apersona

Ownership of "content" is a legal fiction invented to give states more control over creativity.

1. I hate the argument of "legal fiction" because the whole concept of law itself is a "fiction" invented that gives states more control. But I imagine you wouldn't want to live in a "lawless" society, would you?

2. Can you please explain how ownership of content gives states more control over creativity? There are so many way better methods of control a state can do (state-approved media, just banning books, propaganda) that this sounds like a stretch.

3. Alot of mainstream media is underdog rebels beating an Empire, and ownership of content definitely stops the spread of that idea.

How does copyright limit creativity? If you want to write a new story about a boy wizard going to school, no one can legally stop you. If you want to make a new Mario-inspired platformer, no one can legally stop you.

But if you want to make money and do it from riding the brand name association of Harry Potter or Mario, they can.

I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default.

Why wouldn't big corps win by default? They have the brand name, own the resources to make more polished version of any IP, and have better distribution channels than anyone else.

Can you tell me how this scenario won't play out?

1. Big corporation has people looking for new and trending IP.

2. Instead of buying the rights to it, they get their army of people to produce more polished versions of it.

3. Because they have branding and a better distribution channel, the money goes 100% to them.

Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations.

People working in the field sell their copyright like Gravity Falls' Alex Hirsch: https://x.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1906915851720077617

You can't do a damn thing with it not because of copyright, but because you don't have the resources to make the movie in the first place.

Copyright can't legally stop you from making a movie about wizards fighting each other with laser swords in space.

Let's separate the implementation of copyright and the concept of copyright. I don't think you would find anyone who would say the US's implementation of copyright is flawless, but the OP seems to be talking about the concept itself.

Additionally plenty of people making videos for YouTube have had their videos demonetized and their channels even removed because of the Content ID copyright detection scheme and their three strikes rule. In some cases to a ridiculous extent - some companies will claim ownership of music that isn't theirs and either get the video taken down or take a share of the revenue.

Let's take YouTube videos as an example. If the concept of copyright doesn't exist, there is nothing stopping a YouTuber with millions more subscribers from seeing a trending video you made and uploading it themselves. Since they're the one with the most subs, they will get the most views.

The winner of the rewards will always go to the brand that people know most rather than the video makers.

I think you have a misunderstanding of what's copyrightable.

This idea that they own the very idea of 'boy wizard who goes to school' is insane and plays right into this flawed and pernicious idea.

Copyright protects an expression of an idea, but not the idea itself. No one can legally stop you from writing your own story about a boy wizard who goes to school.

Nintendo fan games can be released (even sold) if they changed it up a bit so they're no longer associated with that IP.

Copyright is important but does/should not extend to every time I want to print out a picture of a boy wizard for my kid.

You can. No one will sue you. No one will send you a cease and desist. It happens when you try to print Harry Potter and try to make a business out of it.

We have millions of teachers going above and beyond expectations. We have mothers and caregivers. We have comedians crafting jokes for comedy and they have no ability to protect those jokes. We have brilliant chefs creating recipes after years of work, experience, and effort and they too don't have protections.

I agree with this, but why is your proposed solution to remove protections from everyone instead of giving everyone else protections? People who put in work should be rewarded.

Ah yes, USAID, the agency that provides foreign aid (disaster relief, combatting poverty, providing technical advice) to create a strong, positive impression of the US is "working against your interests".

Please tell me what you have against USAID.

You are not a machine.

Have you noticed that authors and artists love sharing their inspirations? Let's say you're an up-and-coming author. In an interview, you list your sources of inspiration.

Using your logic, why does the creative community celebrate you and your inspirations instead of crying foul like they are with LLMs?

This is so reductionist, it's not even funny.

Imagine debugging your own code (your code being your intellectual work) and this guy barges into your room and says "Why are you wasting your time? Why didn't you just pick a better 'number'?"

I saw someone say they stopped reading after this line:

At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling.

