Yeah, GHA has a massive plugin ecosystem. A common pattern is using an “action” from a plugin as one CI step/job. So these are dependencies that get resolved at runtime when GHA puts together your workload.
Other CI platforms have plugins, but the “plugins” in GitHub really get used as the core primitive of the system, which is part of what makes it so simple & easy to use… for really basic workflows. You just hook up a couple actions like this and you’re good to go, no shell scripting required. (Though you can totally do that too.)
I mean at the end of the day, it’s a big part of the value proposition, even if I prefer a much more bare metal approach. GHA is really not great at massive CI workloads.
Absolutely yes. My prescribed CPAP came with 5G that uploads data for their app and for your physician to monitor your progress. You basically wouldn’t even know it had one, the plan must be managed by the company and automatically connects where ever you take it.
AT&T sounds like the same thing, Google sounds different because they theoretically claim to not sell your data, and instead sell ads, and Google can show you an ad you want to see because Google knows you so well. It doesn’t precisely sell you to advertisers in the same way.
Anyways, the whole thing sucks for consumer privacy and needs to be outlawed. The problem is that companies come up with unique, tricky ways of exploiting you, and people can never fully understand it without a lot of effort. Someone might be ok using Google and seeing contextual ads, but wouldn’t be ok if they knew Google was saving a screenshot of their browser every second and uploading and reselling it. The first can feel innocuous, the second feels evil.
Exactly. The free market has very little recourse when companies basically all start doing the same thing, and more or less don’t tell you about it. You certainly don’t see “takes a screenshot of your TV every 2s and uploads it for us to analyze” plastered all over the boxes! I guess the idea is the consumer will be omniscient and that a company will come along offering a privacy protecting alternative… but those incentives just doooo not work!
Seriously, totally deranged to think the “free market” is capable of protecting humans against widespread nefarious behavior from colluding actors with vast amounts of money and power.
A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept and markets like electronics are nowhere near free. Collusion is something that happens in an oligopoly. The fact many markets degenerate into oligopolies and monopolies is why we need government. 30 years ago I feel like people understood this. Now it seems everyone thinks they know what free market means just because they heard the term one time.
"A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept"
How would we know the real-world properties of a theoretical concept from economics? We understand pieces of economics, but certainly not the whole thing. Let's say we make the market free-er and free-er. Apart from politics junkies, who knows for sure how that behaves?
I like this branch of discussion and I want it to keep growing. What has to happen to make an electronics market free? Is the situation about spyware TV/cars can not be improved in any kind of Libertarian or Anarcho-Capitalist world without the Government? Is bad government worse for the electronics market than absence of any governments?
Some things like semiconductor fabrication will have huge barriers to entry for the foreseeable future due to being massively capital intensive and involving lots of trade secrets etc. We can't really do much about this.
What we (ie. the government) can do is ensure no entities own the entire supply chain, so you can't run a fab and also market finished consumer goods. That way, manufacture of consumer goods (including the software) from the raw fabricated parts gets a much lower barrier to entry.
We can also force consumer manufacturers to advertise all "features" that we deem to be important. We already do things like energy ratings, why not privacy ratings too? The more information consumers have the better.
Make no mistake, any capital intensive industry like electronics will degenerate into an oligopoly without government, or you can dream of a day where everyone can print semiconductor wafers at home.
The core probe is exclusivity agreements. Honestly think they should be illegal. Disney should not be allowed to choose who has access to view the content they’re releasing to the public.
The right is that of copyright, one that is granted by the public to incentivize the creative arts. Disney and other rights holders need to hold up their end of the bargain, so it's reasonable for the public to require wider dissemination of their works.
Disney still gets paid if their works are shown on Netflix; they choose exclusivity to build a moat around their streaming service, regardless of the quality of the service, which is a form of consumer abuse (albeit a mild one in the big picture).
Disney still requires you to disclose your age and gender to use the service, last I checked. This is concerning, and would be punished by a competitive streaming market were it not for exclusivity.
There's some precedent for this: Back in the 40s, the movie studios were forced to sell their stake in theaters due to antitrust issues around exclusivity. Streaming services owning studios feels like the essentially the same situation.
> The right is that of copyright, one that is granted by the public to incentivize the creative arts. Disney and other rights holders need to hold up their end of the bargain
Are you contending that Disney isn’t producing new content because they are permitted to control dissemination of their works? That doesn’t square with either reality or incentive.
Besides, there's nothing in the Constitution that says that on top of advancing the "Progress of...useful Arts" that unlimited dissemination is required to promote that goal. On the contrary, the Constitution allows Congress to provide authors the "exclusive Right to their respective Writings" -- which directly contradicts your argument.
Copyright is not a property right. It is a state granted monopoly that is supposed to provide incentives. It should therefore be designed to maximise incentives.
In any case lots of property rights have limitations and exclusions. Land might be subject to other people having rights to enter it (so you cannot exclude them), or mineral rights might be owned by someone else. There are legal restrictions in many places on what you can do with it. You can require a license in own some things (e.g. guns on most places).
As an attorney who specialized in IP practice in law school, I can tell you that your understanding of what a property right is is absolutely wrong. If you told a judge that copyright is not a property right, they’d stifle a laugh and advise you to come back with a lawyer, and your lawyer would, in turn, advise you to keep your legal opinions to yourself.
Both are rights to exclude enforced in law, which is the essence of what property law is. As the owner of physical property, you can exclude others from occupying or using it (with the violation being trespass). As the owner of intellectual property, you can exclude others from copying it, making derivative works, etc (with violations also enforceable in law).
Yes, both types of property rights are subject to limitations, either by law or by contract (as in the easement and mineral rights examples you gave). But that doesn't change the essence of what they are.
Legal definitions are often not the same as plain English, and wording used in legislation is often politicised.
The nature of copyright is that it is a monopoly right. It is almost indistinguishable from letters patent (e.g. in the case of the KJV Bible in the UK). I am less familiar with US law but I believe US copyright law is based on a clause in the constitution giving the federal government the power to grant monopolies?
A monopoly right and a property right are the same thing with different names. As a landowner, for example, you have the right to kick people off (evict from) your property. You have both a de facto and de jure monopoly to exploit your land.
The US constitution confers to Congress the power to grant copyrights and patents in Article I, Section 8:
"The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
The operating word here is "exclusive" which, yes, is a monopoly right. But again, it's not different in essence from a property right, which is also a monopoly right.
Music has mandatory licensing: you can play any songs on your radio station as long as you pay the fixed, standardized fees. And yet the music industry is still alive
Not strictly true. An artist can refuse to license their work to a given station. That never happens in practice, but politicians being refused use of music has happened.
> An artist can refuse to license their work to a given station.
Via what means?
First, radio stations in the USA aren't required to pay royalties to a recording artist, only to the songwriter via a Performing Rights Organization (PRO) like ASCAP or BMI. It follows that recording artists don't even have a say in whether their recordings can be played on the radio.
Second, songwriters don't have any control over public performance once they've licensed their work to the PRO. It's all or nothing. Songwriters can withdraw their works from the PRO, but then they have to negotiate with public performers through some other means. Radio stations don't have the means to enter separate negotiations with every songwriter, so they'll likely forego it, which practically means no airplay for artists who haven't submitted to the PROs.
> politicians being refused use of music has happened
It’s odd, I read ravenously as a kid/teen, as did my siblings. You need to read what you enjoy, and for it to not be forced. (For example, summer reading at the library gave out prizes kids cared about for reading books.) Plus, we didn’t have access to much digital media like TV/video games (though it was the early 2010s) because my parents were strict, so books were a solid source of entertainment.
That was my problem too. Not in the US but in Europe. The stuff we had to read was all by 'highly acclaimed: authors who have carved out this niche of 'literature art ' between them.
However their books were dusty, tough, whiny and horrible to get through. Yuck. I never read fiction in my own language ever again just in spite.
I'm older than you (graduated high school in 1975). I read tons of sci-fi as a kid. I also don't remember reading any whole novels for English class. Maybe we did, but if so I have successfully blocked them out.
I have been amazed at the number of houses I've been in over the years which didn't appear to contain a single book.
I graduated high school in '92 (S.F. Bay Area) and can recall several assigned books we read for class in either junior high or high school. I think there were more, but these are the ones I can recall easily today.
Pride and Prejudice. Last of the Mohicans. A Separate Peace. Tom Jones. Beowulf. Grendel. Crime and Punishment. Waiting for Godot. Tale of Two Cities.
Also, several Shakespeare plays, though I am no longer sure which were read when.
We also had other reading assignments where we chose our own books. The above were assigned to everyone.
interesting. Assuming you're talking about high school I had a totally different experience, we were assigned maybe 6 books/semester for the year I spent in mainstream classes (and about double that when I did the IB program but I expected that to be uncommon)
It doesn’t happen anymore because of phones and the internet. Most people in the past read because they had nothing to do and they were willing to invest the time into a good book. You sacrifice a lot of energy in order to get enjoyment from a book.
Now with the internet there’s an unlimited stream of zero investment snippets of entertainment. People naturally dive into that because it’s more rational in the short term to do that.
Schools stopped reading but it’s as a result of the way students behave. The causal driver is student behavior.
1. Poor color grading / mastering. For example, many of the Harry Potter movies have an “artistically” dull color scheme and don’t take advantage of HDR much. So they don’t look that different on a good display. Plenty of other movies don’t even try to take full advantage either. (Lots of movies where black isn’t actually an inky black, or where shiny things don’t translate specular highlights into brighter HDR)
2. Marketing shitty HDR displays as HDR. My monitor is “HDR” but is only HDR400. This really doesn’t look that good. Also, HDR fundamentally doesn’t really work that well if the TV doesn’t have enough local dimming zones. If you only have a single backlight, you can’t really make a diamond ring look sparkly. On an OLD, just the diamond will be displayed brighter, making it look shiny.
However, for media that is graded well and published in a high bit rate (4k Blu-ray), it looks outstanding on a good HDR display (like a Samsung s90c)
Anyways, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get a better TV in the future. For example, handling motion without jitter, handling reflections with high ambient light, simply getting brighter and handling burn-in better… and besides that, the display technology that looks the best (QD-OLED) has yet to make it into cheaper models most people buy.
Other CI platforms have plugins, but the “plugins” in GitHub really get used as the core primitive of the system, which is part of what makes it so simple & easy to use… for really basic workflows. You just hook up a couple actions like this and you’re good to go, no shell scripting required. (Though you can totally do that too.)
I mean at the end of the day, it’s a big part of the value proposition, even if I prefer a much more bare metal approach. GHA is really not great at massive CI workloads.
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