Don't love it but (1) it's addressing a serious problem and I'm not sure what the alternative is and (2) if you all remember the starting place, it was staggeringly, dramatically worse, practically a death sentence for F-Droid and seemingly testing the waters for if they could simply power through and do it despite objection.
This is a major course correction that doesn't kill F-Droid. A one time 24 hour hoop to jump through and then never again is monumentally better than losing F-Droid forever.
Is it a serious problem that you can run whatever software you want on your computer? Should we make it so that no one can do that without permission to protect them?
I recommend Cory Doctorow's talk on why this is a serious problem for society:
Could you try to put more of a effort into keeping the specifics in view and not turning the whole conversation into a view from 10,000 ft filled with drive by generalities? You might as well be linking to a Wikipedia entry on 1984.
We have moved away from an existential threat to F-Droid to a speed bump which lets it live. As is often the case, it's a both can be true situation in that I don't like the ratcheting up of restrictions, but think possible without contradiction to note how the change over time has impacted F-Droid compared to prior iterations of the proposed policy.
It disappoints me that people on HN aren't sufficiently in control of their own attention to the point of being able to show up to that conversation, as the fate of F-Droid has been central to this saga if you've been following it over previous HN threads.
Yes, lots of vulnerable users get harmed by modern tech. E.g. people have lost their minds using AI, their livelihoods using smartphones, their life savings using the Internet. In general, I prefer a solution where any mental health issue (age-related infirmity, ADHD, etc.) result in protection from modern exploitative tech like this.
Every application use for such people should be supervised by a government official trained to ensure you are not hurting yourself.
This way people who want to use AI, smartphones, or the Internet can do so if they’re healthy and the mentally disabled can be protected. We know that this need exists because even on this “Hacker” News forum everyone gets very upset when a mentally disabled person gets injured after AI use.
Not enough people give a shit about "general purpose computing" to matter. They use computers for a few things and as long as they can do those things they're fine with it. My wife loves all her Apple gear. It provides her with a wonderful, curated experience. Okay, maybe it hasn't been so good with recent iOS releases but it still beats Android or Microslop. Being able to hack, modify, or install arbitrary stuff on your device is something only a minority of a minority care about, statistical noise in the quarterly sales figures. When you compare that to the harm done by malware, illegal or indecent material, and the negative blowback to YOUR OS's reputation—or worse, the "felony contempt of business model" enabled by a general-purpose OS (piracy, ad blocking, etc.)—it's a no-brainer to implement restrictions.
It's pretending to address a serious issue while giving Google significant power to limit distribution of apps Google doesn't like, which could sometimes include legal apps that certain governments don't like such as the recently famous ICEBlock.
Google says they don't intend to do that, but even if I believe that's their current intention, they have a strong incentive to do otherwise in the future. Incentives predict outcomes more reliably than intentions.
I say it's pretending because scammers are good at shifting tactics. If convincing users to install malware ceases to be the path of least resistance, they'll convince users to install legitimate remote access utilities, hand over credentials directly, or some other scheme I haven't thought up because I'm not a scammer.
> they have a strong incentive to do otherwise in the future.
The reality is far worse than that. Remember FBI vs Apple? That defense came down to Apple not having software in place that could facilitate the demand being made of them. If they'd had such a system they would presumably have been required to comply.
The government can presumably get an illegal app forcibly removed from an app store but at present you could still install it yourself. With this system they could compel Google to block it entirely.
F-Droid has spent many years trying to step out of the "only for technical/power users" into the "This is a tool that normal phone users should have and use". A one time 24hr wait moves back to the "F-Droid is only for technical users" big time.
Bought a new phone? Moved from iPhone to Android? Want help from your friend/family member/librarian/other to setup your new phone for getting apps? Sorry, you need to come back a day later before you can actually use it.
Guess what the normal/non-tech user does in this 24hr period? Go to Play Store, install a bunch of apps, forget that you had the desire to use an alternative.
This indeed does make F-Droid no longer a tool for normal people, but only a tool for those willing to do a bunch of "Advanced" things on their phone. By definition, not regular users.
Electric utilities are "natural monopolies" that get to monopolize territory in exchange for being well regulated. It's preferable to having 3, 4, 5 utility poles stuck at the same corner all running wire for competitors. But it means you don't have market conditions driving optimization between competitors.
Moreover electric transmission and distribution gains from limiting solar investment and there's a history of utilities being in tension with solar power and lobbying against it. Solar skips the power lines and utilities need people to need power lines.
Right, they actually have siting advantages over ground mounts for that very reason.
And let's not forget that they are investments, not just stranded costs (it's baffling to see them discussed that way to and down the thread). You get something back for having built them and the barrier to entry is the upfront cost, which is easier to overcome if you're a state spending on infrastructure.
It's probably less expensive than field setups in large part due to siting near existing infrastructure. And it doesn't have to out compete residential, it just has to be a net positive investment on its own terms, out competing an otherwise unshaded parking lot that isn't leveraging it's airspace for anything.
Rather than a tax on lots it's something that turns them into a source of revenue generation.
