abustamam

"If buying digital media isn't ownership, then piracy isn't stealing."

I'm all for buying media. People worked hard on that stuff. They deserve to be compensated.

But if I buy something and then it can randomly be taken away from me at the whims of the publisher or copyright owner or whoever the hell, then I don't "own" that. And if ~I can't~ they won't let me own digital media, I have no qualms over acquiring such media in other ways, given the ongoing war against physical media anyway

Glad to see I'm not the only one who (perhaps) overuses in-line parentheticals... sometimes to the point where I'd have parentheticals within parentheticals!

To add to this, it does make me think what the difference between down vote and flag is. I mean down vote is obviously the numerical opposite of upvote but why else would people downvote if it not be inappropriate for the forum? (Other than the obvious "I dont like this commenter/their opinion")

Just thinking out loud I suppose.

As opposed to dang the robot? :)

Agreed. I live in a relatively new suburb of my city (built in 2022) and it was built past what would have been called "the boonies" a decade ago.

The way to get to the city proper goes through country roads that probably used to only get a few dozen vehicles per hour, now having to handle massive traffic due to the new developments in this area (they're still building!)

They're working on reworking the roads but the speed limits are nonsensical because of this history.

In some cases (like this), 99.99% isn't enough. 100% is mandatory.

I moved into my house a few months ago and while I was exercising my foot discovered a nail that I guess was left by the previous homeowner/tenant/builder. Fortunately it was just a scratch, but it could have easily turned into a trip to the ER.

With a baby learning to walk and crawl, the tolerance for cleaning up nails on the floor is absolutely 100% (or 0% nail) so I scoured the entire house carpet with a strong magnet to ensure there no other surprises. I did this several times just to make sure

This was a few months ago and yet I still tend to have anxiety when walking on the carpet now.

Tangentially, but 5-day vs 4-day workweek is somewhat similar. You've not only reduced your working days by 20%, but you've also increased your days off by 50%.

That's strange. I was reading through this thread nodding my head like "Ha, my Tesla doesn't have these annoyances!" until I saw your comment.

I'm guessing though that you're in the EU (I'm in the US where it is almost considered criminal to go speed limit on the highway)

I mean that's my experience with a lot of modern software anyway. I have to reload or force close and reopen or please try again.

Oh that's interesting. Yes that is exactly what it did! Didn't think that'd use so much ink though!

While I agree it is pretty cool, I think they probably did that to avoid a class action lawsuit.

But that does also beg the question, if we do eventually regulate this better, do you own streamed products? IE with Google stadia (and I think Amazon Luna) you buy a game but the game data is streamed to your device. If they shut the service down (like Stadia did) then what happens to your game collection?

It's a hypothetical, but interesting to think about nonetheless

I owned a Brother inkjet for some time. I'd print maybe a few times a year. But it seemed like every time I needed to print, the printer was out of ink. Granted I used an ink service (ie not official brother ink) but still where the heck was the ink going?

I've since switched to a Brother LaserJet and I'm still on the starter toner after a couple of years.

People's lives depend on money earned from lots of things, criminal and otherwise.

While I do think there needs to be regulation of some sort for SWEs, I can't fathom how it'd be enforced. Non-coders can use replit to build whatever they want and sell it to whomever they want. That kind of scale doesn't exist in the physical world.

It's fun to do it forwards too (ie all recent technological advances that could be category a where society cannot live without it or category b where society is like meh or even category c where soecity utterly collapses because of it).

The internet as a whole can arguably be all three at the same time.

Maybe it's just familiarity, but same. I have a Tesla and I once rented a Toyota BZ whatever that had android auto. It was neat. But I struggled to do basic things. With Tesla I can navigate to the nearest charging station. I could not figure out how to do something as basic as that from the car. I had to use my phone (plug share or whatever) to find a charging station.

I haven't driven a rivian but I've heard their UI is comparable to Tesla.

That said, I don't see why cars need to have bespoke software in the first place. Ideally we have one or two open standards for infotainment systems. Imagine if you used a Dell then you used an HP and then you used an Alienware and they were all different!

I don't get what the fuss is about. I have 2gig internet and it's good enough. I'm not downloading multi gigabyte files often, and even when I do, it's often bottlenecked at the provider, so it wouldn't go faster even if I had 20 gig internet.

Yeesh. Collect enough fuzzy data and you can identify a lot about someone.

Game keys and download codes are two separate concepts. You can think of a game key as a transferable license. Download code is a one time license attachment to your account and requires a Nintendo account (I belive)

This is an excellent point. I'm self educated while my wife holds multiple degrees and a masters. Yet when she saw a news article about age verification (something I've been following for years thanks to HN) she was like "this is good" and I'm like "why" and the ensuing discussion made it clear that she didn't really think about the repercussions of age verification, just that seemingly smart people in positions of power seemed to think it was a good idea.

And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative.

Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.

At least in my case, much of the code in the codebase I'm working on is AI generated so even if I have an accurate mental model of how everything works, I have no idea where any of it is located or named.

[Google] were not called the attackers.

They should be. But as the saying goes, one website/company dying is a "tragedy," lots of them dying at the hands of one company is a statistic of corporate growth. Or something like that.

And then of course when the tables turn on a company and they're the ones getting bombarded, they cry foul. Keep in mind Anthropic did many similar things that you mentioned Google did.

I think the term "attack" here is appropriate but not in the way Anthropic is framing it. Alibaba is clearly violating terms to extract data, so that's definitely not above board. But it's not like a DDOS attack where Alibaba is trying to attack Anthropics servers. Alibaba is simply doing exactly what Anthropic did to the rest of the internet, just targeting Anthropic and paying them to do so.

That's basically how I looked playing Cuphead with my wife except I think there was a bit more swearing coming from her

They should just ask Copilot to convert it into a native app /s

But in all seriousness, if MS really did believe in copilot, there would be no need to write webapp slop. They could just write native app slop.

I once did IT support and I had a client who installed some malware that basically filled up his hard drive with nonsense. That was a lot of data really fast.

I think the point many commenters are making is that yes, lots of data IS necessary to do this scan effectively and quickly, it's not the only heuristic, and it's a bit misleading to compare it to the speed of an MRI given that this does not produce the same data as an MRI.

TIL! Thanks

When I was getting started with programming I often forgot to do one of those steps and often ended up losing my work because I was working from a library computer or something.

When I got more experience I finally understood why it is like that, and it makes sense now, but its still a lot of steps for someone learning to remember.

Sometime ago I had to pay for parking to get access to a hiking trail (in US). The way to pay for parking was shady as hell. Just a random QR code sticker on the wall that said "pay here" that navigated to a payment portal that asked for your CC, address, license plate. I mentioned to my friend who was with me, "anyone could really just put any sort of QR code here and navigate you to a fake payment portal and steal your CC"

But like you said, what are you supposed to do otherwise?

I think what a lot of tech people don't understand is how little most people care about technology. People want products that work well. If you can find a solution that serves people's needs then they don't really care about the underlying technology.

For example, apart from my day job, I do IT consulting for small local businesses. I do anything from landing pages to AI integration into their existing processes to make them more efficient at their work. The end result is their customers getting faster and better quality service, and my customers get to focus more on their business instead of administration. They don't really care that it's AI, but they do care about the results.

And I think that's the part many executives are missing. Focus on building great products. If AI is part of it, cool. But unless you're OpenAI or Anthropic, AI is probably not your product.

making existing ones continue to work well

Say what you will about MS, but the fact that Windows was backward compatible for so long (it may still be, I haven't kept up) is damn good engineering.