> I wouldn't hold up GrapheneOS as a good example of more freedom compared to Apple or Google tbh.
I don't see why we can't have both, but this doesn't really a fair criticism of GP's comment. The specific word GP used was 'privacy', not 'freedom', and you are attacking GrapheneOS's stance on the latter, not the former.
GrapheneOS is more focused on privacy over freedom, as you said ("their stance on user privacy is so extreme that it gets in the way of user freedom"). They have chosen to prioritize one over the other.
> For freedom, I'd moreso point towards projects like LineageOS.
This might be true, but LineageOS doesn't have access to microcode either, and certainly GrapheneOS is more 'private' than Lineage, assuming that GrapheneOS hasn't been compromised either internally or at some point in the AOSS supply chain. Except for niche mfgs like PinePhone et al, Google is probably the most free of the major manufacturers (ironically, less private but more free).
I agree that we should aim for both freedom (as in free speech, not necessarily as in free beer although it'd be nice!) and privacy.
Both are critically important, and the efficacy of the latter depends in large part on the former.
Oh, no, that's not true at all. An invention might not even be possible, let alone having a clear and (literally, provably) correct specification of inputs and outputs. Just seeing that it exists, to say nothing of getting the correct proportion of inputs and outputs, could shave a decade off your invention cycle.
Take, for example, the nuclear bomb. Just knowing that it could be done put you ten steps ahead. What if cold fusion or a warp drive were known to be possible because you could see it (even if from a great distance with little detail)? Airplane manufacturers leapt ahead (literally) after the Wright Brothers.
A tremendous amount of effort for worthy inventions is often involved simply in proving that it can be done. Once you know it can be done, you don't have to prove it anymore, and also large companies will throw buckets of money at a clone of something that's proven to work.
A patent (sometimes) prevents that -- at least, when everything is working as it should be. (In this case, clearly not!)
I'd settle for a source analysis and reproducible builds for just our myriad open source dependencies. All it takes is a single developer to be compromised in the thousands throughout a typical stack..
> If we look at university performance at the margin, we would really be expecting some of these people to have won a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.
At the highest-level universities, nearly every applicant is already exceptional before they're even accepted, and yet:
Even if you carefully selected 100 or so people out of nearly any university, it's statistically unlikely that a Fields medal winner, Nobel prize laureate, or unicorn founder would come to fruition out of any of them, even if we allow more than a decade.
Yes; you might have seen mosquito "dunks" that are small donut shaped things that you can drop into flower pots or other areas that don't drain properly. They dissolve over time. There are also mosquito traps (bird-house sized or even just small plastic bags that you cut open). They can be filld with water to activate.
Here's what it's focused on, targeting Themelio cryptocurrency's requirements:
> In a blockchain, the behavior we almost always want is for all transactions on the database to be serializable and for database integrity to be guaranteed — that is, a transaction either happens completely or not all, and crashes/power failures cannot cause inconsistency — but we do not need strong durability. We don’t need to ensure that a information saved to disk is still there if the system crashes immediately, since generally Themelio will tolerate “traveling back in time” a few seconds.
> The combination of extremely robust serializability and integrity with eventual durability is hard to find. SQLite in WAL mode with PRAGMA synchronous = NORMAL is close, but directly using SQLite still has relatively poor performance with the extremely fragmented reads and writes Themelio nodes create. LMDB and friends simply give no option besides either synchronizing every transaction or leaving database integrity up to chance every time a power failure might happen.
> ... We actively encourage use of BoringDB outside of Themelio; we think it’s the perfect choice whenever you need a single-process, embedded key-value database with extreme reliability but also reasonable write performance.
>>> you do not have a constitutional right to spouting off in the public square without consequence. What you say publicly can & will be used against you in the court of law.
"spouting off..used against you in a court of law"
But, even if the OP didn't intend for these two to be tied together in this way, then a very strong constitutional right still exists for spouting off, so whether conflation occurred or not is moot.
Of course, if you incriminate yourself while spouting off (or while engaged in any other activity, like writing in your diary), then you are producing evidence of a different crime, but spouting off is not a crime in itself.
The next sentence: "What you say publicly can & will be used against you in the court of law", so governmental consequences is what the OP was referring to.
It seems like the OP might have been conflating free speech with admissions of guilt for other crimes, but "spouting off" is not, and must never be, a crime.
> you do not have a constitutional right to spouting off in the public square without consequence
Actually, in the U.S., you literally have that specific constitutional right.
The First Amendment protects "spouting off in the public square without consequence" via the Freedoms of Assembly (the right to gather), Speech (say what you like without consequence), Religion (believe what you like), and the right to petition the government.
Loud complaining or even vague and non-specific threats (such as "I'll make you pay for this!") are actually protected by the First Amendment.
There are very rare and limited exceptions, such as "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".
Unpopular opinion (and so strange that a red state like Texas did it this way), but: Texas is far too dependent on wind power, fossil fuel plants (even natural gas!) being shut down at the behest of the federal govt, and definitely not enough nuclear, although those can take quite a few years to come online.
I don't see why we can't have both, but this doesn't really a fair criticism of GP's comment. The specific word GP used was 'privacy', not 'freedom', and you are attacking GrapheneOS's stance on the latter, not the former.
GrapheneOS is more focused on privacy over freedom, as you said ("their stance on user privacy is so extreme that it gets in the way of user freedom"). They have chosen to prioritize one over the other.
> For freedom, I'd moreso point towards projects like LineageOS.
This might be true, but LineageOS doesn't have access to microcode either, and certainly GrapheneOS is more 'private' than Lineage, assuming that GrapheneOS hasn't been compromised either internally or at some point in the AOSS supply chain. Except for niche mfgs like PinePhone et al, Google is probably the most free of the major manufacturers (ironically, less private but more free).
I agree that we should aim for both freedom (as in free speech, not necessarily as in free beer although it'd be nice!) and privacy.
Both are critically important, and the efficacy of the latter depends in large part on the former.