...and I don't fault them for doing so and making the assumption that the author is not an experienced coder

I am baffled by the original poster's claims. The original poster claims that they're tired of the millionth LISP interpreter and want software engineers to focus on "certified real TM problems", and concludes with people should play at home and work at work.

1. Except, the millionth LISP interpreter is almost definitely a hobby project, so their claim that people are screwing around at work is bogus.

2. What drives people to work on problems (in industry) isn't "what the nerds find cool", it's money. That's a capitalism problem, not a "this industry isn't controlled enough by me" problem. The most lucrative jobs are in enterprise SaaS and ads companies, do you think engineers flock there because that sounds fun?

3. The software industry isn't uniform. Medical devices ARE regulated under the medical industry, commercial airplanes ARE regulated under the aviation industry.

Has there been recent disasters in those industries due to software? Yes, and regulation gets updated. Regulation gets written with blood.

You might argue that software feels like they're the most prominent, but I argue it's because:

1. Software is relatively new

2. We are software engineers, so we take notice of software more.

Mechanical and civil engineers are not immune to human-injuring mistakes. Think of the last car recall due to mechanical failure (heck, there's one this year due to brake manufacturing issues: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a44475030/honda-acura-brak...). Or the O-ring failure in the space shuttle Challenger that caused it to explode mid-launch.

I'm sorry, but I am really baffled by what I'm reading.

Like I ranted recently here in HN, can we stop with the millionth LISP interpreter already?

Except, the millionth LISP interpreter is a hobby project, that people are making on their own time, not during work? I get it's annoying to see something you've seen before, but you know, you can ignore it.

Play is an important part in learning. The millionth LISP interpreter, game engine, whatever is fine. From my experience, the people building these things gain a lot more valuable experience than just doing college or even just having a prior job.

We have people dying in hospitals because the software of the heart monitor glitched or misread a sensor. Can we get on those problems instead?

Do you have any idea how current problems actually get decided for in industry (not only software, but in general)? It's not "this problem gets tackled because it's cool", it's because of money. Do you think bright software engineers love working on Microsoft Word or better AdSense because they think it's fun?

Also, this sounds really stupid to say, but this seems to be what you're implying when you say "keep play out of work": do you really think the same people working on embedded systems for heart monitors are the ones writing LISP interpreters...somehow...at work?

There's also something that plagues HN and it's that they think the software industry is somehow uniform. Medical devices get regulated under the medical devices industry, commercial airplanes get regulated under the aviation industry. The pure software industry is not the only place that hires software engineers.

I'm sorry, but have you tried the Quest Pro's pass-through?

I have, and it was an awful experience. They had color pass through but faked it and it felt like a grayscale video that someone shoddily tried to paint over it. There was significant warping and text (like a poster on my friend's wall) was barely readable.

It "exists", but was completely useless in terms of usability. If Apple can get pass-through to actually work well, I would call that "new" in the sense that it's a feature that's usable.

I didn't believe it either until I met one. They exist, but it takes more than an interview to gauge and they're so rare it's not worth trying.

I think both 0.1x engineers and 10x engineers exist.

0.1x engineer: one of my friends works at a certain government contractor. One of her coworkers had difficulty understanding short circuiting in evaluating boolean statements, everything he writes she needs to fix, he thinks XML is a programming language, and it's just a huge mess amongst a huge list of other complaints.

10x engineer: Actually, he's still in undergrad. I was his TA for a VR class and he made a pretty great clone of Beat Saber before it was released just from watching the trailer, and in under a week. He's never heard of Leetcode, yet is absolutely comfortable with interview questions (well, I decided he didn't need practice after asking a few questions...). He's had an internship at a FAANG and finished his project early and got bored. I introduced him to a few of my other friends in the industry and they are intimidated by him too. He's this rare combination where he has the theoretical knowledge of CS, but also excels at actual engineering work.

Both 0.1x engineers and 10x engineers just feel like they re on a "different level". I don't know how else to describe it .

As for whether or not looking for 10x engineers is practical, I don't think it is.

