Fundamental science is mostly publicly funded though and has little immediate practical application. The lack of funding in much of science also shows the problems this approach has.

Yeah, but some things cost a lot of money to develop. The higher the cost of the R&D, the less likely it is to occur without some patent system. Although I agree that in programming specifically the Open Source model seems to work quite well - look at the Apache Foundation.

You could have a model where all research was done by a public body or something like the Apache Foundation, but this reduces innovation as it means there is less opportunity for some people to try something that may not be considered likely to be successful, as publicly funded research tends to focus on the safest path. For an example, look at how public nuclear fusion research is continuing on the traditional toroidal tokamak model with ITER compared with the more experimental designs being tested by private companies such as Helion, Focus Fusion, Tokamak Energy (they are using a high aspect-ratio 'spherical tokamak).

Yeah, I think with software due to the low barrier to entry etc. it makes sense for it to be further towards the less protections end of the spectrum.

But still, if you’d paid a load of PhDs to come up with some really clever algorithm (think of like how Shazam had it’s music recognition algorithm long, long before modern ML) and then someone could just steal it well, it’d harm innovation and ultimately the tech industry and investment would go elsewhere and those clever PhD grads just wouldn’t find employment.

It’s a balance that depends on the properties of each industry, but I don’t think that no protections whatsoever is ever a good answer.

But it’s trivial to write a slightly different implementation of something.

I think one really has to consider what the effect on innovation will be - you don’t want too many protections as that will stifle innovation as it prevents people from building upon the prior ideas, but equally you don’t want no protection at all as that will discourage innovation as R&D takes money, so if you can’t recoup the investment the money simply won’t get invested into R&D and the innovation won’t happen.

I don’t organise it 🥲

One problem atm is that a user can’t block by instance, just by community or individual users. It seems a lot of people are requesting this ability though so hopefully it gets added in the future.

I’d never heard of it! It does look pretty stressful though.

I can understand wanting to have a well-moderated community.

What I don’t understand is how they expect to do that with a moderation team of just 4 people.

I guess now people will just leave Beehaw, its communities that were popular here will be replaced by others in the Fediverse and life will go on. The Fediverse is built to be resilient to such changes.

I mean the future Story Pack expansion that is mentioned in the Deluxe Edition. Given they are already selling it, it doesn’t seem so speculative.

Hmm, I don’t have vacations until the 11th so other than being able to get it before the weekend, having it 5 days earlier isn’t that big a deal.

Being able to get the story expansion at presumably a cheaper price is worth it though, as I’m guessing they won’t add this to Game Pass?