litchralee

@litchralee@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are all of the Bananas and Oranges in FL from California?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Adding to the other comments, even when certain fruits can indeed be grown in places besides California, there’s also the matter of infrastructure. Not specific to oranges, Pacific Fruit Express (PFE) supplied refrigerated train cars for long-haul distribution of fruits from California’s Central Valley out to the East Coast. Because this was the early 20th Century before mechanical refrigeration was widely available, cooling had to be done using the same approach for centuries: ice.

  In this regard, California was blessed with the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where water could be frozen into ice and then transported by rail on the now-Union Pacific transcontinental railroad to Sacramento and then down to the entire Central Valley for keeping food from spoiling during the long journey out east. The fact that these fruit-laden railcars had to go through the mountain pass again meant they could be topped up with more ice, and when the empty train car returned from the East Coast, it could carry ice back down to the Central Valley again. A virtuous cycle.

  Basically, fruits not only need to be growable, but also the transportation infrastructure must exist. Sure, Florida also had railroads in the early 1900s but it was not really well connected to the rest of the Eastern Seaboard. As a side note, this is a contributing factor to the Confederacy’s loss in the American Civil War, since different railroad gauges meant they had more difficulty mobilizing by rail, specifically for materiel. Whereas the industrialized North already used standard gauge for their trains. So even if Florida did have standard gauge going into the 1900s, the different rail companies would not necessarily have had good enough relationships to permit trains to do a full run from Florida to the population centers up north. These are all frictions that never plagued the now-Union Pacific, which could run basically effortlessly to Chicago and eastward beyond. And of course, Florida is not known to have ice-making weather.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a small android phone work as a router ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Technically yes. In fact, that’s exactly what smartphones do when they operate as a wifi hotspot: packets come in from the mobile provider and are IP routed to the Wifi network, and vice versa. Whether this happens using Legacy IPv4 and NAT, or with prefix-delegation on IPv6, it’s still routing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s also not forget inheritance tax, which directly addresses the problem of hoarding wealth and perpetuating inequities across generations. If supposedly “self-made” people “earned” their billions, then their heirs should have no problems earning their own as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In California, property tax is adjusted annually regardless of which way it goes. But if it goes up, it is capped at 2% per year, due to Prop 13. If the assessed value drops, then the reduction in property tax is not limited.

  As public policy, this has been devastating for local funding, being the primary means for funding local school districts in this state. When the education prospects of children are subjected to the whims of the wider economy and/or how hot (or not) the local property market is, this is a recipe for inequity: well-off areas are willing to tax themselves extra (beyond the Prop 13 2% cap) and get good schools for it. But poor areas cannot afford even the existing tax, because property tax is regressive and consumes a larger proportion of poorer household budgets. Meanwhile, the state abdicates its role in funding education, because they believe the locals would vote for more taxes for education, even though it’s plainly obviously a Zip code lottery.

  But I digress.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe you have the current meta understood, yes.

  I know that most people actually get places by having stuff to show off e.g projects, clubs and GOOD GRADES

  From what I’ve seen with how my company handles intern applicants, there are at least two different tracks: the first track is indeed people that have GPAs and coursework that is immediately impressive to any recruiter working on commissions. But the second track is where applicants make an impression to our engineers staffing company’s booth when on-site for career fairs.

  My take is that engineers have a better gauge for aptitude and generally fitting-in with the company culture, miles above what an external recruiter or a company HR person could ever assess. And fortunately at my company, the process for assessing applicants from either track still ends up before the same interview panel of technical people.

  My advice then is that in tandem with a mass approach to resume distribution, also seek out in-person career fair opportunities. These opportunities won’t exist after you’ve left uni, and it’s a good way to both understand a prospective employer and also make a good, in-person impression. And if you do this, do brush up on exactly what those prospective companies work in, and put your most appealing strengths forward first. Even just asking them questions but using correct industry vocab is a differentiator.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Happy cake day btw!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aside from being an open standard, what other benefits are there to RISC-V over x86/ARM?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Better to use an old architecture whose patents have expired, and implement it on a new, smaller process.

  I’m not aware of any examples of an old architecture that was largely reused while ported to a new process, without requiring extensive redesigning of the analog components. Old processor architectures are a product of their day, making assumptions and decisions about the silicon paths that would be wholly invalidated if brought as-is to more-modern processes. It is nowhere near as simple as a copy/paste job of SystemVerilog or RTL.

