Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Was it the future of Windows when they did this the last bunch of times? The Wyse Winterm came out in 1993. It was a huge failure then and every iteration of the same same thing since has also failed.

    What makes this version different? Branding? The fact that some of the OS/software doesn’t boot over the network? That you have to have a working Internet connection and not just a working local network and boot server (LOL)?

    No business wants this. No consumer wants this. There is no “added value” in this device. It literally only runs software made by Microsoft and even then, only software that runs through Azure.

    What office worker literally only needs Office 365? I mean, you can get away with a whole lot just in the browser but if you’re going to do that why bother with this device? Just use ChromeOS stuff (and never be locked in to Microsoft’s stuff).



  • The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP.

    The data in that video is (probably) accurate but your statement is completely wrong: In that list only Intel makes anything but trivial amounts of money from patents. In fact, Microsoft, Google, and Docker have famously lost shittons of money thanks to patents. They basically siphoned money out of those companies into the pockets of lawyers and provided absolutely no benefit to society.

    For fuck’s sake: Features were removed from Android because of software patents!

    Not only that but Google makes almost all of its money from advertising, not “IP”. Same for Meta which is oddly missing from the graph (even though they contribute to and maintain a ton of FOSS stuff).

    Then let’s talk about #1: Redhat. They absolutely would be 1000% behind banning software patents. It’s nothing but trouble for them.

    I’d also like to note that Microsoft has been very much in favor of software patents since they were invented by the courts (remember: no legislation added software as a category of patentable subject matter: They exist as a result of court rulings!) because they thought they would put an end to open source software (see: Halloween documents). However, software patents have actually cost Microsoft more than they ever helped the company! In short: They’re idiots. They opened a can of worms that’s kept them constantly under attack but because those worms also hurt their perceived enemies they’ve doubled down on their decision.



  • Why? Software patents are already covered by copyright. Anyone can write software and they automatically get assigned the copyright for it. The barrier to entry is basically zero since everyone has a computer and nearly anyone can learn to program by simply taking the time to do so.

    I mean, I also don’t think patents should exist in general but there’s a pretty clear difference between software and things in the physical world. Software is “just math”. And I mean that literally: 100% of all software that exists can be reduced to math that you could–in theory–perform with a pencil and paper.

    There’s a lot of reasons why software patents shouldn’t exist far beyond the scope of patents in general.


  • Imagine if any company could just copy an indie game and scale it up/polish a bit and get all the sales.

    You’re describing the entire mobile games industry. You think all those top apps in the app stores are 100% original? No. They copied other games.

    Also, patents have nothing to do with that. Software is covered by copyright.

    Furthermore, “back in the day” manufacturing was expensive and required huge factories to build stuff (in quantity). The barrier to entry was enormous! People were mostly uneducated and there was not much in the way of “shared engineering knowledge”. Ten thousand people could look at a car engine and have no friggin clue how it worked. That’s why patents were necessary: Disclosure

    These days disclosure has become irrelevant. Any engineer can look at an invention or product and figure out both how it works and how it was made. At the very least, they can figure out a way to make it. Just look at all the Youtube channels where every day people are making complicated machines, parts, and electronics! The mysteries are gone. Disclosure is unnecessary.

    Since the entire point of patents was disclosure why do we still need them?



  • The article sucks. The FTC isn’t going after Microsoft’s cloud services because they’re good/bad. They’re going after Microsoft because of forced bundling. Same abuse of monopoly power they were found guilty of when they started forcing everyone to use Internet Explorer.

    Microsoft is forcing customers to use their cloud services under all sorts of scenarios. Many of which have no logical reason other than to force customers into Azure.

    For example, if you have a lot of Windows servers in Azure they will stop supporting you once you reach a certain threshold unless you also sign up to use their enterprise cloud AD service.

    They already do this with regular Windows–you have to use AD if you’re a business customer and you go past a certain threshold of systems–but in that case you can just get some Domain Controllers and call it a day. You can put them wherever you want (locally, in AWS, in Azure, wherever).

    With Azure Windows servers though you’re forced to use Azure AD (or you lose support and possibly access to other bundled services). You can’t host Domain Controllers anywhere else. I mean, they’ll let you have as many off-Azure DCs as you want but they must still be joined/synchronizing to Azure AD.

    There’s probably many other anticompetitive tactics in place within the world of Azure but that’s the one big one I know off the top of my head.






  • Except there’s nothing illegal about scraping all the content from websites (including news sites) and putting it into your own personal database. That is–after all–how search engines work.

    It’s only illegal if you then distribute said copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission. Because that’s what copyright is all about: Distribution.

    The news sites distributing the content in this case freely gave it to OpenAI’s crawlers. It’s not like they broke into these organizations in order to copy their databases of news articles.

    For the news sites to have a case they need to demonstrate that OpenAI is creating a “derivative work” using their copyrighted material. However, that’s going to be a tough sell to judges and/or juries since the way LLMs work is not so different from how humans do: They take in information and then produce similar information (by predicting the next word/symbol, given a series of tokens/a prompt).

    If you read all of Stephen King’s books, for example, you might be better at writing horror stories. You may even start writing in a similar style! That doesn’t mean you’re violating his copyright by producing similar stories.


  • Riskable@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Cult of Microsoft
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    20 days ago

    Ahaha! Microsoft employees are using AI to write hallucinate their own performance reviews and managers are using that very same AI to “review” said performance reviews. Which is exactly the dystopian vision of the future that OpenAI sells!

    What’s funny is that the “cult of Microsoft” is 100% bullshit so the AI is being trained in bullshit and as time goes on its being reinforced with it’s own hallucinated bullshit because everyone is using it to bullshit the bullshitters in management who are demanding this bullshit!