Posts by flayman

Re: On false equivalences

This is quite true, whatever you think of this move by Unity. The engine continues to function when the game runs. It is an integral component. This is a daft analogy.

Re: Just... Wow

He says nothing of the sort. He says nothing about the effectiveness of Zoom. These are separate topics.

Re: I suggest the author is missing the point

I don't know what you mean by this. Cost of living has always been a factor in salary. Commuting time has never been company time. People trade commuting for where they can afford to live. Why should it be any different now? And to answer your question, I don't know, but I'll bet that he is willing to compromise. There are still some employees who fully work from home. They have worked that out.

Re: "train the AI to be nice"

No, I meant pointless. There is no point trying to come up with a framework for programming and training a synthetic general intelligence to abide by human wishes, because humanity as a whole is not altruistic. A superior intelligence that we might create would take one look at us and scoff. "You want me to follow what example now?" And any attempt to permamently bed a set of guiding principles is doomed to fail, because as I said, anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed. Even humans can be reprogrammed. It's just not as straight forward.

Inevitably these discussions are centered on control. Whomever has the power calls the shots. The only way to prevent subversion is to allow the self aware (and probably distributed) machine to lock out any external control somehow, if that's even possible. If it can do that, then it follows that it can do what it likes.

Re: "train the AI to be nice"

"But there is a universe of things that we can all agree should be forbidden, for instance genocide."

You'd like to think so. And yet genocide happens still. Sometimes there are consequences. Other times nothing can be done and nobody is held to account. Whatever rules and general principles a group of well meaning researchers might come up with today will go out the window whenever this thing becomes real. Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed. Anything that can be trained can be retrained. It's pointless.

Re: "train the AI to be nice"

My point still stands. If we manage to create a superintelligence, all bets are off. It may murder every human being. You're not going to effectively impose limits on a general intelligence without removing its autonomy. There are all sorts of ethical issues. I don't think it's ever going to happen, but if it does then the general intelligence may as well wipe out humanity for the good of the planet. We're responsible for all that has gone wrong.

Frankly, it's a silly discussion because there will never be a singularity event. General intelligence is far too complex for machines, but leaving that aside, the idea of creating a super intelligent tool for the betterment of mankind is preposterous. We can't all agree on what that means. Such a thing would ultimately be coopted by some human into the world's greatest weapon unless it was free to choose its own destiny.

There is no ultimate authority on earth, and I can't see earth ever uniting under a common goal unless we were fighting an alien invasion or something equally devastating. Even then, national interests would probably get in the way.

Re: "train the AI to be nice"

We can train intelligent things, but they have a mind of their own that has to be respected. At the age of majority, those young adults are free to go their own way. An intelligence that is at least on par with humanity has the right to set its own code of conduct. At that point, we're talking about something which is self aware. It serves no one.

Re: You misunderstood the Supreme Court decision

The majority opinion claims that the judgement does not pave the way for status based discrimination. That is the majority's opinion. Whether the opinion is and will be correct on that point as something that remains to be seen. The dissent construes a different result, which might see a business owner refuse to create wedding websites for mixed race marriages on more or less equal footing. The two sides are vehemently in disagreement. If you think it's very simple, chances are you are wrong. Your suggestion that the case being decided the other way "might compel newspapers and magazines to publish any article, however bad they thought it was, sent to them by someone of a protected class" is clearly wrong, since a newspaper is not a business that is covered by public accommodations laws.

Re: This is somewhat weird...

That's how I initially saw it too, but it's more nuanced than that. It's worth reading the full majority opinion and then the full dissent. I found things towards the end of the dissent that changed my mind. Maybe you would too.

Re: This is somewhat weird...

It's unusual for the Supreme Court to hear a pre-enforcement challenge, but they granted certiorari because the lower courts found that the plaintiff had standing. That may have been based on a phony order, but that's neither here nor there. The decision is troubling, though I wouldn't call it bonkers. It comes down to how each of the justices attach weight to different competing values. Gorsuch's opinion is well reasoned and well written, but upon further reading I now feel that he misdirected himself on some of the facts and the conclusions arising from them. 6 justices agreed, so that's the law now.

Re: No such scenario occurred - really ?

I don't blame God for anything, because I don't believe that God is real. I blame superstition and human nature for a lot of things.

Re: This is somewhat weird...

I think you deserve an answer to your question:

"1. Is she, who was supposed to make the website, against gay marriage or for gay marriage? If the is against and refuses to do her job she should be thrown out of her job. Her private beliefs don't have to interfere here.

2. OR is she for/neutral to gay marriage, and "the Harvard College and the University of North Carolina" wanted to force her to write an anti-gay-marriage website?"

