That's a funny example. I have no issues with the idea of course but in my day to day life I'm way more likely to encounter an issue with colors being lost after sent to a pager or a log file or tee or what not
In my experience with live codebases, "error" or "warning" rarely mean the same thing to the same person, but admittedly you're much more likely to guess that they're in use as opposed to crying-green-clown emoji
It allows the code to be fully public domain, so you can use it anywhere, while very strongly discouraging random people from forking it, patching it, etc. Even still, the tests that are most applicable to ensuring that SQLite has been built correctly on a new compiler/architecture/environment are made open source (this is great!) while those that ensure that SQLite has been implemented correctly are proprietary (you only need these if you wanted to extend SQLite's functionality to do something different).
This allows for a business model for the authors to provide contracted support for the product, and keeping SQLite as a product/brand without having to compete with an army of consultants wanting to compete and make money off of their product, startups wanting to fork it, rename it, and sell it to you, etc.
It's pretty smart and has, for a quarter century, resulted in a high quality piece of software that is sustainable to produce and maintain.
Look, I get the fantasy of someday pulling out my musket^W ar15 and rushing downstairs to blow away my wife^W an evil intruder, but, like, we live in a society. And it has a lot of benefits, but it does mean you don't get to be "king of your castle" any more.
Living in a country with hundreds of millions of other civilians or a city with tens of thousands means compromising what you're allowed to do when it affects other people.
There's a reason we have attractive nuisance laws and you aren't allowed to put a slide on your yard that electrocutes anyone who touches it.
None of this, of course, applies to "poisoning" llms, that's whatever. But all your examples involved actual humans being attacked, not some database.
Thanks that was the term I was looking for "attractive nuisance". I wouldn't be surprised if a tech company could make that case -- this user caused us tangible harm and cost (training, poisoned models) and left their data out for us to consume. Its the equivalent of putting poison candy on a park table your honor!
That reminds me of the protagonist of Charles Stross's novel "Accelerando", a prolific inventor who is accused by the IRS to have caused millions of losses because he releases all his ideas in the public domain instead of profiting from them and paying taxes on such profits.
I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.
My generation learned how to plug computer components together and install operating systems and drivers.
The reason people did that is because they (more or less) had to.
The generation being born today will need neither of those skill sets.
Cars, by and large, stay working for as long as people care to keep them and the things that do go wrong are, mostly, uneconomical to fix at home.
It's likewise rare for, dunno, uninstalling a video game to accidentally delete some crucial OS dependency that causes the thing to need to be reformatted.
It's hard to say what skills the next generation will learn, but I can guarantee there will be something that they need that their children will not. And that they'll complain about their children being useless for not knowing whatever that is.
No, we just outsourced car maintenance to professional shop services. Both because mechanical aspects have become reliable enough to last a year without maintenance and because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated.
> because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated
And because it's software, it happens to be a perfect way for the manufacturer to extract rent (er, "recurring revenue") from car repair business. It's not complexity that's shaping how end-user repair experience looks like, but the fact that you often need proprietary connector, proprietary software, and a valid license key to interface with the car's computer.
And because plenty of engineering goes into designing subsystems with the explicit but unstated purpose of making them close to impossible to repair without ultimately resorting to help from the manufacturer.
Software is just the latest layer on the cake. Non-repairable designs, special tools, unavailable parts, unavailable instructions, fragile and error prone procedures, encryption, and more. They're all occasionally used to with the main purpose of blocking any attempt to easily repair without generating revenue for the manufacturer and their network.
Source: I have family working for two large car manufacturers both in engineering and management, who have personally experienced explicit demands to make things hard to repair by the owner but make them in a way where a reasonable explanation can be used for plausible deniability.
> I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.
These are all things I learned to do myself and have done recently (even the alternator).
Like I said, it’s easier than ever.
I’m kind of baffled that I’m getting downvoted for saying it on HN. Anyone with a little resourcefulness and a willingness to get their hands dirty can do these trivial operations too.
It's tempting to see some kind of relationship to class/caste systems here.
A hypothetical english person might feel trapped by their class and station and "win" by accepting it but the american character always has a chance to rise
There's a lot of stuff to nitpick in the christ story but I've always thought they did a particularly poor job of justifying the sacrifice as being required.
I suspect it resonated more strongly with people of the era whose primary mode of interacting with gods was via sacrificial propitiations, modern relgions rarely stress that part.
> There's a lot of stuff to nitpick in the christ story but I've always thought they did a particularly poor job of justifying the sacrifice as being required.
Are there? Or are these gaps of knowledge?
For instance, you claim that "they did a particularly poor job of justifying the sacrifice as being required". The first problem is that no one claims it was absolutely necessary. God is not compelled or coerced by anything greater or outside of him. This is why I wrote "an act that is not necessary, but as Aquinas says, most fitting". It is most fitting as part of a freely chosen, greater providential plan that you can say best manifests the divine nature and especially in relation to mankind. You might call this a necessity relative to this plan or under the presupposition of this plan, but it is not absolutely necessary. God could choose to forgive sin with a snap of the proverbial fingers.
> I suspect it resonated more strongly with people of the era whose primary mode of interacting with gods was via sacrificial propitiations, modern relgions rarely stress that part.
What are these "modern religions"? New Age cults? Various Westernized consumerist varieties of Buddhism? Occult stuff like theosophy? Other neopagan attempts to retreat from history back into myth? Whatever they are, and putting aside principled criticism, their "modernity" already works against them, as empirically, it can take a little time for the inner faults of a worldview or religion to result in tangible crises. History is littered with all sorts of cults and heresies that have since long been swept into the dustbin of history. Does anything remember the Cathars, the Gnostics? (Curiously, we're experiencing a bit of an unwitting gnostic revival now in secular Western culture. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.)
In any case, modern ideologies often gladly dismiss the sacrificial demands of justice, because they first dismissed sin. And they dismissed sin, because they did not wish to think of what they desired to do as sinful. It chafes and eats at the conscience and contradicts a certain desire for a kind of ontological autonomy, which is to say, self-idolatry. But denial of sin - with sin as an choice taken with some degree of conscious assent - is always a bad move. Repressing such knowledge or losing the vocabulary to talk about it only places you in helpless submission to it. Every sin causes a disintegration of the self, however minor. The universally observed and conspicuous pre-Christian sacrificial propitiation of ancient peoples may have been mythological, but it drew from the well of the human psyche. (The tradition of the Church would say they prefigured the true and perfect sacrifice of the mass. Even here, many low-information Catholics, encouraged by the opportunistic cultural upheaval after Vatican II, have absorbed modernist sensibilities, failing to recognize that the mass is, above all, a sacrifice made on an altar.) There is no justification for the belief that modernity has somehow transcended the human condition and banished human nature. We have merely obscured the meaning of certain impulses at our own peril, dressing them up in what is often a flaky pop-psychological terminology. We still project guilt and scapegoat. We still experience the impulse, but without the proper outlets, it becomes a destructive and self-destructive force. The demand for sacrifice still exerts pressures on the psyche, whether it is acknowledged consciously or not, resulting in all sorts of weird and pathological behaviors and mental states.
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