  To invest even one hour of design time to update, say, the 1970s Intel 4004 design (10 micrometer process) into the 2000s (130 nm) would be more expensive than just using RISC-V for free, which has already been fabricated using 22 nm, among other processes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aside from being an open standard, what other benefits are there to RISC-V over x86/ARM?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t say I’ve looked too much at RISC-V (yet), but someone once painted the following picture for me: if AMD and Intel are duking it out for supercomputers, while ARM works its way up to servers and down to microcontrollers, who serves the absolute smallest use-cases? As in, what if my whizz-bang product genuinely only needs a 300 Hz – not MHz, not kHz – processor to do some truly banal calculations? How can I possibly convince a silicon fan to build such a niche and tiny chip at scale?

  In this context, scale would be however many could fit a single 300 mm wafer, and takes into account the fixed cost of the wafer itself, and then the price premium for smaller manufacturing process that would fit more chips onto the same wafer. At such low clock frequencies, the chip could be made using ancient lithography machines for dirt cheap.

  But ARM would almost certainly not entertain the request to do consulting work for such an incredibly low-end chip, where the ARMv8 and v9 architectures would be vastly overpowered.

  For these sorts of economically infeasible ideas, RISC-V brings to the table the possibility that some small-batch ASIC consulting firm would work with their customers to churn out some mindboggling processor designs. Because when the architecture is free (as in beer and as in speech), it releases the designers from constraints that today’s designs must have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The market is turning into a giant server ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I personally would be thrilled if day-to-day commerce could be settled using HTTP return codes. If I could IP-block the small-talk, DNS blackhole the advertisements, and just do precisely the transactional things I have to do, without being accosted by pushy salespeople, the inconvenience of driving and parking in car-dependent suburbia with no realistic, properly-funded transit options, this would honestly be great.

  The modern in-person shopping experience is not a place of honor. It is an affront to call shopping malls and big-box stores as “the future” when it so degrades the human experience, reducing people into wallets with emotions ripe for exploitation.

  Online shopping did not kill in-person shopping. The in-person shopping experience destroyed itself, poisoning the idea for whole swaths of the next generation. Only time can possibly heal these deep wounds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How were maps created back in the day?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The map overlay on that website is stunning. I don’t know much French, but I managed to get it to overlay the IGN map (I presume the currently accepted map from the government mapping agency) on the Cassini map, both at 50% opacity, and it’s truly remarkable how good the latter must have been in its time.

  There’s so much detail along the coast that was faithfully recorded. The only thing I can spot that is noticeably different would be the river runs, but that’s entirely expected since rivers naturally move around.

  I’d love to know if there’s a USA website that overlays colonial-era maps atop the modern USGS maps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How were maps created back in the day?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Might I suggest this article about French mapmaking in the 1600s. Supposedly in response to a map commissioned by King Louis XIV at the time, which shower France about 20% smaller than originally mapped, the King replied:

  “Your work has cost me a large part of my state!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it ideal to renounce citizenship if moving abroad permanently?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  there’s jury duty

  In California and probably other states too, there’s a requirement to actually reside within the county in order to be called for jury duty. College students that live on-campus away from their home county might receive a jury summons, but it’s an automatic excusal if they write back and affirm that they’re not domiciled in that county at the time of the summons. Of course, students are eligible to be selected for jury duty in the county where the university is, but since most in-state students don’t change their driver license or state ID card address, that county usually doesn’t have the info to summon them anyway.

  right to vote

  In the USA and basically most other Western countries, I’m told, overseas citizens are eligible to vote. It is a defining quality of being a citizen, after all. An overseas American citizen would be registered to vote in the county of their last American address. This is basically a mail-in ballot with all federal offices, and depending on the US State, some state offices too.

  ---

  What exactly do you see as a tether, apart from the unique American position on taxation by citizenship?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a word for people who will mess something up and blame the victim for it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t disagree. But seeing as OP specifically asked for a word, I’m inclined to offer the most specific, most descriptive word I can muster that is germane to what they’ve described.

  IMO, precision of language is paramount when it comes to addressing other people’s problematic behavior, because it closes the door on excuses like “it’s just a simple misunderstanding” or “that’s just their opinion”.

