was.
One of the tooling engineers that had previously worked with Apple before they were offshored said, "Well, we couldn't wait around for him to come back to us, we have to eat too so we switched to making different things. He's welcome to invest in our production and we'll make whatever he wants"
Man how the fuck does that guy keep popping up in the most random places starting fights?