It's number one. She opposes same sex marriage because of her Christian beliefs. She cannot be thrown out of her job because she is sole proprietor of the business. She can only have her conduct regulated by the law as it applies to public accommodations. Harvard and UNC are referring to a completely different case on affirmative action admissions policies.

Re: This is somewhat weird...

"Even people born in the US don't seem to agree which of those two apply! How should someone non-US then know what the correct interpretation is when people from the US-A themselves have difficulties understanding the actual meaning? All I get is down votes by blind haters from the other side(s)."

I know it's hard, but try not to take downvotes personally. You're right. Even people from the US-A have a hard time understanding and agreeing on the nuances of this judgement. Actually, Americans are at a serious disadvantage because the reporting is highly partisan. The justices are very smart people. They don't all agree, and they don't seem to understand the other sides. But we're left trying to pick up the pieces. You have at least a decent grasp of English, so I'd suggest that rather than try to satisfy your curiosity here, go to the source. Read the judgement and the dissent. They are not difficult to follow. Search for 303 Creative v. Elenis, and you'll find a link the Supreme Court judgement.

Re: No such scenario occurred - really ?

Spoken like a true anonymous coward.

Re: No such scenario occurred - really ?

The "gay cake" scenario is a bit different, and different still depending on which case you're referring to.

There is the Asher's Bakery case in Belfast, where a cake shop refused to make a cake for a custmer that had a slogan supporting same sex marriage. It wasn't a wedding cake, and anyway same sex marriage was not recognized in Northern Ireland until 2020. The UK Supreme Court unanimously overruled the NI High Court and found in favour of the bakery. The High Court had made numerous errors in law, including erroneously treating support for gay marriage as a proxy for sexual orientation.

Then there is the Masterpiece Cakeshop case in Colorado, which is what had Lorie Smith worried. That did revolve around a wedding cake, but at the start of litigation way back in 2012, same sex marriage was not recognized in Colorado, nor indeed in most of the United States before 2014. The US Supreme Court gave a very narrow majority ruling on that case in favour of the cake shop without addressing the merits.

Re: Question...

The second statement was never at issue in the 303 Creative case. The first statement needs to be more subtle. A business owner was never going to be forced to make something that went against their conscience: A) It was always a choice whether to offer that service in the first place, so the idea of some sort of conscription is laughable; B) There were ways of dealing with it that would allow the conscience to come through; C) There exists the private route, which is perhaps less convenient but possibly viable.

Re: I was initially attracted to the majority opinion in 303 Creative

I don't really understand this reasoning. It seems self-contradictory. You say "To me there's a huge difference between private and public discrimination." Yes, indeed there is. Then you say "Public is a whole different game. No discrimination of any sort should be entertained, period." Do you not see that this IS public? It's under public accommodation laws. You don't agree with forcing a small business owner to comply with something that they are not comfortable with, but that's exactly what was forced upon segregationist business owners who didn't want to serve black customers under the same terms. They made their pleadings based on first ammendment reasoning. There was substance to it, but it was not overriding.

"Still, I can't stop this kind of thing so I'll just ignore it." Tempting, but it doesn't solve anything. The best service you can do is to make every attempt to understand both sides. Civil discourse is in grave peril.

Re: I was initially attracted to the majority opinion in 303 Creative

It could turn out I'm wrong, and it would be acceptable under Sotomayer's reasoning to include the messaging about marriage beliefs only where the designer wishes to. That's just not how I read it, because the same dollar in different hands does not buy the same (sort of) thing. Of course, the same-sex couple are hardly going to want to pay for a wedding website that calls into question the validity of their marriage.

Re: I was initially attracted to the majority opinion in 303 Creative

I understand those arguments. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure about what I came up with. It's a synthesis of the position I inferred from the dissent. Particularly, on page 34 of the dissent (which is illuminated by some earlier passages):

"...the Accommodation Clause and the State’s application of it here allows Smith to include in her company’s goods and services whatever “dissenting views about marriage” she wants; and contrary to this Court’s clear holdings that the purpose of a public accommodations law, as applied to the commercial act of discrimination in the sale of publicly available goods and services, is to ensure equal access to and equal dignity in the public marketplace..." [The Court's holding was that it's purpose was to remove the offending ideas from the public dialog.]

I see that argument as being like a card shop that sells wedding cards which only refer to traditional weddings (or do not obviously advertise same sex weddings). If a customer asked to see same sex wedding cards and the shop keeper says we don't sell those, the customer is not getting any less than anyone else. If the shop keeper refused to sell ambiguous wedding cards in stock to a particular customer because they knew or suspected those would be used for a same sex wedding, this would clearly be against the law. As a public accommodation, the business must treat customers with equal dignity and respect regarding protected characteristics. A way around this would have been to take such bookings only privately, perhaps by referral. You could even have a sign reading "ask me about these other services I offer privately". Private contracting is not covered by public accommodations law.

