I am surprised that a university with the renown of Stanford would have a course specifically on "the fundamentals of how to build applications for iPhone and iPad using SwiftUI." Not even mobile UI/UX, or UI/UX principles in general; straight up yolo iOS.
How do people not find this absolutely egregious?
At my uni, we organized protests for much smaller intrusions of corporate interests into education.
Is Stanford not much better than a bootcamp these days?
No? It was a legitimate question because there have been similar trends in other unis around the world, and I am not personally acquainted with Stanford things. I always held Stanford in high regard.
There was no Android, app store was new, there were no app bootcamps.
In 2025 if you wanted to offer a hands-on quantum computing class for Computer Science (not Physics), you'd need to pick a corporate product.
I don't know if you're just joking but this is the crux of the problem and what they are asking for has deep implications. If somebody can thoroughly define evil in a software license, please publish it for review so that we can learn from it.
Presumably they want to keep the project liberally licensed modulo the "no evil" part. A source-available license would probably be too restrictive for that purpose unless it is somehow made compatible with open/free licenses. But I am not a lawyer, so I have no fucking idea what I'm talking about.
It's literally the MIT license with an added clause of only using the software for good, not evil.
Obviously, corporate attorneys will advise not to use the software since good and evil aren't really well defined legal terms. It's also not open source using the osi definition.
Politicians and bureaucrats who lacked a strong father figure is my genuine unironic non-disparaging answer.
There are a great many people in this world who not only look to government for a sense of safety and direction, but seek to impose that paternalism on everyone else for “their own good”.
People can't say no to the EU. That's such a common misconception on HN. The EU has a body it lyingly calls a parliament, which doesn't get to decide what laws are proposed or passed. It's more like an upper house that can only slow down or veto legislation, which is why it fills up with political nobodies who either just cheerlead for the EU or want to see their countries leave it. It's not like they can do anything else.
So people say no and they just bring it back again, or get activist judges to discover that it was legal all along. It's not like voters can kick them out.
Bourgeois representatives who know they can't keep their wage-slaves in check if they organise online. They will absolutely extend it beyond the current scope
Yes, I see the same flaw in the argument. Retrospectively looking back and saying it was good because it didn't do any of the shit companies do today; but, really, it wasn't as bad as it could be because the technology just wasn't there to begin with. Counter-factual either way, but calling it "good" is a stretch.
Not to take away from the movement, though. I think it's great.
The technology was certainly there, BonziBuddy existed around the same time and was widely condemned as a spyware and adware ultimately resulting in its demise. Today Microsoft officially does many of the things BonziBuddy used to do and people just see it as normal.
Digital Convergence tried to do similar with the CueCat, a low-cost barcode reader that had a hardware serial number and for which the official software to drive it required you sign up for an account with them, giving them PII. When people figured out how to neuter the serial number and encryption in hardware, DC invoked the DMCA.
Oh, damn, I recall that motherfucker now that I look at the picture. I was a kid back then and had no context of it being spyware.
I stand corrected in my original comment.
> In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a browser toolbar, and serving advertisements.
Yeah, so not much different from modern Big Tech, lol.
At the time, that sort of behavior was expected in almost anything you downloaded, it really was perhaps even more invasive than today. Java was infamous for installing a search bar on your browser and making it hard to not “accept” it.
Ironically, the only thing Clippy was missing for it to be genuinely useful was... LLMs. Hooked up to GPT-4 + bunch of tool calls, it would've delivered far beyond what originally promised.
Which is why I'm both dismayed and impressed with how badly Microsoft keeps screwing up Copilot. This stuff isn't hard, unless you want to make it hard.
That adds clippy and all the other agents to a webpage. There is a PR on the repo that adds an example that hooks clippy up to a local ollama agent:
https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs/pull/17
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