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Is Matrix cooked?

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  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    While I understand the need for them to maintain a steady income, all I can think of is Discord’s Nitro when I think of this upcoming Premium account offering.

  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    deleted by creator

  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    Honestly the reply sort of burys the leade, the most damning part (as an outsider) was:

    but wasn’t going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code…

    OSS getting sacrificed first sign of financial instability isn't something I can condone.

    edit: see reply chain.

  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    SimpleX Chat – Many suggested this and I will explicitly recommend against it due to the founder's positions on various topics. This includes being anti-vaxx, believing COVID-19 was a hoax, trans- and homophobia, climate denial; In the SimpleX Groupchat he's also been seen basically bootlicking trump a couple times, but I've lost receipts to that

    Unrelated to the main points I kind of always thought SimpleX seemed sketchy...

  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    Matrix has always been way too bulky for being a simple messenger. Imo their architecture was cooked from the start.

  • Honestly the reply sort of burys the leade, the most damning part (as an outsider) was:

    but wasn’t going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code…

    OSS getting sacrificed first sign of financial instability isn't something I can condone.

    edit: see reply chain.

    AGPL is a full-on FOSS licence with strong copyleft requirements, not a measly open-source licence like Apache, which could be pivoted to proprietary at a moment's notice. We're communicating through an AGPL-licensed system right now as it's what Lemmy's licensed as. If they were going for a corporate-friendly licence, AGPL is the last thing they'd choose as it forces you to share source code with even more people than the regular GPL does.

  • AGPL is a full-on FOSS licence with strong copyleft requirements, not a measly open-source licence like Apache, which could be pivoted to proprietary at a moment's notice. We're communicating through an AGPL-licensed system right now as it's what Lemmy's licensed as. If they were going for a corporate-friendly licence, AGPL is the last thing they'd choose as it forces you to share source code with even more people than the regular GPL does.

    When I first read the article this was a WTF moment for me. I was reading it twice to find out how that fits in the whole picture, but it is just mentioned once... no further explanation. So I called the whole thing BS...

  • Matrix has always been way too bulky for being a simple messenger. Imo their architecture was cooked from the start.

    it's ... not ... a simple messenger, if that helps?

  • Honestly the reply sort of burys the leade, the most damning part (as an outsider) was:

    but wasn’t going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code…

    OSS getting sacrificed first sign of financial instability isn't something I can condone.

    edit: see reply chain.

    I didn't understand the original post. It seemed like someone whining about a switch to AGPL. But that switch certainly sounds like a good thing to me. I didn't know the old license was Apache but it still seems like a good switch. Redis (with a misstep in between) did something similar.

  • AGPL is a full-on FOSS licence with strong copyleft requirements, not a measly open-source licence like Apache, which could be pivoted to proprietary at a moment's notice. We're communicating through an AGPL-licensed system right now as it's what Lemmy's licensed as. If they were going for a corporate-friendly licence, AGPL is the last thing they'd choose as it forces you to share source code with even more people than the regular GPL does.

    My bad, I thought they were moving from Apache to something more restrictive / less open (the way so many have recently, to effectively "source available"), especially by their wording — which conveys to me they're frustrated they aren't "capturing" the "value" of their code.

    AGPL is not my favorite license but it has its purposes I suppose.

  • Matrix has always been way too bulky for being a simple messenger. Imo their architecture was cooked from the start.

    This. I know a lot of folks in the fediverse like Matrix, but the user experience feels like yet another platform that started with the platform architecture, and not the end user’s experience.

    Then it gets adopted by a bunch of people who enjoy installing Hannah Montana Linux distros for fun, and no one else.

  • SimpleX Chat – Many suggested this and I will explicitly recommend against it due to the founder's positions on various topics. This includes being anti-vaxx, believing COVID-19 was a hoax, trans- and homophobia, climate denial; In the SimpleX Groupchat he's also been seen basically bootlicking trump a couple times, but I've lost receipts to that

    Unrelated to the main points I kind of always thought SimpleX seemed sketchy...

    It's just software...

  • My bad, I thought they were moving from Apache to something more restrictive / less open (the way so many have recently, to effectively "source available"), especially by their wording — which conveys to me they're frustrated they aren't "capturing" the "value" of their code.

    AGPL is not my favorite license but it has its purposes I suppose.

    redacting with strikethrough is fine, and that way we all can learn

  • It's just software...

    with (write) access to everything on your computer, but even just your chats on the phone

  • with (write) access to everything on your computer, but even just your chats on the phone

    Uhhhh no?

  • Uhhhh no?

    what no? why and how am I wrong?