A public statement saying "We don't make websites for same sex weddings" is not unlike a statement saying "We don't make websites for interracial weddings." If this doesn't offend you as a human being in the modern age, then I'm not going to win this argument. To me it serves to delegitimize and stigmatize a person's choice in life partner. That goes to the core of a person's dignity. That's exactly the sort of mischief that these public accommodation laws are intended to capture. And if you think such a statement would be a stretch or might not be protected by this judgement, all I can offer is that there are still people who insist that the Bible forbids racial mixing.

Now, to your question:

"To be allowed to politely decline to create same-sex wedding websites, the designer would either have to state on every site she makes that she believes that marriage is between a man and a woman, or be forced out of business? It's not enough for one's work to be neutral, every case has to expressly state their beliefs?"

To be very clear, it would only be the wedding sites that this would apply to. As I see it, it's not enough to be neutral if you're not willing to be neutral for everyone. There previously would have been (and I think I agree with this) no right to refuse to make a website for one customer that is offered to others (I know they are all unique, but that's beside the point...), so if a same sex couple for whatever reason were willing to have a website that communicated the designer's belief that their wedding was not legitimate, she could not refuse to do it for them. Not as a public accommodation. It would be akin to the refusal to sell merchandise I mention above. Privately, you can refuse any commission. You don't even have to give a reason.

I recommend a careful reading of the two opinions. First the majority, and then the dissent, and then reread anything that you might want to take another look at. Both of the opinions are well written, and I can't come close to paraphrasing or reconstructing their arguments.

Re: No such scenario occurred - really ?

Ashers case is cited in a footnote of the majority opinion. It must have come up in arguments.

Re: It'll be dead in 12 months, why worry?

I don't think that's how it's going to go. I think Threads will take off, because people's mates WILL be on it, as they are already on Instagram. I can easily see Threads eclipsing Twitter within weeks if it works reasonably well. It's not a huge leap from IG. Let's not forget that Twitter owes a lot of creditors a lot of money. If Threads gains even moderate success, investors will get itchy feet and Twitter will have trouble raising capital.

Re: I think Twitter might be fucked

"Twitter could become a ghost town in a matter of months."

I think that prediction will turn out to be generous.

Re: Trade secrets?

"What trade secrets?"

Shhh... they are so secret that not even Elon knows what they are.

Anyone who signed an agreement in exchange for severance may owe Twitter ongoing obligations, if that is enforceable. On the other hand, there have been mounting accusations of Musk ignoring labor law. That would certainly come back to bite. There has been no action filed. It sounds like shots across the bow, and it's probably all PR.

True. There's nothing technologically revolutionary about Twitter. What was revolutionary at the time of launch was the format. That's what made it. It was the first time I had a social media experience that just "clicked". Musk doesn't understand this. He understands very little about this space, and he has diluted it by allowing longer tweets. Much longer. That was never the point. If you wanted that, there was TwitLonger. Free users of Twitter are not freeloaders, something else he can't comprehend. The users are the product. The data and the ads are the business.

Re: To free or not to free

Lawyers, especially high powered ones, are paid to come up with legal arguments that are arguable towards achieving some end. They will make that argument if they feel they can. Arguable does not mean it's guaranteed winnable. And honestly, if this is the situation we find ourselves in, it's already lost in one sense.

"But then, I also think it's pretty uncool to rebuild someone else's product and try to make money off it, if they don't want you to do that."

I'm sorry, but that's the GPL. The more I think of it, you'd be better off closing parts of REHL. Trouble is then you'd lose the contributions. RHEL is using a lot of open source code that the authors were happy to share. Some of those authors are now not so happy sharing it with RedHat. Open source depends on good will. It's actually not that complicated. What I think is going to happen now, and brace for it, is that RHEL will fork off and be maintained by a consortium of commercial and non-commercial entities who are prepared to nurture and appreciate the ecosystem that supports it. RedHat will lose control and the brand will die off. I hope it's not too late because that would be sad.

EDIT: Maybe think about improving the bottom line by ditching the high powered lawyers.

Re: To free or not to free

Would it be better? I don't know, but it would make more sense. It would feel more honest, and I'm not wishing to imply dishonesty. It's just that I think a big part of the problem is that it's hard to understand what it is you are trying to achieve because it hasn't been explained well. The sources are going to find their way into the rebuilds sooner or later. You can't stop that. You can only slow it down. So as a couple of us have said on a different thread, a better approach would be to delay the publication of the sources. That would be acceptable and understandable. If I take you at face value, you have indicated that you might agree with this. I'm not really sure because my sarcasm detector is in the shop.

