Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.
MinD: Unified Visual Imagination and Control via Hierarchical World Models
Xiaowei Chi, Kuangzhi Ge, Jiaming Liu, Siyuan Zhou, Peidong Jia, Zichen He, Yuzhen Liu, Tingguang Li, Lei Han, Sirui Han, Shanghang Zhang, Yike Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18897
The Yokai Learning Environment: Tracking Beliefs Over Space and Time
Constantin Ruhdorfer, Matteo Bortoletto, Andreas Bulling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12480 https://
UAV-Enabled Wireless-Powered Underground Communication Networks: A Novel Time Allocation Approach
Kaiqiang Lin, Yijie Mao, Onel Luis Alcaraz L\'opez, Mohamed-Slim Alouini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14627
YSO Jets Driven by Magnetic Pressure Generated through Stellar Magnetosphere-Disk Interaction
Yisheng Tu, Zhi-Yun Li, Zhaohuan Zhu, Xiao Hu, Chun-Yen Hsu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11333
Comments on Class S(YK)
Micha Berkooz, Trivko Kukolj, Josef Seitz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12524 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12524…
From Martin Shaw in New Lines magazine.
"I may have missed something, but the major Western publications that have recently carried “genocide” editorials or prominent features have devoted virtually no space to the measures that governments should take against Israel to stop the genocide. It’s as though they are saying, “Yes, it’s a genocide, but what can we do about it?” ...
"How many have identified the arms flows from their countries to Israel? How many have reported on the deep political ties between their ruling political parties and Israel? Or have covered military collaboration, which in the case of Britain has helped the Israeli military to keep bombing civilians over 21 months, through surveillance flights over Gaza and extensive data sharing? ...
"Since even genocide-aware media are not reporting how Israel’s policies are made possible by wider Western support, they are also very weak in identifying policies that might break it. ...
"Today, genocide scholars, the serious press and even voters have interpreted Gaza as a genocide — but the point is to stop it. Until we do that, we are still in denial."
#Gaza #Palestine #Israel
The Geometry of Extended Kalman Filters on Manifolds with Affine Connection
Yixiao Ge, Pieter van Goor, Robert Mahony
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05728 http…
Ah yes, MIPS Technologies.
https://mips.com/products/hardware/
The famous designer of MIPS (microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages) architecture processors.
Such a well named company /s
It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion