It doesn't seem so. I believe they're pointing out that our current best alternative to a robot dog with a gun is a human with a gun. Robot dog gets shot and is decommissioned; human gets shot and relies on disability payments for a few decades.
We could fight about the actual value of the CPU, HDD, network, etc is. Not literally zero. The manpower to keep it running is a stronger argument, but I still think it's missing the point. The real value is the community generated content, and yeah, that's a commons.
Subtract the fact that at least the serfs got to keep some of the net product of their labor while Reddit users get less than nothing and I think it all evens out.
I was absolutely not using the term in a legal sense. Is "commons" even a legal term? I suppose I should have said "should be a commons" - as in, a publicly generated and maintained 'good thing' (susceptible to tragedy).
Okay, it's certainly an interesting idea to speculate about, maybe some country will recognize it in the future. Though it seems unlikely, unless most of the world agreed, considering WIPO and various other treaties which have been ratified.
How is this relevant to the present issue regarding reddit?
In regards to the idea of reddit rent-seeking - the primary value of reddit is not something they create, it's something they _host_. It could be anywhere, but by dint of network effects, it happens to be there. Reddit is not valuable because it owns a serverfarm, or even because it employs people to maintain the serverfarm. It's valuable because it controls a cultural meetingpoint.
Aggressive control of the meetingpoint (which it is able to do), is rent-seeking because reddit controls _access_ to the value, but does not create the value. You were making a point that reddit doesn't provide literally nothing. That's true, but it's a red herring. Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.
edit: I'm sorry, you were not making that point. I was responding to that point.
> Reddit is not valuable because it owns a serverfarm, or even because it employs people to maintain the serverfarm. It's valuable because it controls a cultural meetingpoint.
How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?
> Reddit provides some things, but not the actually-important things.
This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.
> This will be easily proven by people moving from Reddit to an alternative. Or disproven by not moving to an alternative.
This ignores the nature of network effects. The value of the thing is precisely that other people are using it. That's not a value that's created by reddit, it's a value that's _exploited_ by reddit.
"Just go somewhere else" requires either a phenomenal degree of coordination, OR to just bite the bullet that not everyone will move to the same place at the same time, which fragments the community (which was, again, the bulk of the value in the first place).
The difficulty of network effects is that, as the group gets larger, the value goes up faster than linear AND the cost of coordinating a migration ALSO goes up faster than linear. A gathering that's 1/10th the size, isn't worth 1/10th as much. It's _significantly_ weaker. And migrating en-mass is an n^2 coordination problem. It's closer to a hostage situation than it is to a value-add.
> How did it come to control a cultural meeting point? Was it because they owned a server farm and employed people to create a website people wanted to use at the right time and the right place?
Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even. Does that justify indefinite control of an important resource? Legally probably, but you can tell I think it shouldn't.
> Kinda don't care? Maybe they worked hard for it, even
So you could've just lead with the fact that you don't care about private property and have an anti-social outlook on life. It was spelled out to you why there's value in Reddit. You say the commons are the important thing.
If I go to your living room with 3 friends and we start talking about life and philosophy, you'll ask me to leave or pay rent. But I will tell you no, you just host the place where cultural discussion is happening, I don't care if you worked hard to get your home, I'll just be there and it's not up to you to control that home forever. I could've gone into any home, the value is in my discussion, so you should be happy I'm having it there and allow me to have it for free, since there's no value in your home and you shouldn't even own it for the future.
And then they'd call the police and get you kicked out.
If instead you'd been invited in - "come along, bring your club members, you don't need to pay for your own hall anymore, use my house, free signup, moderate your own room, use it without paying, bring your friends" and then when your old meeting place had shutdown and been abandoned and all your leaflets and documentation and inertia had settled on the new location, then stavrianos turned on you and said "now you're all used to coming here, I need to pay off my investors who have been funding this all along, that'll be $10Bn valuation please - and don't bring your friends unless they can pay a few million a month. Or you could just leave, after I've borrowed a lot of money and arranged things to make it so you can't easily do that".
Compare to trademark genericization, where a brand name becomes the word for a whole product category, and loses trademark protection because our use of the word is more important than their use of the brand. That's not something that happens instantly, there are thresholds for it. But it's also not something that never happens at all. Maybe you think that's bad, but I certainly don't. There's a whole lot of room between that, and abolishing private property altogether.
