But until a government steps in there’s potential civil liability for violating the terms. And even winning a lawsuit against Nvidia could be very expensive and take years. And even if they lost it would be worth it to Nvidia to go through the long, expensive process because they’d making sales that entire time.
You probably don’t but it depends where you are. Reverse engineering software without permission isn’t illegal in most places but in the US I’m pretty sure it is.
No idea, I’m not from the US and don’t know the laws beyond what I have previously looked up. Here in Estonia you can make the translation layer without accepting any EULA and even if you did it wouldn’t be legally binding. You can alse reverse engineer anything you want.
These companies are wielding way too much power if they are not afraid to act like this in the open. Bring back making the board of executives and C Suites lives hell when a company so much as inconveniences you.
Just to play Devils advokat here: Wouldn’t that just completely discourage anyone from taking up a new CEO or similar role since you are now liable for some illegal activities that might have happened without your knowledge and long time ago.
You would at least need very good evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the person in question actively put into motion the illegal activity and knew that it was illegal.
Placing blame on a single individual might feel satisfying but does not nessesarly punish the correct responsible. When cooperations get as large as Nvidia, Intel etc. it functions in my opinion like one giant complex organism and legal issues like these are often systemic and involves hundreds of people who took decisions.
I think massive and progressive fines are in fact a good tool because it punishes the “organism” that is truly to blame and not an individual who might be to blame.
I agree but yet here we are… And I don’t think just putting people in jail helps. But it should definitely have consequences, that’s for sure, but they must first be effective for what they are trying to solve.
Exactly. Same in every club, society and whatnot. The power hungry with strong narcissistic traits (not the mental health diagnosis, mind you) are those who promote their buddies and do everything to stay in power. Its essentially the single biggest problem we have. You can pin mostly all and everything that is wrong with our world on those traits (basically the dark triad), yet they are promoted everywhere. You need to have „elbows“ even in primary school. Just a fool wouldn’t see the outcome of that.
Disincentivizing people taking up massive responsibilities that affect the wellbeing of more than a hundred people, sometimes billions, is absolutely the best way to insure that only selfless and competent people take the position.
Fuck em, CEOs are a waste of space, just make everything a cooperative or something.
I think it is naive to think that only selfless and competent people will take the role then. If properly competent you’d see the massive risk of jail and be highly discouraged to take the position. Noone in their right mind would risk jailtime for a job position.
On the other hand, billionaires, risktakers and gamblers would be more than willing to take such a role for the power it gives. They don’t really care since billionaires manage their risks with all the money they have, and risktakers and gamblers simply just dont care about it untill it hits them.
If selfish or incompetent people take the role they go to jail, if highly ethical people take the role they don’t go to jail. Generally how laws are supposed to be written.
Well sometimes it is… very much subjective… That’s why different countries have different laws. Each country have subjective views on what should be punished or not and how much punishment is right. If Ethics is always objective and like a maths equation that can be solved we should all just have the same laws because it’s objective.
And you played the devils advocate well but the reality is very different. As a former CEO I can tell you that there definitely are jail sentences possible for rather minor offenses (where I live, mind you) like not answering a letter by the government because you were busy. Granted, you do have to be very overwhelmed to not answer those for an extended period but it happens.
But its the same for small companies that male no profit as it is for multi billion dollar companies.
I suppose you get the problem here. We have always pinned it on the individual because fines are a corpos wet dream. Same readon why the country I live in has mostly fines for speeding (so it doesnt affect the rich).
So, mandatory jail sentences, increasing with the companies profit.
I want to see fines that have real teeth. No flat rates. Some defined amount per violation, in addition to forfeiture of all revenue derived from or connected to the violation(s). It might be complex to figure out what revenue that applies to inside a large corporation, so to help with the assessment you get a group of government auditors attached to your company for as long as the assessment takes. You pay their wages and provide them with whatever office space &etc they require, and they have a position on your executive board and full oversight of company operations until your debt to society is fully paid.
Regulatory violations should risk ending the company. If you can’t run a profitable business legally then you shouldn’t be running a business.
Personally, I think it would be easier for all involved to just fine based on a percentage of global annual revenue from the date of the violation to present. If they want personhood so bad, then they can have this too.
Edit for an example: let’s say Intel does anticompetitive behavior 15 years ago and a court case finds them liable for damages today. Add up the last 15 years worth of global revenue, and take a percentage of that.
Making it easy is precisely not the point. Having to deal with auditors combing through your accounting records and overseeing your operations until every dollar of illegally gained revenue is accounted for is the point.
The consequence should be onerous, cumbersome and embarrassing for the company.
I get what you mean, but I prefer massive fines due immediately vs expensive and drawn out processes. Using my example, the very absolute bottom of the barrel Intel’s fine could be is a percentage of over $500B (Intel’s revenue in 2009 was $35B, multiplied by 15). Even at 1% based on this floor, the fine would be over $5B.
Just as an aside, I’m an American that emigrated to Canada. My province (BC) is currently passing a law to make one attempt at IVF free for everyone (starting midyear in 2025)… laws actually can be used for good.
