You can watch this same process unfold live before your eyes with Android OS, or if you don’t want to miss the beginning of the show, grab some popcorn and watch these guys.

No, I have money to pay instead. If I were able to contribute to the effort, I would have said that. Just picking fights in response to open questions today?

Does anyone know if there’s any chance for a fork before this situation inevitably deteriorates? I dont know the license on that software enough to know if its an option.

Unfortunately, there is no historical example where this hasn’t turned predatory. It’s a tale as old as venture capital has been in software development:

• get free contributions from altruistic people donating their time and expertise to your FOSS project that you’re selling
• make a closed-source set of extensions as optional dependencies
• slowly diverge the closed source feature set to include developer and user “must-haves” you do not contribute upstream
• slow or functionally halt open source contributions

It is an oft-repeated long con to pull off a mass heist of donated skill and time while imposing vendor lock-in on your users through a back door.

"As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, “Why did you sting me? You have killed us both!”

The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.”

It definitely is in the very same family of rudeness to the system. Like with everything anymore, we have to design every system to account for bad faith actors, because they are too abundant to ignore and will quickly inundate any good faith, mutual trust, or professional courtesy based system with their “flood the field with bullshit” approach to everything.

I think in this case, as in many others, we need to shift the burden of contribution more onto the contributor so that spurious contributions are more costly to the contributor than the system they’re contributing to. Much like with bots now disrespecting robots.txt, we have to add an element of discomfort to that violation of trust, since the violators lack any senses of community, respect, or shame to keep them acting in good faith.

A system that achieves the same goal as the Nepenthes Web project that punishes and wastes AI resources that disrespect web sites’ bot policies may be needed for software and scientific contributions to raise the bar on contributions such that it is not so easy for prompt engineers to copy and paste some LLM output and call themselves mathematicians.

Excuse me while I go take a shower after saying “prompt engineer”.

“Sure, we designed it, built it, taught it everything it knows, and are directing its actions, but holding us accountable for it is a bridge too far!”

Well, at least he’s doing his job! I hope they remember this moment during his annual performance review.

Every country not fully divested from the dollar will have to do that.

I don’t think they can get away with printing the amount of money this will take, but I guess we’ll see. Either way they go, the global economy will have to be rebuilt from the debris.

Right, but that’s what you, a customer, want. These guys are scaling back the self checkouts because there is excessive shrink happening due to customers being totally untrained and some of them shoplifting much more easily because they’re barely supervised. They’re claiming to be doing it of their own accord because it is hurting profits by way of shrink, though many consumers happen to get what they prefer by coincidence in this case.

I think they may have located a more extreme, even dumber business category than “too big to fail”: “too big to bail out”.

As seen from what the company claims in the article, the employee is there, and it is better that they are, because people are both accidentally and intentionally bad at scanning everything and they’re losing their ass.

Because of just that alone, the idea seems to be dying without the previous poster’s philosophical argument, which is not invalid, even coming into play.

Our species, at all times, consists of some probably relatively consistent percentage of what you’d probably call idiots.

I would say that if some social experiment like this is tried, and it fails because too great a percentage of people are “idiots”, it’s really the thing they’re trying that isn’t suitable for us. It seems a little upside down to blame the people something is made for being the ones poorly suited to it.

At least your partner is the one you most need to have and benefit from listening. Your privacy can easily be compromised by close associates. Best of luck to you; you’re not doing anything wrong. Its not you that’s the downer, it’s the circumstances you’re describing.