(I bet there are people at all the big AI labs working on ways to incorporate something more CNN-like into LLMs somehow.)

[1] I am sure this is not actually the right term. I do not care.

Is it a sensible demand? I dunno. Some people have thought so. Some other people have thought not. I'm not trying to settle that question; just trying to bring some clarity as to what the issue is.

[1] I think the usual concern is more "they pay Yandex, and Yandex has ties to the Putin regime, so they are indirectly funding bad things done by Russia" than "their results have whatever biases Russia forces Yandex to have", but the latter could definitely also be a concern; there have definitely been allegations of Yandex results for e.g. searches related to Ukraine having pro-Russian biases.

[2] Rather than as a way to remind people who would object to Kagi's use of Yandex that it's happening.

They mean "I would like our government to stop taxing people who don't get to vote for it" or "It is unjust for a government to tax people who don't get to vote for it" or something of that sort.

The fact that things aren't already the way you want them to be doesn't make it absurd to demand that they change to be that way.

(You might argument that governments don't give a damn what anyone demands and for that reason it is absurd to demand change. But I think that in fact governments do take notice of what people want, if they fear what the people might do if they don't get it. Whether that's voting them out of office or putting their heads on pikes or anything in between. And they will take more notice if more people are demanding whatever it is, and a large part of the point of saying things like "No taxation without representation!" is to get other people who aren't in the government to sympathize with your cause and maybe start demanding the same thing. So I think it's manifestly not absurd to make such demands, as such. Some particular demands -- "No taxation without $1M/year universal basic income!" -- would be absurd, but this one seems obviously not to be in that category.)

(But the temperatures should have been recorded on the Réaumur scale.)

Maybe in some sense "no taxation without suffrage" would be more accurate, but it would be a worse slogan. In any case, "no taxation without representation" is a well known phrase, it's been around for over 250 years, and I don't think much is achieved by nitpicking its wording.

[1] Obviously Newton counts as one. Leibniz like Newton figured out calculus. Other people did important work in dynamics though no one else's was as impressive as Newton's. But the vast majority of human-level intelligences trained on texts prior to Newton did not create calculus or derive the equations of motion or come close to doing either of those things.

You are root inside a sandbox. As root-in-the-sandbox, you create a symlink and this gives you the ability to escape the sandbox.

(Whether this is interesting or not depends on whether anyone actually tries to use the sandbox facility in such a way as to give root-in-the-sandbox privileges to untrusted people or code. I don't know enough about OpenBSD to answer that.)

(Of course there is also scope for debate about how much world model today's LLMs have; it seems like it's more than none even though it has to be built out of token-shuffling parts. But that's not relevant here.)

(I do agree that Mr Trump is a shockingly bad president in oh so many ways. But the malaise being described here doesn't seem to have started in 2016. Not every bad thing is his fault.)

(In practice, they presumably couldn't do that, at least not effectively, because the code is open source and someone else could fork it. But let's imagine that somehow they could require all Thunderbird users to pay them.)

That doesn't, of course, mean that it would be better overall. Thunderbird users would go from getting Thunderbird for free and maybe having reason to donate some money, to having to pay some money just to keep the ability to use Thunderbird: obviously worse for them. There'd probably be more money available for Thunderbird development, which would be good. The overall result might be either good or bad. But it would, indeed, no longer be unclear whether and why a Thunderbird user might choose to pay money to the Thunderbird project.

If instead I donate to an open-source project, I'm not doing it in order to get access to the product; I already have that. I'm doing it because I hope they will do something with the money that I value. (Possible examples: Developing new features I like. Rewarding people who already developed features I liked. Activism for causes I approve of. Continuing to provide something that benefits everyone and not just me.)

And so I care a lot what they're going to do with the money, in a way I don't if I (say) pay money to Microsoft in exchange for the right to use Microsoft Office. Because what they're going to do with the money determines what point there is in my giving it.

Sometimes, everything the project does is stuff I think is valuable (for me or for the world). In that case I don't need to ask exactly what they're doing. Sometimes, it's obvious that what happens to the money is that it goes into the developer's pockets and they get to do what they like with it. In that case, I'll donate if the point of my donation is to reward someone who is doing something I'm glad they're doing, and probably not otherwise.

In the case of Thunderbird, it's maybe not so obvious. Probably the money will go toward implementing Thunderbird features and bug fixes, but looking at the history of Firefox I might worry that that's going to mean "AI integrations that actual users mostly don't want" or "implementing advertising to help raise funds", and I might have a variety of attitudes to those things. Or it might go toward some sort of internet activism, and again I might have a variety of attitudes to that depending on exactly what they're agitating for. Or maybe I might worry that the money will mostly end up helping to pay the salary of the CEO of Mozilla. (I don't think that's actually possible, but I can imagine situations where Mozilla wants some things done, and if they can pay for them via donations rather than using the company's money they'll do so, so that the net effect of donating is simply to increase Mozilla's profits.)

And I don't think anyone's asking for anything very burdensome in the way of transparency. Just more than, well, nothing at all which is what we have at the moment. The text on the actual page says literally nothing beyond "help keep Thunderbird alive". The FAQ says "Thunderbird is the leading open source email and productivity app that is free for business and personal use. Your gift helps ensure it stays that way, and supports ongoing development." which tells us almost nothing. And "MZLA Technologies Corporation is a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and the home of Thunderbird." which tells us that donations go to a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation (which I believe is the same entity that owns the Mozilla Corporation, but like most people I am not an expert on this stuff and don't know what that means in practice about how the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation and MZLA Technologies Corporation actually work together).

Maybe donated money will lead to MZLA Technologies Corporation hiring more developers or paying existing developers more? Maybe it'll be used to buy equipment, or licences for patented stuff? Maybe it'll be used to advertise Thunderbird and get it more users? Maybe it'll be used to agitate for the use of open email standards or something like that? Maybe. Maybe some other thing entirely. There's no way to get any inkling.

Anyway, thanks for giving some indication of what you didn't like.