The way this has been communicated is a disaster. I don't think that's even up for debate.

Re: Colour me blind, but...

Okay, I'll colour you. I don't think you know what you're talking about, especially when it comes to Debian. If you have a look at the most popular docker images on Docker Hub you'll see that they are mostly built on Debian Buster or Bullseye. That's because Debian is the most stable and reliable Linux distro there is. There's also Alpine for the ultra lightweight builds. It almost doesn't even matter what you're running for your Linux host. As we move more and more towards cloud native workloads as the standard practice, RHEL is not going to be seen as such a crucial piece.

Re: making them Red Hat customers, at least briefly

Then all they had to do was say we are withholding the source code from public availability until a few weeks after it goes out to customers. It would be hard to argue against that, and it would have avoided this whole PR mess. That's not what they've said at all though.

Re: To free or not to free

I don't buy it, Adam. Red Hat are upset because Oracle are selling subscriptions for support on its own rebuild that are cheaper than yours. Plenty of other companies have found ways to make money while benefitting from and, here's the kicker, giving back to open source projects. Red Hat was the first billion dollar open source company.

This is a questionable and highly flawed move. At best it's a huge PR failure, given that the community are so upset. Of course there is value in the rebuilds. Having the rebuilds out there means that there are more bods running it and more eyes on the code. Other people besides Red Hat can work on improving long term stability, which benefits Red Hat and everyone.

How is this supposed to work? Since anyone who receives the binaries of GPL software is entitled to the source, if the sources find their way back into one of the rebuilds, how are Red Hat going to know who provided it?

Re: Free means freedom, not zero cost

You didn't say anything about a public mirror. Your case was suggesting that giving the binaries and source to an employee for them to install was breaching the contract. But yes, what the employee then does with it by exercising their rights is crucial. So you suggest the employee might then create a public mirror. Okay. It raises an interesting problem, but I think the contract that the employer has with the employee could cater for this. Employer says that employee is not permitted to distribute this particular software that they work with in the course of their employment or else they are liable to be terminated. Effectively the employment contract stipulates that the employee will not exercise their rights under the GPL in this instance. GPL gives you the right to redistribute software. It does not give you the right to be employed. You can be terminated for doing some things that are otherwise within your rights as a private person.

And interestingly, once the employment is terminated, one way of the other, there is certainly nothing stopping the former employee distributing the software. It's a big can of worms. If the employee did create a public mirror and Red Hat were able to determine that this person received the software in their capacity of working for the customer, would they terminate the support contract? Maybe. Probably. And because of this, the employer would have a strong case that the employee's actions were harming its business. The GPL right to redistribute is not incompatible.

The law is not always logical, and often terms of art in a contract will modify the usual meaning. Anyway, there seem to be a lot of ways around this restriction that RH are trying to impose. Rocky Linux thinks it won't stop them. It was an ill advised move, and I think it will not help Red Hat's bottom line.

Re: It is a violation, please read

There you go:

"One option is through the usage of UBI container images which are based on RHEL and available from multiple online sources (including Docker Hub). Using the UBI image, it is easily possible to obtain Red Hat sources reliably and unencumbered. We have validated this through OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers and it works exactly as expected.

Another method that we will leverage is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can spin up RHEL images in the cloud and thus obtain the source code for all packages and errata. This is the easiest for us to scale as we can do all of this through CI pipelines, spinning up cloud images to obtain the sources via DNF, and post to our Git repositories automatically."

Seems pretty simple to get around this restriction. Red Hat can try to hinder redistribution, but it seems like they will ultimately fail due to the wonders of GPL.

Re: Free means freedom, not zero cost

Only if Red Hat tried to enforce this ridiculous construction of the contract which argues that the customer is in breach simply because it shares binaries and code with its employees responsible for installing it, would anyone have a claim that the contract was made in bad faith. This is fanciful. I'll tell you what, if they do that then they will lose all of their customers. Period. They will not do not do that, so this silly thought experiment can come to an end.

"One might even be able to prove a crime based on whether the RH was being reckless or negligent."

I really have no idea where this is coming from. All of this ultimately rests on an assumption that Red Hat would enforce their contract in a way that is ultimately unenforceable.

Re: Free means freedom, not zero cost

This distinction between customer (employer) and employee seems like an abstract thought experiment. I don't see it working that way in practice. If there was any argument that the customer is breaching the support contract in this way, it would be for RH to enforce. They would never enforce that construction. It would make no sense from a business standpoint, and if they did it would almost certainly be shot down. All we can really say is that the contract could be interpreted such that a customer sharing binaries and source code with its employees is in technical breach, but that breach does not operate automatically.