  • redacting with strikethrough is fine, and that way we all can learn

    Omg thanks for linking that thread. The amount of removed and deleted content on Lemmy is so frustrating. I hate the fact that removed or deleted posts also completely nuke all the comments on it.

    Reddit's approach is so much better in this respect. A removed post removed the OP's text, but if it's a link post the link remains, and all the comments remain.

  • what no? why and how am I wrong?

    Why would you think a chat app has full write access to your disk?

  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    I self host matrix. Should anyone who’s not on the foundation’s home server care? Do these changes affect anyone else?

  • In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

    The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F!sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

    https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

    Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

    fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

    Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

    nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

    Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

    Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

    At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

    No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

    Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

    No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

    Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

    wow.

    the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

    so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

    this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

    In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

    Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

    somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

    Sidenote, the modern web is so fucked because how am I supposed to teach a kid that I would trust the random website "paper.wtf" I have never seen before with literally "meow" randomly above their article MORE than businessinsider.com which is like at the top of every search result

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    M
    While you're right to be skeptical, if they just wanted to collect data they would have an Android version. And their stated reason for not supporting it, is that push notifications on Android would require them to at store device-IDs, which they want to avoid for privacy reasons and being vulnerable to subpoenas.
  • Is AI Apocalypse Inevitable? - Tristan Harris

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    V
    Define AGI, because recently the definition is shifting down to match LLM. In fact we can say we achieved AGI now because we have machine that answers questions. The problem will be when the number of questions will start shrinking not because of number of problems but number of people that understand those problems. That is what is happening now. Don't believe me, read the statistics about age and workforce. Now put it into urgent need to something to replace those people. After that think what will happen when all those attempts fail.
  • Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition?

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    B
    It’s funny how the article asks the question, but completely fails to answer it. About 15 years ago, Nvidia discovered there was a demand for compute in datacenters that could be met with powerful GPU’s, and they were quick to respond to it, and they had the resources to focus on it strongly, because of their huge success and high profitability in the GPU market. AMD also saw the market, and wanted to pursue it, but just over a decade ago where it began to clearly show the high potential for profitability, AMD was near bankrupt, and was very hard pressed to finance developments on GPU and compute in datacenters. AMD really tried the best they could, and was moderately successful from a technology perspective, but Nvidia already had a head start, and the proprietary development system CUDA was already an established standard that was very hard to penetrate. Intel simply fumbled the ball from start to finish. After a decade of trying to push ARM down from having the mobile crown by far, investing billions or actually the equivalent of ARM’s total revenue. They never managed to catch up to ARM despite they had the better production process at the time. This was the main focus of Intel, and Intel believed that GPU would never be more than a niche product. So when intel tried to compete on compute for datacenters, they tried to do it with X86 chips, One of their most bold efforts was to build a monstrosity of a cluster of Celeron chips, which of course performed laughably bad compared to Nvidia! Because as it turns out, the way forward at least for now, is indeed the massively parralel compute capability of a GPU, which Nvidia has refined for decades, only with (inferior) competition from AMD. But despite the lack of competition, Nvidia did not slow down, in fact with increased profits, they only grew bolder in their efforts. Making it even harder to catch up. Now AMD has had more money to compete for a while, and they do have some decent compute units, but Nvidia remains ahead and the CUDA problem is still there, so for AMD to really compete with Nvidia, they have to be better to attract customers. That’s a very tall order against Nvidia that simply seems to never stop progressing. So the only other option for AMD is to sell a bit cheaper. Which I suppose they have to. AMD and Intel were the obvious competitors, everybody else is coming from even further behind. But if I had to make a bet, it would be on Huawei. Huawei has some crazy good developers, and Trump is basically forcing them to figure it out themselves, because he is blocking Huawei and China in general from using both AMD and Nvidia AI chips. And the chips will probably be made by Chinese SMIC, because they are also prevented from using advanced production in the west, most notably TSMC. China will prevail, because it’s become a national project, of both prestige and necessity, and they have a massive talent mass and resources, so nothing can stop it now. IMO USA would clearly have been better off allowing China to use American chips. Now China will soon compete directly on both production and design too.
  • 8 Stimmen
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    %100 inherited and old lonely boomers. You'd be surprised how often the courts will not allow POA or Conservatorship to be appointed to the family after they get scammed. I have first hand experience with this and also have a friend as well.
  • Apple’s Smart Glasses Expected to Hit the Market by Late Next Year!

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    great, another worthless tech product that no one asked for. I can hardly wait.
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    guydudeman@lemmy.worldG
    Yeah, I don’t know how they’re doing it. They’re using some “zero trust” system. It’s beyond me.
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    Fantastic! Me and my 7 legs tank you so much!
  • Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2025

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