The use case is well defined here, let’s not jump the gun. Text search, like with code, is a relatively simple problem compared to intrinsic semantic content in a book for example. I think the moral here is that RAG is not a silver bullet, the claude code team came to the same conclusion.
This kind of circles back to ontological NLP, that was using knowledge representation as a primitive for language processing. There is _a ton_ of work in that direction.
Possibly they don't want corporations on the board that are actively sandbagging an initiative that competes with that corporation's products. But much like the RubyGems fiasco, all the decisions seem very opaque, so I can't say whether that's actually the case.
While anything is possible, we can rest assured that if there was any evidence of subterfuge / sandbagging, given our own involvement in the situation, they would have shared it at some point, surely in their main response.
So, basically, TDF doesn’t want Collabora (a company) people on their board. The technical vs non-technical framing seems contrived at best. The excuse by TDF seems… suspicious.
Classic pattern. The board gets populated by people whose main skill is board politics, and they use governance tools to push out the people who actually build the thing. Seen this happen in multiple open source foundations.
This is anecdotal at best, but it does play into the tired old technical vs non-technical simplification. The fact that the two entities have now become direct competitors is a better explanation grounded in facts
Your explanation is also an oversimplification that leaves out a lot of key details.
TDF is ran by a board. The board is supposed to contain 10 people, it currently has 7. This board is expected to be elected by members on a regular schedule. The elections are late, because the rump board has twice delayed the elections. Instead of holding elections to fill out the board, the rump board chose to change the bylaws, through a legally questionable process (properly, they would have to hold a vote of trustees, but chose not to), to allow them to exclude people from voting in the elections. Then they use the new bylaws to exclude many of their political opponents, on very flimsy grounds⁰.
You don't need to even consider which side of this conflict is technical or non-technical to see that there is something rotten here.
0: And yes, the grounds are very flimsy indeed. Excluding people in case of active litigation sounds sensible, until you consider that the litigation was started by the TDF board, and is frivolous. Collabra is using the trademarks under valid license.
I don't see it as trying to exclude non technical people, only that people who specialise in organisational politics will have a natural advantage over people who specialise in code so in the long run more of the former will sit on boards
On the other side of things, i've seen plenty of examples where technical people try to manage things despite having no administration experience and screw it up.
If you’re looking into small models for tiny local tasks, you should try Qwen coder 0,5B. It’s more of an experiment, but it can output decent functions given the right context instructions.
So… a prompt? I’m not on my laptop but I hooked it to cmp.nvim, gave it a short situational prompt, +- 10 lines, and started typing. Not anywhere near usable but with a little effort you can get something ok for repetitive tasks. Maybe something like spotting one specific code smell pattern. The advantage is the ridiculous T/s you get
It’s not like creating a chip gives you unfettered access to it. You _can_ add 0-day flaws and backdoors, but these can be discovered, leaked, etc. Has there been any case of such a backdoor built in consumer chips like theses? I’m not talking about CIA ops like snowden described, that’s supply chain interception. I mean, has anybody ever found such a backdoor?
Well, that depends on what you count as a backdoor, but Espressif has had some questionable flaws:
- Early (ESP8622) MCUs had weak security, implementation flaws, and a host of issues that meant an attacker could hijack and maintain control of devices via OTA updates.
- Their chosen way to implement these systems makes them more vulnerable. They explicitly reduce hardware footprint by moving functionality from hardware to software.
- More recently there was some controversy about hidden commands in the BT chain, which were claimed to be debug functionality. Even if you take them at their word, that speaks volumes about their practices and procedures.
That’s the main problem with these kinds of backdoors, you can never really prove they exist because there’s reasonable alternative explanations since bugs do happen.
What I can tell you is that every single company I’ve worked which took security seriously (medical implants, critical safety industry) not only banned their use on our designs, they banned the presence of ESP32 based devices on our networks.
Except if you penetrate the market with modules that cost 5% of similar US made solutions, you start to win mindshare. At least some of those hobbyists start making a product, and sometimes the determination of whether a product is "safety critical" isn't agreed upon until after it's failed catastrophically.
Lol carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles, this now means a multi billion dollar ship can and will be destroyed by cheap drones if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone.
> carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles
Where? When?
> if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone
What are you referring to? The entire modern carrier strike group is architected around using stand-off weapons to clear threats to make way for stand-in weapons. The relevant ranges are what your stand-in bombers can hit without re-fuelling versus with. The era of direct firing from ships passed ages ago–that doesn't make carriers less valuable, just changes their role.
Where? Any war games in the last 10 years. It’s a known issue with aircraft carriers agiants anti ship missiles. What’s protecting them right now is what would happen to a country if they attacked one of those. Retribution is not a great defensive capability in the long run.
Contrary to popular belief, an aircraft carrier does more than just launch airplane. Its optimal deployment zone will be defined by the range of its helicopters. So not as far as you think.
Take the helicopters out and you have easily 50% less missions this thing can launch per day.
> Did you ever hear the tragedy of USS Plagueis The Unsinkable?
The USS Plunkett? A destroyer, not a carrier, that sustained the best the Germans could throw at her and kept on going; earning 5 battle stars while participating in all the major allied invasions in europe. What part was the tragedy of her? That she was scrapped in 1975 instead of being turned into a museum?
You have any evidence for this? Because low cost drones can't fly very far, are easy to spot with radar, are slow as hell and can be shot down with cheap intercepters, or even lasers as the US is already deploying.
Traditional anti-shipping missiles are a bigger danger.
The optimal deployment zone is far off shore, and there its very hard to reach.
Is your point that you can put a huge carrier literally in the straits?
Also the standard Shahed-136 style drones carry less than 200 pounds of explosives, and deliver that to the surface of a target.
Antiship missiles carry larger warheads, often double the size, and deliver that warhead deep inside a warship where it is much more vulnerable. A shahed blowing up on a carrier deck will be upsetting but won't do much. With particularly egregious negligence of standard US Navy damage control methodology, you might cause a lot of damage by fire, like what happened to the Ford. Not that I'm suggesting it was hit by a Shahed.
You don't even need to say "lasers" : that's the future. CIWS is already a thing today and Ukrainians have downed Shaheds with ground fire from small arms.
There's a plethora of various low cost systems being developed for some defence, but the assumption I always see on HN and elsewhere is that for some reason cheap offensive drones will just never have a countermeasure...which isn't how any of this works (exhibit A: massed infantry assaults can sometimes work against emplaced machine guns, but in general the machine gun was the end of that tactic).
There is absolutely no reason that the current disruption drones are causing should lead to some sustained power imbalance: if you don't have the big laser today that's one thing, but if tomorrow you're scoring 100% intercept rates against the same threat then how cheap it is doesn't matter anymore. And there's no particular reason to think that won't be the case (if a cheap drone can be on the offensive, you'd have to present a very good case why the interceptor cannot be built in similar quantities at which point you're back to high end systems deciding the day).
You just need a radar controlled anti aircraft gun. Most militaries phased these out as they had been considered obsolete (dosn't help against e.g. modern fighter jets).
Sure, my point is just that lasers you can get the cost per 'kill' to literally a few $. So even the 'cheap drones are cheaper then other interceptor' argument doesn't work.
100% interception … drone interception is NP complete dude, there’s nothing you can do against 1000 drones like that, and they’ll get cheaper, faster, smaller, bigger, more manoeuvrable. So 10Million bucks to down an aircraft carrier. With 0 casualties to your side.
reply