I brought it up two years ago and get downvoted when I brought it up a couple months ago.
There is a story on the front page right now about someone losing their child's family videos from a youtube ban. We hear about this stuff all the time.
I suspect we are gonna be in somewhat of an arms race with AI products as the bubble grows over the next 18-24 months. This makes me worried about how disadvantaged people are going to be if they lose access to the better platform (whichever that ends up being).
Do you think AI is going to be so important that we would benefit from legal protections for access?
Or do you think the models and technology will become so small we will be able to personalize / decentralize the tech and it still be useful / competitive?
Happening already. My new claude max account got instabanned after just a few messages asking it to debug some stuff for me, that they felt like a TOS violation. Nothing remotely controversial. The main model didn't even complain, some dumber background censorship model flagged it.
I am building a very similar thing after a short stent at a robotics company in 2024. The industry is very far behind more general dev experience and tooling.
I am forced to accept the popularity of ROS but I find it to generally be a terrible experience. Are you considering an alternative? Have you used foxglove?
Hey! Great to hear from someone in the same boat. I completely agree, the general dev experience and tooling around ROS can be deeply frustrating...
I am definitely looking into Foxglove! It seems to solve many of the transport/protocol headaches, but I feel like there's still a massive gap in how we actually interact with the robots day to day, especially when you are not glued to a desktop monitor.
I'd love to hear more about your experience. What specific part of the tooling drove you crazy enough to start building an alternative?
(Also, if you are open to a quick 15-min chat to share "war" stories, let me know!)
Foxglove is not the only name in town. There are many, Transitive Robotics, the company I'm building is one of them. Different from Foxglove we are much more focused on live-remote monitoring and control, e.g., we have a pretty popular remote teleoperation module: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/transitive-robotics/remo...
You can find all the other modules we're currently offering here: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/
The platform itself is and remains open-source.
I will second this. You might not be able to get away without ROS compatibility depending on the market but a dependancy on it is a big pain in the neck from my point of view.
Not OP but of some bird owners I've see that let their birds hang out in their house / on their shoulders and such the birds willingly go to their cage to rest.
+1 to this. My birds all have open cage doors and they mostly stay in their cage. That's where their food and water is, and they only come out of their cage to go into another one
Many birds with anxiety problems do much better at night in covered cages. The anxiety may be temporary (e.g. a new person/animal in the house) but nonetheless there are good reasons for it, and quite common in some species.
This just seems obvious to me, but I've been around animals my entire life.
I built something on top of DuckDB last year but it never got deployed. They wanted to trust Postgres.
I didn't use the in browser WASM but I did expose an api endpoint that passed data exploration queries directly to the backend like a knock off of what new relic does. I also use that same endpoint for all the graphs and metrics in the UI. Just filtered out the write / delete statements in a rudimentary way.
DuckDB is phenomenal tech and I love to use it with data ponds instead of data lakes although it is very capable of large sets as well.
And "data pond"? Glad I am not alone using this term! Somewhere between a data lake and warehouse - still unstructured but not _everything_ in one place. For instance, if I have a multi-tenant app I might choose to have a duckdb setup for each customer with pre-filtered data living alongside some global unstructured data.
Maybe there's already a term that covers this but I like the imagery of the metaphor... "smaller, multiple data but same idea as the big one".
I remember a somewhat prominent dev in the DC area putting on Twitter around 2012 or so something like "I do plenty of open source coding and I don't put a fucking license on it" and it stuck with me for all these years that it was a weird stance to take.
Dan Bernstein took that attitude back in the 90s - I think his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain", which ran counter to the mainstream position of "if it doesn't have a license, then you have to treat it as proprietary".
And, sure, djb wasn't actually likely to sue you if you went ahead and distributed modified versions of his software... but no-one else was willing to take that risk, and it ended up killing qmail, djbdns, etc stone dead. His work ended up going to waste as a result.
I doubt the lack of license was the reason DJB's projects didn't take over the world. Most of them required heavy forking to break away from hardwired assumptions about the filesystem and play nice with the OS distribution, and DJB is himself notoriously difficult to work with. Still, qmail managed to establish maildir as the standard format and kill off mbox, and for that alone I'm eternally grateful.
Well, there were always plenty of patches available - it's just that lots of them conflicted with each other, and that was a product of the licensing.
Agreed with the rest, though. I relied heavily on qmail for about a decade, and learned a lot from the experience, even if it was a little terrifying on occasion!
These days one would just most likely create a fork on github. Vim was also maintained through separate patches for a long time, but Bram was a lot more accepting about integrating and distributing those patches himself.
> his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain"
I mean philosophically and morally, sure, one can take that position ... but copyright law does not work like that, at least not for anything published in the US after 1989 [1].
They didn't say that and the article didn't allude to that. 1 instance with 30 databases.
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