• 0 Posts
  • 310 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle






  • It’s a bit different because of the stated values though.

    Raspberry pi’s foundation is focused on making computers available broadly, while this new organization is focused on making privacy widely accessible.

    While both can be commercialized, the pi’s foundation has no fundamental problems with selling out privacy or focusing on money to achieve those goals. Proton would have a much harder time arguing that profiting from sale.of private data supports privacy.

    This is relevant because it means even if the remaining shares end up on the stock market, the foundation can use its majority ownership to veto any privacy concerns.

    Time will tell. I could also have missed something


  • A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I’ll do my best to make you money back, and it’s very legally binding.

    You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don’t get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.

    When the legal goal becomes “money above all else”, it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.

    Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton’s founder’s belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.


  • Seems solid.

    It doesn’t change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying “now we can’t sell out like everything else.”

    If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can’t buy them out, it’s not about the money. If you were iffy already because they’re not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn’t change that, either, for better or worse





  • Estimates vary but seem to be between 5 and 10 cents per brick.

    Lego definitely makes a profit, but they also haven’t done the usual thing for a business to do, make the product cheaper to squeeze more out of it. In fact, one of the reasons to choose lego over another is the tight tolerances they have for their Legos, they fit better and hold better than a knockoff.

    So like, yeah, business, they’re trying to make money, but its not the clear-cut fake inflation thing going on, or even necessarily price gouging, as far as I could determine. Its more, this is what a quality product costs, they haven’t cheaped out, but it just feels so prohibitively expensive because people aren’t paid enough in general.





  • They’re basically saying they won’t ship off data to be processed to anyone else. Apple server hardware will process it in data centers.

    There’s then a further promise that this hardware will be isolated from other things apple is doing, so that no other apple processes not related to AI will be able to see this data.

    So, for instance, some other AI company might cut a deal with Amazon, get a discount on AWS processing, and in exchange, let amazon snoop through the data being processed. Or, a company might use a cheaper process in an existing data center that isnt particularly secure, and just not care if its being spied on. I’m sure there’s more likely scenarios as well, I’m not a security expert, but apple is promising to thwart any similar thing, by promising the “cloud” for AI is a unique cloud, not just encrypted or whatever, but actually physically separate from everything else

    Its the equivalent of saying “this product won’t trigger your peanut allergy, we’ve built a facility that will never see a peanut, so cleaning procedures are easy and accidental contamination is impossible since this product is the only thing made in this factory.”

    These are still just claims though, not facts, so we’ll see.


  • Khanzarate@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzviruses
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    26 days ago

    Interesting.

    The paper indicates the forms are specifically limited, in mice there were 15 specific forms they could take.

    But still, they evolve between the forms, so yeah, they are equally alive as a digital thermometer. Now they just need to get their act together to beat a tamagotchi.


  • Khanzarate@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzviruses
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    49
    ·
    26 days ago

    Nah they’re a single molecule. While they do have a mechanism to “reproduce”, they cannot react to stimuli of any kind, or evolve. Of the 7 commonly accepted traits of life, viruses have 5-6 depending on where you stand with them not being able to reproduce on their own. (In comparison, while a tapeworm or other parasite might need a host, they bring their reproductive equipment with them).

    Prions have 1 of those traits. They can’t regulate an internal environment as they cannot have one, they lack any kind of organizational trait, they have no metabolism (the other one viruses lack), they do not grow, they don’t adapt to their environment, and they do not respond to stimuli.

    A digital thermometer has organization and responds to stimuli, so it’s more alive than a prion.