Lots of us know, but we mostly live in urban centers where life is better (and often a bit less car centric, for example). Our voting and election finance laws erase lots of our voices.
Just be lucky that when motivated, we still vastly outvote the right wing nuts.
California tries its best… There’s a bunch of pro-consumer laws that other states don’t have. There’s the CCPA which is similar to GDPR (including the right to know and the right to be forgotten). You must be able to cancel a service easily online if you can sign up online. Store gift cards aren’t allowed to have expiration dates. Gift cards with less than $10 on them must be redeemable for cash. Stricter laws against false advertising. And a bunch of other useful laws.
Not as good as the Australian Consumer Law, but better than pretty much every other US state.
Actually probably not. Not without major concessions. The pound will have to go which they will never accept unless they have absolutely no other choice
Some joined when the rules stated that you could choose. Some others are just waiting to meet conditions that will allow them to enter the Eurozone (like Croatia did last year)
Apparently it’s dependent on the signing of a certain agreement before a certain date, which the UK did sign, so it’s actually debated on whether or not Brexit made that signature null or not.
That would be such a mistake and only serve to cause more division, because as you say, the UK would never accept it. Neither would multiple countries already in the EU that also use their own currency.
The EU, generally, are pragmatic. They’d much rather get other concessions than wasting political capital on trying to enforce the Euro on the UK.
E: downvote all you like, but that’s realpolitik. The EU isn’t going to pass up the second largest economy in the continent over something so trivial that they don’t even pressure much smaller countries into it. Pure fantasy from people who don’t have a clue.
The UK adopts various EU rules, a lot of stuff even sold in Northern Ireland has to abide by EU rules (so just say that Apple did make separate lightning and USB C phones, they’d have to use separate operations to sell specific ones in parts of the UK and not others, it probably would have been easier for them to just sell the European models)
In general, it translates instructions into something readable by whats accessing it. A popular translation layer on Lemmy is Proton. Its how the Steam Deck can play all those windows games.
Cuda is an Nvidia specific method for using a graphics card to do computation (not just graphics), like physics simulations.
Translation layers would let you use software designed for other graphics cards to work with Cuda, or to let Cuda software work on other graphics cards
Less that they don’t want other companies using it and more so they don’t want other other companies translating it into something they can use.
Basically, translating an instruction manual from German to Spanish.
No one is breaking any copyright laws or IP to do this. It’s the same how Steam created Proton to run Windows games on Linux. It’s translating code from one language to another that’s readable.
If Linux becomes the dominant gaming platform for gaming (not gonna happen, wish it would tho), there is no reason for a “Proton for Windows” could/should emerge.
Hey now. That all depends on how popular Steam Deck handhelds keep getting and if future versions of windows keep getting worse and more ad intrusive like windows 11 has done. Gaming on Linux has gotten much easier and at some point the chunk of people on Linux will be high enough (it’s gone from 1.6% in 2019 to 4% now) that devs will decide its worth it to make Linux compatible games. I have a desktop at home that still works as a pretty good gaming rig at home, but win 11 isn’t supported by my processor. Once win 10 stops getting support it will be running Linux only. A lot of preventing a full switch over now is the anti cheat software some major studios use on their online games that won’t run on Linux.
Oh, I drive Linux only. I have Windows 10 running Atlas playbook on standby but hasn’t been booted in months.
I think the entry barrier for installation/setup is what will be what stops Linux fully taking over. If OEMs start loading a very user friendly Linux on their “normal” desktops/laptops (Best Buy, Amazon, etc.), then I can see Linux being the majority.
With all that said, I want Linux to be the majority and running on everyone’s computer. I’m just being a realist at this point in time.
CUDA was there first and has established itself as the standard for GPGPU (“general purpose GPU” aka calculating non-graphics stuff on a graphics card). There are many software packages out there that only support CUDA, especially in the lucrative high-performance computing market.
Most software vendors have no intention of supporting more than one API since CUDA works and the market isn’t competitive enough for someone to need to distinguish themselves though better API support.
Thus Nvidia have a lock on a market that regularly needs to buy expensive high-margin hardware and they don’t want to share. So they made up a rule that nobody else is allowed to write out use something that makes CUDA software work with non-Nvidia GPUs.
That’s anticompetitive but it remains to be seen if it’s anticompetitive enough for the EU to step in.
I guess I’m missing who owns/developed Cuda, then. Like, why does Nvidia think they can disallow anyone else from using Cuda if Cuda was made and broadly used as the API before Nvidia.
I would argue that the meme has long lost that particular aspect of itself and the character alignment is ignored. In this instance, clearly indicated by Surtr being EU, while the context heavily implies that EU is the “hero”.
You took my comment too seriously, it was just a joke.
But you also singled out Intel. Corporations aren’t heroes in general and AMD is also there. And EU is depicted as the villain, although it’s implied it’s the hero in the context of the meme.
ZLUDA originally only supported on Intel since it was designed by an Intel employee, but AMD hired him to make it work for AMD instead. So in a way Intel is somewhat important here.
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