Take note Bluesky fans: Your "benevolent" controlling nonprofit can quickly become a for-profit if enough cash is thrown at the governing board...
Mozilla and Firefox too....
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
130 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
60059 readers
2916 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Except Mozilla has declining revenues.
Possibly even less money in the future if the Google antitrust suit bars them from paying Mozilla to place their search engine first.
I mean, that can be even worse IMO, desperation can be just as bad as greed, even if the motives are very different
Good point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License
Mozilla can't stop people from modifying or distributing firefox without changing its license.
If they do change the license, then all the versions up to that point will still be fair game for modification and redistribution.
This is part of why copyleft is so important. Relying on proprietary software means there's nothing we can do if the "owner" decides to change course.
Yikes, that's a scary thought
Reaching A.G.I. could also reshape OpenAI’s business. When that declaration is made, Microsoft loses its rights to use OpenAI’s technology, according to the investment contract it signed with OpenAI. If OpenAI severs its ties to Microsoft, it could consider partnerships with other tech giants.
Already, OpenAI’s for-profit company has used this potential declaration as leverage against Microsoft — warning that if Microsoft will not agree to better terms, the nonprofit might issue this declaration and void their entire agreement, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations.
That's pretty messed up. So whenever OpenAI says they've achieved AGI it's just a gonna be a lie.
I'm actually surprised AGI isn't better defined in the contract, or that there isn't a burden of proof so that they can't lie, but that was definitely on purpose. I really can't imagine them severing that tie though; OpenAI simply isn't financially stable enough, especially in the long term, and I'm sure they know it too.
I'm actually surprised AGI isn't better defined in the contract
There'll be a significant lawsuit if OpenAI tries such a declaration without MS on board with it.
But i'm not sure how much OpenAI is even investing toward AGI. LLM is their bread and butter and I don't know many experts that think LLM is the path to AGI.
The fact that OpenAI have waived the threat of using the clause implies to me that they've defined it relatively loosely... or just that they're really stupid, which may also be possible.
I did a little bit of looking and couldn't find a figure on how much OpenAI spends on AGI compared to GenAI research, but in looking, I found this interesting:
https://openai.com/index/scale-the-benefits-of-ai/
Which begins with the following:
We are making progress on our mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Every week, over 250 million people around the world use ChatGPT to enhance their work, creativity, and learning...
Which seems like a shady placement of two unrelated things next to one another. Makes me wonder if texts like this have the goal of selling GenAI as AGI one day.
Take note Bluesky fans: Your “benevolent” controlling nonprofit can quickly become a for-profit if enough cash is thrown at the governing board…
Isn't Bluesky an open-source implementation of an open protocol? And isn't Bluesky already a for-profit organization? The point is you don't trust the corporation. You trust the availability of the code and the protocol specification. People should be setting up instances just like they did with lemmy.
Sort of, but not quite...It's intentionally done in a way that in no way scales well and quickly becomes cost prohibitive for small players (not just individuals) to run a server because it requires an insane amount of data and bandwidth. So in practice you can only run a server if you're willing to throw a shitload of money after server capacity.
Facebook creating a bluesky instance in 3... 2... 1...
That's not true at all actually, running a PDS uses about as many resources as a regular personal blog HTML server (as it doesn't do anything but serve up your signed posts), and running a relay with only the couple thousand people that have decided to host their own PDSes is home self-hostable.
Good blog post here clearing some stuff up: https://whtwnd.com/alexia.bsky.cyrneko.eu/3l727v7zlis2i
Yes, you can run a PDS, but while it might be true that you can self-host a relay with a couple thousand people (I didn't find anything about this in that blog post but I don't see why you couldn't), using a limited relay like that would mean this would not be a full/real instance of Bluesky (unless you disconnect from the rest of the network, but then why even bother)
So let's examine the problems with relays here:
After recent growth, our out-of-box relay implementation (bigsky) requires on the order of 16 TBytes of fast NVMe disk, and that will grow proportional to content in the network.
Core Bluesky engineer's blogpost
In July this was "only" about 1TB, in mid November around 5TB, and now 16TB? That's insane growth if you want to self-host that, and will get expensive really fast really quickly, especially since fast storage is important here. I don't think many individuals have the resources to self host this just for themselves.
Another critical problem is that when more people self-host relays this has the wonderful side-effect of increasing the necessary computation power and network use, because Bluesky scales O(n^2 ) , which is really bad if you want anything close to a decentralized network.
So yes, it is true that it scales down terribly, this is by design. It's a step up from Twitter, because this time multiple corporations can control it instead of one, but it isn't that good either.
Damn those are some terrible distributed scaling mechanisms.
The constant hate i see for bluesky on Lemmy and the seemingly irresistible urge to constantly trash it feels not only unwarranted, but also sad how bitter so many people here seek to be.
While not bitter in particular, it is disheartening to see yet another VC-funded social network gain traction, especially under the guise of freedom and decentralization it doesn't fulfill in the slightest.
Sadly, marketing works, and people just flock to where the ads lead them. And the wheel of Internet history takes a turn over and over again, as people are doomed to repeat their mistakes.
You might be right and in any case the new boss is better than the old boss right? Then again maybe this is just the honeymoon period which bluesky soaks up as many users as it can before the enshittification begins to start wringing profit out of the enterprise? Time will te if the hate is justified or just sour grapes.
It's like people don't pay attention on purpose I swear
Reddit habits die hard for many.
I don't hate it, but I'm also not going to pretend it's the hot, new decentralized microblogging service, come to shake up the status quo. It maybe has the potential to be decentralized, but it's not currently. It might be a "public benefit" company now, but that's not an official or regulated classification like being a nonprofit; it's basically just a promise, and all it would take is a simple vote to change that. All the power still rests with the main corporation, and no matter how altruistic the leadership is, history has shown that every wealthy leader has a price.
I hope it becomes what it promises it's going to be. More decentralized services are a good thing for people. However, I don't see it at this moment, and I don't have any evidence that they're making meaningful strides to become what they promise; time and inertia are not on their side.
Not a single person in the world other than turbo mega nerds like us will ever care about decentralised platforms, or even know what that means.
That's not true.
All it takes are enough people getting burned by centralized products to see the value in decentralization.
As businesses get greedier and run out of corners to cut, they will continue to cannibalize their userbase until it becomes irrelevant.
I figure similar to educating people on how burning fossil fuels contribute to global warming, it will just take time and experience to educate people on the value of decentralization.
The biggest hurdle is getting people to understand that they are wrong and don't know everything.
Go ahead, explain it to am average Joe than and see them run and at in a minutes time, especially when you wanna tell someone they are wrong.
I figure similar to educating people on how burning fossil fuels contribute to global warming, it will just take time and experience to educate people on the value of decentralization.
Bluesky is just for consumers who don't know any better. I've been alive long enough to notice that there are people who need to be "sold something" in order to see value in it.
We should be promoting Mastodon which is federated.
To address the blue sky comment. Yeah sure it's possible but at the same time so what, it's a protocol like activity pub. Obviously you don't have a problem with that.
So if blue sky goes tits up then everyone can just go to some other plant form without having to lose all their content. So it's fine.
Meanwhile openAI despite the name was never open source. Not that I really know what that would even look like for an AI.
I don't think anyone else runs a BlueSky server right now except for BlueSky. At last not one with any substantial amount of users. Imo this makes BlueSky a lot less resilient compared to Lemmy or other federated social media.