> Private property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy, with socialist perspectives making a hard distinction between the two. As a legal concept, private property is defined and enforced by a country's political system.
> The distinction between private and personal property varies depending on political philosophy
That is a political statement, whereas what I described is a practical situation of life. Do you support the viewpoint that I replied to that it doesn't matter if someone owns something, even if they worked hard for it, that you should be able to come in and takeover because of discourse that happens there? If so we can disagree on that, there's no need to make it a wider political statement.
Funnily enough the Reddit community originally started on Digg and moved there after Digg shot themselves in the foot in a similar way to what Reddit is currently doing. So while Reddit now is a lot bigger and more entrenched than Digg then, I wouldn't be at all surprised if history repeated.
I keep seeing people talking about chatgpt hallucinating when it's wrong, but not when it's right. Maybe I've misunderstood, but isn't it just always hallucinating? It's not like the failure-mode is meaningfully different from the successes, except insofar as whether we agree with it, right?
Hallucinating is no different to believe or know or infer: its the wrong label to use for what it does.
Yes, colloquially what it does is hallucinate all the time, and sometimes it lucid. But more factually no, it doesn't hallucinate because there is no "it" there, it's not conscious and you need to have a brain, to hallucinate.
There's no "there" there.
That is the whole of my point: we're using the wrong labels to describe what is happening.
When it comes to explaining and describing "it's like" is one of the WORST ways to go. explanation by analogy or metaphor is a trap. "atoms are like billiard balls BZZZT next" "cells are little bags of water BZZZT next" "panadol 'kills' the pain BZZT no, it doesn't kill anything next"
'Hallucination' is the term LLM researchers use, and is arguably inaccurate based on the dictionary definition. The actual term for this for behaviour in people is 'confabulation', which is a lot more accurate.
Oh well.. if the LLM researchers are going to coin terms of art, well and good but I dislike this intensely because it invites belief it implies AGI and brain when in fact, its synthesis of new state from a model.
This coining terms of art thing isn't uncommon. Think "brutalist architecture" and remind yourself its "en brute" == raw from the french. It has nothing to do with how "brutal" people think concrete is.
> This coining terms of art thing isn't uncommon. Think "brutalist architecture" and remind yourself its "en brute" == raw from the french. It has nothing to do with how "brutal" people think concrete is.
> The term was coined by the British architectural critic Reyner Banham to describe the approach to building particularly associated with the architects Peter and Alison Smithson in the 1950s and 1960s.The term originates from the use, by the pioneer modern architect and painter Le Corbusier, of ‘beton brut’ – raw concrete in French. Banham gave the French word a punning twist to express the general horror with which this concrete architecture was greeted in Britain.
I've seen this conversation before, but I've never been clear on what exactly the consequences of the SSO are. I imagined, it might be that the provider gets an IP address when you connect or something. You're saying they potentially get _access as you_? Am I understanding that correctly?
Anything authenticated with SSO can be accessed by the SSO provider since they're able to approve any authorization, which means they can just log into all your stuff.
So e.g. if you use "log in with Google" on a web site, Google now has access to your account too (if they behaved badly or were compromised).
Spreading SSO auth everywhere gives the SSO provider login access to absolutely everything you have.
I have not tried Tailscale SSH or looked at it deeply, but as a general rule the answer is yes if the system is using delegated SSO alone to authenticate. (What I don't know is whether TS SSH supports any secondary methods like a password or SSH auth forwarding.)
You are delegating authentication, so your delegated authenticator can authenticate anything they want.
I feel like a large number of people adopting SSO/IAM systems don't fully understand this. If they do understand and are making a cost/benefit based choice to do this that's one thing, but... I think people should understand.
I've never used or examined Tailscale either, but I assumed that:
- Tailnet traffic needs to be associated with an approved device key
- Tailnet device addition needs to be signed by the offline key of another approved device
If a compromised control plane and/or SSO provider can add and approve devices on their own then the security architecture of Tailscale would be fundamentally broken. I wouldn't even call it end-to-end encrypted.
What precisely are the consequences of the third-party auth? Is it, they get an IP ping each time a device connects or does anything? Or, does that only happen once, but they can revoke access at any time? *Surely* they aren't granted access to the content? That would be mindboggling.