This is probably a good time to tie it back to the article. Because however good or bad a critic Neil DeGrasse Tyson is, Kim Stanley Robinson is an order of magnitude better. And KSR calls bullshit in large part because the entire surface of Mars contains perchlorate at levels at least 30,000x above levels deemed safe on Earth.
Mars is almost perfectly optimized to make perchlorate as lethal as possible because Mars has extremely fine electrostatically charged dust that is suspended in the air everywhere even on clear days, covers the surface of the planet and gets into everything. Dust on Mars is 1 to 3 microns in size while sand on a typical beach is at least 500 microns. That plus global dust storms, it's a perfectly complementary pairing of lethally small and efficiently distributed. Life extectancy shrinks to 5, 10, 15ish years, maybe 20.
What's the fix? Some kind of human genetic engineering, or centuries of bacteria repairing the soil? Those aren't happening in our lifetimes.
Agreed. At a bare minimum it's a hedge against terrestrial existential risks. And if Mars itself sucks, then, well, rotating space stations with simulated G, same principle.
One terrible thing wrought by billionaire Mars fantasies is a backlash that I think has become too sweeping. It's wrongheaded for a million reasons, but it's nevertheless true that hedging against terrestrial existential risks is something we should have an interest in.
Sorry, I'd love to hear exactly how a mars habitat with a half dozen people or a space station are "hedges against terrestrial existential risks"? Those are both "unfriendly" environments that lack the resources required to sustain themselves for any appreciable amount of time. And certainly don't have the number of people required to repopulate.
I'd love to see you make more of an effort to try and understand the idea you're engaging in than just engaging in an emotionally charged dismissal. I try to profess the principle of charity here from time to time, which means tackling the version of an idea that credits it with making the most sense.
So if the version of the idea that you're engaging with is one that doomed to fail, doesn't have the resources or technology or population to succeed... maybe assume that's not the version I'm talking about?
There are contexts where I love to get into these kinds of details (there was an amazing conversation on HN from a few months ago [1] about what would be involved in sending a bunch of voyager-style space probes to alpha centauri), but you have to want to try.
I be quite blunt, what you're saying here seems wildly unreasonable.
Why on earth would you presume someone talking about such hedges, is discussing 6 people? The very idea is absurd, and you're certainly not discussing this in a way that seems reasonable, or fair.
In terms of resources, Mars has plenty. The fact that you view Mars through a time-locked, current view is weird. Mars is a path. It's not just about now, but 2 centuries from now as well. You take a step on a road, and you're not there immediately.
Arguing that "Well, what's the big deal, you want to take a step down the sidewalk?! Where will you be then, no where!!" is a very, very strange way to discuss this.
If I’m to believe the experts, LLMs are a panacea to all problems to have ever existed, like Blockchain before it.
Therefore it is a non-issue as given that LLMs have only gotten exponentially more impressive, in [current_year+n] you will be able to prompt Claude to materialize a fast terraforming machine and FTL it over to mars.
Currently reading Blue Mars, the third and final book in the trilogy. It's amazingly fascinating but also exhausting. I say with full seriousness it may be best to read this with a very specific high resolution full color map of Mars on your wall somewhere.
If anything KSR is not giving himself as much credit as he deserves, as personal AIs show up in ways that are remarkably salient and similar to what we're currently seeing. And he talks about advances in genetics that parallel what we're figuring out with CRISPR at least to some degrees. The biggest "error" is the preoccupation with a Paul Ehrlich-style population boom, but by the same token it reveals that the book is a window into the time it was made.
If any ambitious and aspiring science novelists are reading this, I would love for someone to be the Kim Stanley Robinson of Venus and tell the story of colonization there, aspiring to the same bar of technical specificity that KSR had for Red Mars.
Good on you, exhausting is the right word I’d think. Red Mars was the book that killed my enthusiasm for reading for nearly a year. Something about it bored me to tears and yet, I kept reading (my fault) I think I gave up at 60%.
I feel like I should like it, I’ve read everything my Neal Stephenson so I’m not averse to hefty books
I think I was in a similar boat and where in doubt, I think I powered through for completionist sake. But it's possible you paused right before some of the most interesting stuff in the whole book.
It's not a spoiler to note that the it begins with a flash forward that talks about the fate of a major character. Some of the most interesting stuff starts happening to them and it comes full circle in a way that leads up to that flash forward. And mercifully the constant mentions of regolith lessen the deeper into the series you get.
True enough, but it's still incumbent on us to understand what other biochemistries are plausible based on what we know. We look for things like organic molecules and planets in habitable zones because we know a lot about the mechanisms that allow them to support life.
And we are curious about alternative biochemistries, I think that drives a huge amount of curiosity toward Jupiter's Galilean moons especially Europa. My worry is that people say "well there might be other biochemistries" as a deepity that kind of checks out from looking at any specifics, unfocusing conversations that were actually more focused prior to the emergence of the deepity.
Is the snow melting? Do you hear birds? Must be chat control season.
Someone should sell calendars based on when this typically gets proposed as well as dates throughout the year when past instances of check control came up against key procedural hurdles.
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