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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Just remember, the current CEO was too greedy even for EA

    John Riccitiello is his name. Dude has the anti-Midas touch. Everything he has ever touched turned to shit. How people keep hiring him is beyond me.

    That said, the board of directors is also part to blame for this. One name stands out, Roelof Botha. Same guy from Sequoia Capital that backed the whole Elon Musk taking a loan out for Twitter and old buddy of Musk’s from PayPal days. He’s also been known for some “choice” selections on where to put VC money.

    And of course you have Barry Schuler of “I made AOL popular” fame. So… Yeah, he’s a choice selection for the board as well.

    But on the other side of it, you’ve got David Helgason one of the co-founders of Unity who has been pretty vocal about “We fucked up!”. But to me that is a tell-tell that Riccitiello et al. sold the rest of the board on the change.

    Point being, the board is made up of hard going MFers who fuck up along the way and folks who are easily rolled over by promises of $$$. So while the CEO is indeed “a work of something”, the board is a perfect storm of “egos and pushovers”.

    Either way, yeah, I think that since literally no leadership change is coming from this “you put the same chemicals in, you’re absolutely going to get the same reaction out.” The only thing they have likely taken from this whole thing is that they cannot be as obvious about changes as they were.










  • US FTC’s statement about Google and antitrust investigation back in 2013.

    We nonetheless recognize that some of Google’s algorithm and design changes resulted
    in the demotion of websites that could, collectively, be considered threats to Google’s search
    business… On the other hand, these changes to Google’s search algorithm could reasonably be
    viewed as improving the overall quality of Google’s search results because the first search page
    now presented the user with a greater diversity of websites.

    Rather, we conclude that Google’s display of its own content could plausibly be viewed as an improvement
    in the overall quality of Google’s search product

    Yeah. FTC is going to do jack-crap about the situation given the tools that they currently have. The FTC is on purpose weak, the US Congress has sought to weaken it over the last three decades. People can go leave a comment on the FTC’s website, but don’t forget, US citizens, to stop by the House and the Senate. And if you need some background, here and here.

    Now all that said, this isn’t posted to discourage, it’s posted to get you focused on what hinders the FTC.



  • So the thing is the case has four parts, three out of four are basically (and I quote from the filing):

    [X/Twitter] not only rejects all claims made by the CCDH, but, through our own investigation, we have identified several ways in which the CCDH is actively working to prevent free expression.

    Which pretty much the vast majority of the filing is this. Which is basically"Nuh-uh YOUR mama so fat!" So yeah, it’s going to go nowhere. The inducing folks to break contract, etc. Yeah, there’s next to nothing there. CCDH has tweets showing the very things they indicated and it’s a semantic argument on what “flourished” may or may not mean to a hypothetical person who wants to buy ads on your network. Basically if you’ve got demonstrable garbage on your network, don’t be surprised if someone points it out.

    The fourth part does touch on something to which we don’t have clear guidance on. And that is how CCDH accessed the site to obtain the data. Scraping a website is mostly free, unless you’re doing it for the explicit purpose of profiting. However, CCDH is a non-profit so this is going to be an uphill thing for Musk.

    Except in the case where the court decides to toss a curve-ball. See, the various US courts don’t have any actual legal framework to work from for web scraping. Congress keeps kicking the can on the issue. And that’s the thing that’s got CCDH awake at night, a Judge literally can just invent their own rationale on why scraping is wrong or a protected right. It could literally go either way given a wild enough judge.

    Anyway, the entire point is that no one should be using X or Twitter or whatever the fuck it is now.




  • I will leave this article from the Software Freedom Conservancy which gives an analysis of the legal impact of the new terms of the RHEL CCS distribution in terms of the GPL.

    In short, it is as you say, not distributing to the public at large is only a violation of the spirit of the GPL but not an actual legal violation. As for redistribution, the new terms stipulate that RedHat CANNOT STOP YOU from redistributing the code (unless you forgot to remove their icons/artwork/copyrightable stuff), but doing so will put you under consideration for a 30-day notice that your ability to access binaries and sources will be revoked.

    Additionally, the SFC has gone ahead and assumed that RedHat will have little inclination to sell a single license to Rocky or Alma for them to them attempt a systematic way to get around their RHEL CCS distribution model. In short, RedHat has come full circle in implementing the full breadth of their hostilities towards downstream projects of their RHEL.

    I know RedHat folks justify it as “None of the downstream projects helped patched anything. That the downstream projects were the ones being hostile and RedHat is just finally responding in like.” I think the “none” might be over exaggerated, but RedHat has indeed submitted easily over 90% of the patches to RHEL’s code base. That said, working with the community to help foster more contributions is the correct answer, not taking the ball and going home.

    All in all, RedHat is basically allowed to do what it is doing. But everyone is free to not like this path RedHat has taken themselves down. I mean, there’s a lot of “questionable” spirit of FOSS that multiple companies that contribute to open source do with their product. cough Java cough.


    • P2P is the new hotness
    • LAMP is the new hotness
    • Ruby on Rails is the new hotness
    • Big data is the new hotness
    • Machine Learning is the new hotness
    • Crypto is the new hotness
    • AI is the net hotness

    None of these died, none of them were the new hotness for very long. Oh by the by, our company is looking for anyone with fifteen years experience in ChatGPT (/s). But in all serious, there’s always a very vocal group that’s chasing the hype. No idea how big they truly are, but they sure do bang the gong the entire time.