  The most poignant example I’ve heard of are from parents that make absolutely certain that their children learn the proper names for their body parts. As in, not “hoo-hah” or “privates” but the actual, unambiguous clinical names. This is a marked improvement than the TV trope of “where on the doll did the bad man touch you”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a word for people who will mess something up and blame the victim for it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Deflection: dictionary.cambridge.org/us/…/deflection

  The act of attacking or blaming another person rather than accepting criticism or blame for your own actions: Deflection is a psychological defense mechanism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨how much money is there in total?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  financial philosophy

  Surely this would just be economics, no? Especially as your question pertains to the money supply, which is squarely in the domain of macroeconomics.

  how much money is there in total, in the world?

  I can only summarize what my economics course at uni covered, but you’d have to start with defining what should be counted as money. Even if we looked at an isolated island nation, what is and isn’t money is not readily apparent. If I write out a check/cheque drawn against my bank account, is that money? Can my cheque be circulated as if it were currency? How about a banknote against the gold reserves of a national bank or treasury? What if that banknote isn’t directly redeemable for gold or anything, but is a floating currency? What if it’s neither redeemable nor is managed as if a currency, and yet it is readily accepted by Canadians and has actual buying power at a national retail chain.

  Then we get to second-order candidates that could be money (or not): goods and services, land and houses, ongoing businesses, these all have some value and are tradable. Are these money? Are they at least a store of value? If a company is incorporated and is imbued with some starting investment, and then grows that value through business operations, does that create money?

  To deal with this messy reality, economists have multiple definitions for money supply, found here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply. If two people use differing definitions, then of course they’ll conclude different values for the world’s total money supply.

  Then the bank owes $1.02B actually, while only having $1B on the account. So the total amount isn’t zero, it’s negative

  Not correct, because: 1) this fails to account for the interest the bank can generate through re-lending the money, and 2) interest is not a front loaded charge but is an expense over time.

  For #1, it would be some profligate mismanagement of money for a bank to just obtain a loan “for the lolz” and there would be some sort of plan to actually make it do work. In that sense, capital should be viewed as if it were a powderkeg: very capable if applied carefully, very dangerous if mishandled. As for whether or not a bank’s future revenue can be immediately reflected on their books – since the revenue is only theoretical yet the central bank loan is already a certainty – that’s a question for accountants.

  For #2, the mistake is that interest – although continually accruing, or by other terms – is somehow entirely due at the very beginning, which is not how most loans are structured. At any given point in time, yes, the bank could have negative net value, but they could also have positive net value, depending on their cash inflows. And even with negative cash flow, accounts receivable could still boost their net value because future value is still value.

  My recommendation would be to review some basics in economics or accountability, as these sorts of questions have been hashed out over the course of hundreds of years. And even when economic theories don’t exactly describe this reality, they are still useful as models, which is still more rigorous an approach than divination.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the deal with IPv6?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In a nutshell: github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/why6why.md

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do young people still say words like "taped"?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  An app…lique?

  Sewing jokes aside, this would be a nightmare, where something as basic as a bandage requires an app to unlock the dispenser. Dead phone? I guess only death awaits…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would snail/slug slime make a good "intimate" lube?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Following along, in the hopes a material scientist will give a detailed description of what makes a good lube for human activities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does it feel like most art museums are for adults and most science museums are for kids?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of the most impactful demonstrations of science are hands-on activities. After all, any sufficiently advanced science starts to look like magic, and a major objective of science museums is to disabuse people of that notion. That these demos seem to be child-oriented is simply a result of not assuming any background knowledge of the topic. But even adults might not know how a tumbler lock works, or that electricity follows all paths in inverse proportion to resistance. If something is rooted in natural phenomena, age is not a prerequisite to understanding.

  As an adult, I personally enjoy science museums precisely because they’re the polar opposite of technical papers and textbooks: an accessible and chill mood to learn about stuff I’ve seen but never paid much attention to. I’m not so vain to think that I can’t learn something from a museum visit. In some sense, adults going to science museum is akin to edutainment, the genre on YouTube. Some might also call it “adult learning” or “continuing education”, but whatever it is, it’s enriching for individuals and families alike.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which instance on Lemmy does not apply censorship?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There might exist one, but it probably doesn’t haven’t much volume or isn’t well federated because few other instance want to interact with spammy, problematic, high-complaint instances.

  What you’re describing might be a Level Three in the moderation speedrun: techdirt.com/…/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m unreliably informed that the absolute minimum amount of liquid to drown a human is 1 liter. That might require a special head-shaped bucket, but it seems plausible.

