Microsoft has developed many open-source projects. The view of Microsoft as some kind of anti-open-source crusader is 20 years out of date.
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.
Microsoft has developed many open-source projects. The view of Microsoft as some kind of anti-open-source crusader is 20 years out of date.
Content warning: this is a rant from a teenager who has strong opinions.
Okay…
However, it holds a monopoly on software.
You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.
they could just go “Boop! You’re gone!” and there’s nothing I could do about it other than move forges.
Yeah, nothing you could do about it, other than moving to one of the many other git hosts. Monopoly!
And then after listing off a whole bunch of alternative git hosts…
Centralization is not bad by itself but it’s bad when there’s no other option. There just needs to be ways to contribute to code without having to use Github.
You have plenty of ways to do that, and you know that because you just listed them. Github is not a monopoly.
Also, I don’t see the concept of open source mentioned at any point in this rant.
If it makes you feel better, the thing that annoys me most is not so much that this is happening but more how everybody is suddenly surprised by it and complaining about it. The data-harvesting itself doesn’t really harm anyone.
I’m just venting, really. I know it’s not going to make a real difference.
I suppose if you go waaaay back it was different, true. Back in the days of Usenet (as a discussion forum rather than as the piracy filesharing system it’s mostly used for nowadays) there weren’t these sorts of ToS on it and everything got freely archived in numerous different places because that’s just how it was. It was the first Fediverse, I suppose.
The ironic thing is that kbin.social’s ToS has no “ownership” stuff in it either. For now, at least, the new ActivityPub-based Fediverse is in the same position that Usenet was - I assume a lot of the other instances also don’t bother with much of a ToS and the posts get shared around beyond any one instance’s control anyway. So maybe this grumpy old-timer may get to see a bit of the good old days return, for a little while. That’ll be nice.
Well, a large part of my frustration stems from the “I’ve seen this for decades” part - longer than many of the people who are now raising a ruckus have been alive. So IMO it’s always been this way and the “social contract we’ve adapted to” is “the social contract that we imagined existed despite there being ample evidence there was no such thing.” I’m so tired of the surprised-pikachu reactions.
Combined with the selfish “wait a minute, the stuff I gave away for fun is worth money to someone else now? I want money too! Or I’m going to destroy my stuff so that nobody gets any value out of it!” Reactions, I find myself bizarrely ambivalent and not exactly on the side of the common man vs. the big evil corporations this time.
Hardly. They earn money by being paid by their users, but they can earn more money by being paid by their users and also selling their users’ data. The goal is more money, so it makes sense for them to do that. It’s not crazy.
From the WordPress Terms of Service:
License. By uploading or sharing Content, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, adapt, publicly display, and publish the Content solely for the purpose of providing and improving our products and Services and promoting your website. This license also allows us to make any publicly-posted Content available to select third parties (through Firehose, for example) so that these third parties can analyze and distribute (but not publicly display) the Content through their services.
Emphasis added. They told you what they could do with the content you gave them, you just didn’t listen.
I’m sorry if I’m coming across harsh here, but I’m seeing this same error being made over and over again. It’s being made frequently right now thanks to the big shakeups happening in social media and the sudden rise of AI, but I’ve seen it sporadically over the decades that I’ve been online. So it bears driving home:
They’re giving you services in exchange for your contents.
Does nobody even think about TOS any more? You don’t have to read any specific one, just realize the basic universal truth that no website is going to accept your contents without some kind of legal protection that allows them to use that content.
I actually have a friend who’s involved in a situation like this right now. He got laid off from his old job a few months back and while he was job hunting he started working on a project with a couple other friends that could be worth a fair bit of money. He’s had job offers since then and he got a lawyer to write up a description of the project he’s working on that could be inserted into those “I’m keeping the rights to this stuff” contract sections.
It’s a bit different for him because it’s stuff that he’s actively working on right now, though. It sounds like your case might be simpler, if it’s stuff you haven’t done yet and don’t plan to try working on while employed with this current employer I suspect you won’t need to worry about it. Though of course, IANAL.
How many Minsk Agreements did Russia go through, again?
Have a listen to that rambling interview Putin gave Tucker the other day. He thinks all of eastern Europe is “Russian speaking.”
Russia has passed laws annexing Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts. They invaded Kharkiv and made a run for Keiv and Odessa. Their politicians rant about how Poland and the Baltics are next. You really think anyone’s going to believe that they did all that to keep some territory that they had already occupied?
“He was a Nazi,” Russian propagandist’s favorite excuse for killing people.
So you think Russia intends to keep on fighting until it conquers Ukraine?
They literally just murdered Putin’s most prominent political rival. Just yesterday.
The fighting is to provide ammunition at the negotiating table. Currently, Russia isn’t going to accept any negotiated settlement that requires them to leave Ukrainian territory or return kidnapped Ukranian children, for example. But once Russia’s on the ropes there’s a better chance of them doing that.
Okay, he hadn’t done anything wrong to us. I guess we could have paused the main campaign to spend a while investigating him, but we were doing one of those save-the-world things so we didn’t have the time. :)
Indeed, hence the sticky philosophical puzzler. I would think that the clerics themselves would start getting affected by the spell. Fortunately (for them), the effect of the spell when cast on someone of the same level as yourself is only deafness for 1d4 rounds. The Church could probably cover that up.
There was another interesting related situation that came up in an actual campaign I was in, involving the Blasphemy spell (a variant that only kills non-evil targets). My party and I were in our “home base”, a mansion belonging to an allied NPC noblewoman, planning out our next excursion. A powerful demon we’d been tangling with attempted to scry-and-fry us, teleporting in and nuking us with Blasphemy. Unfortunately there were a lot of low-level NPC staff working in the noblewoman’s household and the spell wiped them out instantly… except for one guy, who happened to be of evil alignment. He survived the encounter because of that.
Even though his alignment was evil, though, he’d never done anything wrong and didn’t seem like he had any reason to do anything wrong in the future. So we weren’t sure if we should fire him or what. It wasn’t illegal to simply be evil, you had to actually do something evil before you could be punished. We just warned him we’d be keeping an eye on him, in the end, and kept him on staff.
I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
Here’s the SRD entry for the spell. It definitely nukes the neutrals.
The evil equivalent is Blasphemy, which nukes all non-evil creatures. Yes, the neutrals get it from both sides.
Then there’s Word of Chaos and Dictum, the Law and Chaos equivalents of those Good/Evil spells. Neutrals, believe it or not, death!
Pick a side, you neutral scum!
Back in 3rd Edition D&D there was a spell called “Holy Word” that could kill non-good creatures within a 40 foot radius of the caster, if the caster was sufficiently high level relative to the creatures. Good creatures were completely unaffected.
When tightly packed you can fit about 2000 people into a 40-foot-radius circle (total area is 5000 square feet). So one casting can deal with the population of a good-sized town. My gaming group speculated for a while about a society where it was a routine ritual to round up all the peasantry and nuke them with Holy Word to keep the population clear of evil. Never incorporated it into any campaigns, though. It’s a bit of a sticky philosophical puzzler.
“Okay, roll for initiative and place yourself on the map” is the perfect time to reveal to the DM that you were in fact conversing with that guy while hiding thirty feet away behind a pile of crates.
I find a ton of uses for quick Python scripts hammered out with Bing Chat to get random stuff done.
It’s also super useful when brainstorming and fleshing out stuff for the tabletop roleplaying games I run. Just bounce ideas off it, have it write monologues, etc.