1) It took me way too long to confirm that feeling (i.e. I imagine interview questions alone aren't enough; you have to see the engineer working).

2) I imagine most companies don't even need a 10x engineer to build the product they need.

3) They're too rare. How do I know? Because (a) none of my friends have felt that before meeting him and (b)the whole industry is still debating on whether 10x engineers exist.

That sounds depressing.

Why would you want to confine yourself to working on CRUD apps instead of working on cool tech?

I don't get why the justification for not needing to understand CS is that 80% of the programming jobs are CRUD apps.

That's such a weak justification in my opinion. Why would you want to work on CRUD apps over more interesting stuff?

The model I have right now is that talent is learning rate, so I don't see how the beliefs conflict with each other.

Some people pick things up faster than others, but if you put more effort you can still catch up.

It also explains why even talented people still need to practice/learn/etc. to be at the top of their fields.

It's the easiest way to get all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) if you're already comfortable with web dev.

It's understood that if someone holds the title 'Engineer', they went through a certification process from a regulated body, traditionally. You can see this for example in countries and per state. [0] [1] [2]

I think you're misinterpreting the intention of the title of "Professional Engineer". As far as I can tell, it's for accountability for public projects (buildings, power, etc.). It's not strictly limiting what job titles can have the word "engineer" in it.

Most engineers in the aerospace industry don't even take the FE exam. Would you refuse to call most aerospace engineers "engineers" then?

From my perspective it looks like a good amount of teachers decided to give up a portion of the compensation earlier (i.e. they gave up good pay not when they're looking for another job in an industry they're already in, but they decided to give up good pay upon joining the industry).

It's like how artists/writers/game developers/etc. decide to go into their field even though they know that they could be making much more money in any other field.

Why do you think it's not both? If you were running a startup (company), hiring people who match your team's work style and values is as important as capability.

Even without Facebook, what's preventing Myanmar's authoritarian government from flooding their own media with propaganda still?

and you sell that power to the highest bidder

You make it sound like FB knew that the accounts that "...posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes" were run by a military operation.

because "we can't scale that"

And how would you scale that?

I don't think there is any easy solution (or even an "ideal" solution).

Not to mention that FB is on now dealing with actual dam military operations by an authoritarian government. How would you defend yourself against that?

Quoting the original poster: > but there are other options for materials and landscaping that could make homes basically impervious > basically impervious

That (for a layman like me) can easily be interpreted as fire proofing.

If you're a normal software engineer, I agree, you shouldn't implement it yourself.

But if you're a researcher/had a CS research background, I don't see why not. By definition research results in novel approaches (ideally better) than the current ones. You have to be willing to challenge the consensus.

PhD students who can prove that their algs work should work on it, like the results of this paper: https://raft.github.io

But Steve Jobs himself didn't do any of the engineering or design either, so...isn't he a people manager himself? And didn't he bring success to his company?

That's an issue with their implementation/use of animations, not animation in general.

Animations are (if done right) very useful in games. It's what makes you feel, for example, the difference between a weak damage (HP bar drops slowly) and something to watch out for (the HP bar actually shakes as a chunk is wiped out).

It also helps with immersion.

I personally don't mind abstract art and believe that it's fine as an art form.

The only issues I have are the proponents of abstract art doing 2 things:

(1) Presenting abstract art as a worthier pursuit than illustration, as if somehow abstract art is harder or more unique than all other art forms.

You can feel the vibe from fine arts professors who look down on illustration majors.

(2) As a subject of study, it feels like they're not willing to learn techniques like perspective, anatomy, etc.

There is no progress on actual learning. I think if you want to be truly creative, you should be willing to learn techniques and then seeing how to break them, so that you KNOW why something feels like X.

Instead it feels like they "look down" on it without ever trying it.

I think people have connected the "we are superior" vibe with the lack of development of skills and started to feel what this connection is called: pretentiousness.

Unfortunately people have also connected the actual art styles to that and dislike the works just because of the art style as well.