  But out of curiosity, what sort of statistics are you seeing about UK people falling into canals? I know they have canals and people, but I thought the trope was shopping trolleys (USA: shopping carts) falling into canals. Is this a serious issue? Can we find comparable figures from the canal-strewn Netherlands for comparison?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re describing district heating, which works great in places that planned ahead and buried the necessary plumbing so that the waste heat from nearby industrial processes can be beneficially used to heat nearby homes and offices.

  The detail, however, is that those industrial processes are diverting the heat to the district plumbing, but if nobody needs heating (eg 40 C summer weather), then they will vent the heat using air cooling to the atmosphere. That is to say, the demand for heating will vary at times, and this is fine because the industrial process can just go back to dumping the heat into the air.

  This doesn’t work for AI data centers because the amount of “waste” heat (eg 100+ megawatts) is well in excess of any nearby demand for heating. To quantify demand, I looked to the district heating system of Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, home to 1.67 million people, and the coldest capital city in the world by average annual temperature:

  the Ulaanbaatar District Heating Company, encompassing 13,500 buildings with a total connected capacity of 3924 MW

  The system serves 60% of the population, so about 1 million people. Where in the mostly-temperate USA could a 4 gigawatt AI data center be located so that it’s right next to 1 million people that need 24/7 heating as though they lived in Mongolia?

  Scaling down to a 100 megawatt data center, the demand would be for a population of 25,000 living in essentially arctic conditions. Such places already have district heating, such as in Alaska. So if a smaller AI data center shows up, it just means the existing non-AJ heat source would fall back to dumping heat into the air.

  In the end, there are very few places that need heating all year round, but AI datacenters would be producing heat all year round. Even if the heat were used for something outlandish, like heating every square meter of public roadway, that still might not be enough demand to quench these behemoth AI datacenters. And that’s before the cost of building out the district heating system.

  We should definitely build district heating systems where they make sense, but building them so AI data centers can exist would be doing the right thing for the most terrible of reasons

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  While not strictly biofouling, the marine environment can definitely be affected by introducing hotter water where it didn’t exist prior, in and around the outflow pipe. Seaside nuclear power stations that use seawater cooling need to be mindful to diffuse the heated water over a large area, to minimize the ecological impact. Citation: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/…/abstract

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Very similar problems arise with desalination plants, which I wrote about here: sh.itjust.works/comment/14613302

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There is almost certainly an impact somewhere, but I don’t have the data to know where it is. My conjecture is that a localized mass of steam would cause convection currents and drive microweather phenomena, especially downwind of such an air cooled facility. I’m not sure rain is necessarily the result, unless there’s a sizable mountain downwind, since although hot air will rise, it might run out of steam (pun intended) before cooling down enough to fully condense out. So it might just be adding a layer of humidity that floats a few hundred meters above the surface.

  But even that could be devastating, if said layer blocks natural convection currents over a downwind town or city. It could act as a thermal cap, making that town warmer at night, because heat rising from the city would meet that humid layer and get absorbed by the water. The thermal capacity of water comes into play again, but this time against the city.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Air cooling is feasible, as evidenced by existing power stations that use air cooling. A lot of newer nuclear generation use water cooling, being sited along the ocean and in the multi gigawatt range. But we can also find examples of inland power stations that have no water connection, and therefore need some massive cooling towers. Here is one in Germany that has a 2.2 GW rating and a 200 meter tall tower: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station

  This is, as you can imagine, rather expensive to build, but it’s doable. Cooling a coal fire is not substantially different than cooling compute loads in a data center, as it’s all just a matter of moving heat around. Will there be differences due to the base temperature of coal versus GPUs? Yes, since the ratio of input to ambient temperature matters. But on the flip side, this should make it easier to construct, as the plumbing for lower temperatures is simpler.

  Mechanical engineers can chime in on feasibility for AI data centers, but seeing as it hasn’t been done, its probably still cost related.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Darn, you’re right, the hours fell off in my dimensional analysis. Corrected, although 6.9 hours for a pool isn’t much time for swimming at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Other commenters correctly describe the cost analysis for using evaporative cooling, but I’ll add one more reason why it’s the preferred method when water is available: evaporating water can dissipate truly outlandish amounts of heat with very few moving parts.

