You can watch this same process unfold live before your eyes with Android OS, or if you don’t want to miss the beginning of the show, grab some popcorn and watch these guys.

No, I have money to pay instead. If I were able to contribute to the effort, I would have said that. Just picking fights in response to open questions today?

Does anyone know if there’s any chance for a fork before this situation inevitably deteriorates? I dont know the license on that software enough to know if its an option.

Unfortunately, there is no historical example where this hasn’t turned predatory. It’s a tale as old as venture capital has been in software development:

• get free contributions from altruistic people donating their time and expertise to your FOSS project that you’re selling
• make a closed-source set of extensions as optional dependencies
• slowly diverge the closed source feature set to include developer and user “must-haves” you do not contribute upstream
• slow or functionally halt open source contributions

It is an oft-repeated long con to pull off a mass heist of donated skill and time while imposing vendor lock-in on your users through a back door.

"As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, “Why did you sting me? You have killed us both!”

The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.”

It definitely is in the very same family of rudeness to the system. Like with everything anymore, we have to design every system to account for bad faith actors, because they are too abundant to ignore and will quickly inundate any good faith, mutual trust, or professional courtesy based system with their “flood the field with bullshit” approach to everything.

I think in this case, as in many others, we need to shift the burden of contribution more onto the contributor so that spurious contributions are more costly to the contributor than the system they’re contributing to. Much like with bots now disrespecting robots.txt, we have to add an element of discomfort to that violation of trust, since the violators lack any senses of community, respect, or shame to keep them acting in good faith.

A system that achieves the same goal as the Nepenthes Web project that punishes and wastes AI resources that disrespect web sites’ bot policies may be needed for software and scientific contributions to raise the bar on contributions such that it is not so easy for prompt engineers to copy and paste some LLM output and call themselves mathematicians.

Excuse me while I go take a shower after saying “prompt engineer”.

As dark a picture as you’re painting, I guess youre more optimistic than me that a major global economic player disappearing from the system would not create an economic depression domino effect around the whole world, even with many countries’ investment in the Dollar notwithstanding.

Every country not fully divested from the dollar will have to do that.

I don’t think they can get away with printing the amount of money this will take, but I guess we’ll see. Either way they go, the global economy will have to be rebuilt from the debris.

Right, but that’s what you, a customer, want. These guys are scaling back the self checkouts because there is excessive shrink happening due to customers being totally untrained and some of them shoplifting much more easily because they’re barely supervised. They’re claiming to be doing it of their own accord because it is hurting profits by way of shrink, though many consumers happen to get what they prefer by coincidence in this case.

I think they may have located a more extreme, even dumber business category than “too big to fail”: “too big to bail out”.

As seen from what the company claims in the article, the employee is there, and it is better that they are, because people are both accidentally and intentionally bad at scanning everything and they’re losing their ass.

Because of just that alone, the idea seems to be dying without the previous poster’s philosophical argument, which is not invalid, even coming into play.

Our species, at all times, consists of some probably relatively consistent percentage of what you’d probably call idiots.

I would say that if some social experiment like this is tried, and it fails because too great a percentage of people are “idiots”, it’s really the thing they’re trying that isn’t suitable for us. It seems a little upside down to blame the people something is made for being the ones poorly suited to it.

Look, I get it. Warning labels prevent avoidable deaths, and rules like the ones mandating the labeling on the bags are written in someone’s blood.

That said, there are billions of us at this point, and there were over a billion at the time of the example we’re using. While it may sound callous, a number like dozens against that backdrop is so statistically insignificant that we may want to see how many people might have died as a result of creating and placing millions of liters of warning ink on billions of bags and make sure that didnt have even more lethality.

The point I’m making is that some warnings and protections can be more onerous than they are helpful, and while a child dying or being harmed is tragic, reactionary response worsening conditions for everyone that is still alive can be, too. It is important to carefully measure safety and security against the harms it may cause, or you’ll end up with widespread safety bans and everyone rolling around in impermeable bubbles.

I dont know the fine details in Australia’s particular case beyond this article and maybe some others I vaguely remember, but it is wise to be very wary of villains wrapping themselves in the “save the children” flag while they strip away people’s privacy and security. I have 4 Flock cameras in my neighborhood to “protect the kids”, but they’re also protecting the brutal social hierarchy, which kills tons of kids.

I hope, for the sake of our species, that the statistic you’re citing was a spurious correlation. It’s just this side of “water is wet”.

I don’t think you have to be so critical of yourself. Everyone here uses things every day that they have incomplete or maybe even even no understanding of how parts of it work. Its just a reality, maybe an unfortunate one, of the level of technological advancement we’re at and how we’ve incorporated it into our societies.

Nothing says “we’re the good guys” quite like having to lavishly bribe the public not to hate and obstruct your every move.

I fear this may be some of the same thinking that got us mandates for manufacturers to put warnings not to suffocate yourself on plastic bags.

I think Apple is shining light on an important reality here:

In the modern era, the populace is practically required to use technological devices that it is unreasonable to expect them to fully understand. So, rather than leave the consequences of that lack of understanding to fall on them with a shrug, it is better for everyone if those devices and their makers do their best to help them by limiting the impact of their ignorance of that particular technological niche.

In that vein, I feel that it is long overdue to apply “the principle of least privilege” and a “defense in depth” philosophy to home computing devices and operating systems. Compartmentalizing data and functionality behind fine-grained permissions with verbose, plain speech descriptions of what those permissions are for, along with what should and should not be requesting those permissions, would go a long way to prevent these sorts of data abuses. It would also help to limit how much damage viruses and malware could do if installed.

For example. I’m frankly struggling to come up with any valid use cases for full disk access on a computer beyond file backups. I’m sure there are some, but almost nobody would need to use them, so a dire, flashing warning seems in order.

It is clear that sane regulation of unscrupulous software behavior won’t be forthcoming any time soon, but even then, you still should lock your doors even though trespassing is illegal, metaphically speaking. “Trust but verify,” one of the only good statements out of Ronald Reagan’s mouth.

At least your partner is the one you most need to have and benefit from listening. Your privacy can easily be compromised by close associates. Best of luck to you; you’re not doing anything wrong. Its not you that’s the downer, it’s the circumstances you’re describing.