  Harkening back to high school physics class, water – like all other substances – has a certain thermal capacity, meaning the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree C. The specific thermal capacity of water is already quite high, at 4184 J/(kg*C), besting all the common metals and only losing to lithium, hydrogen, and ammonia. In nature, this means that large bodies of water are natural moderators of temperature, because water can absorb an entire day’s worth of sunlight energy but not substantially change the water temperature.

  But where water really trounces the competition is its “heat of vaporization”. This is the extra energy needed for liquid water to become vapor; simply bringing water to 100 C is not sufficient to make it airborne. Water has a value of 2146 kJ/kg. Simplifying to where 1 kg of water is 1 liter of water, we can convert this unit into something more familiar: 0.596 kWh/L.

  What these two physical properties of water tell us is that if our city water comes out of the pipe at 20 C, then to get it to 100 C to boil, we need the difference (80) times the thermal capacity (4184 J/kg*C), which is 334,720 J/kg . Using the same simplification from earlier, that comes out to be 0.093 kWh/L. And then to actual make the boiling liquid become a vapor (so that it’ll float away), we then need 0.596 kWh/L on top of that.

  Let that sink in for a moment: the energy to turn water into vapor (0.596 kWh/L) is six times higher than the energy (0.093 kWh/L) to raise liquid water from 20 C to 100 C. That’s truly incredible, for a non-toxic, life-compatible substance that we can (but should we?) safely dump into the environment. If you total the two values, one liter of water can dissipate 0.69 kWh of energy per liter. Nice!

  In the context of a 100 megawatt data center (which apparently is what the industry considers as the smallest “hyperscale data center”), if that facility used only evaporative cooling, the water requirement would be 144,927 L/hour. That is an Olympic-size swimming pool every 6.9 seconds. Not nice!

  And AI datacenters are only getting larger, with some reaching into the low single-digits of gigawatts. But what is the alternative to cooling the more-modest data center from earlier? The reality is that the universe only provides for three forms of heat transfer: conduction, convection, and radiation. The heat from data centers cannot be concentrated into a laser and radiated into space, and we don’t have some sort of underground granite mountain that the data centers can conduct their heat into. Convection is precisely the idea of storing the heat into a substance (eg water, air) and then jettisoning the substance.

  So if we don’t want to use water, then we have to use air. But for the two qualities of water that make it an excellent substance for evaporative cooling, air doesn’t come close – 1003 J/(kg*C) and no heat of vaporization, because air is already gaseous. That means we need to move ungodly amounts of air to dissipate 100 megawatts. But humanity has already invented the means to do this, by a clever structure that naturally encourages air to flow through it.

  The only caveat is that the clever structure is a cooling tower, and is characteristic of nuclear power stations. It’s also used for non-nuclear power station cooling, but it’s most famous in the nuclear context, where generators are well into the gigawatt range. Should AI datacenters use nuclear-sized air cooling towers instead of water evaporation? It would work, but even as someone that’s not anti-nuclear, the optics of raising a cooling tower in rural America just to cool a datacenter would be untenable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  License is the legal instrument which makes open source software/hardware/silicon possible, describing precisely what rights are granted or retained. The term “open source” usually means the definition propounded by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) but sometimes not in certain contexts. At the very minimum, an OSI-compliant open source license will allow any distribution of the software without having to seek additional permission from the author, must be accompanied with access to the source code, and the software does not come with provisos outright prohibiting its use for certain endeavors.

  That last point is about the “use” of the software, and is a crucial distinction between “open source” and “source available”. To have source available means the source code can be examined, but usually cannot be compiled. An open source license explicitly allows all uses, but possibly with additional obligations. For example, the AGPL license allows software to be used to run a server, but creates an obligation to provide the server source code to all users that connect. Whereas something like the MIT 0-clause license has zero additional obligations, while allowing the broadest use.

  The exact verbiage of a license are the domain of lawyers, being a legal document. But the choice of license is down to the software author or corporate owner, and is a multifaceted consideration, including marketability, compatibility with other software, and whether it’s more important that the code gets used or that it forever remains available.

  The latter is the major battleground for advocates of permissive versus copyleft licenses. Some software (eg reference cryptographic algorithms) have the priority that the absolute most number of people should use them, so a permissive license makes sense. While other software (eg desktop 3D rendering suite Blender) have a priority that nobody can ever take it private by adding proprietary-only features.

  Choosing open source is easy, but choosing a license to effect that choice can get tricky. For authors publishing their software, the choice may very well change the course of history (ie Linux GPL-2). For consumers or businesses using software, the license dictates how changes can be distributed.