cjs_ac

When Deckers, the company behind fleece-lined UGG boots, recently took Quince to court over its lookalike boots, it tried to bar Quince from referencing “dupe culture” at trial.

The bid failed, confirming that “dupes” and “dupe culture” — a commercial ecosystem built around providing consumers cheaper alternatives to name-brand products — are cultural phenomena here to stay.

The trial focused on whether Quince’s shearling boots that really, really look like UGGs violated the existing patent for the design. And in a twist, the jury ruled that yes, Quince had copied the UGG design — but the patent over the UGG boot should not have been issued in the first place because the design was too generic to protect. The ruling opened the door for Quince and any other brand to make a similar-looking boot, opening up a new frontier for “dupe culture.”

UGG itself is a company that operates by abusing intellectual property laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugg_boots_trademark_dispute

As someone with many heretical opinions, I’ve found it very easy to avoid accusations of heresy by just shutting up. The right to free speech is not an obligation to speak freely. As a software engineer, my colleagues don’t need to know my opinions on economic policy for me to be able to work effectively with them.

Everyone agrees C has problems, but there’s no consensus on what those problems are. People build ‘better Cs’ to solve the problems they see in the language, and offer them to the community for the benefit of those who share their tastes.

It’s perfectly fine for you to disagree with them, but it’s also perfectly fine for them to publish their solutions to their problems.

‘A better C’ is a good description for these projects. ‘The better C’ would not be.

There's a pretty good depiction of them in David L. Robbins' Last Citadel.

Dave Plummer is the software engineering equivalent of the Navy Seal copypasta.

TBF, some Australian accents put a rising intonation at the end of sentences, as though the speaker is always asking their interlocutor for approval. Just another thing that's reminiscent of Clive James' remark that too many Australians are descended from prison officers.

Come on mate, you can't go around implying that you've actually read the legislation. This is HN, you have to blindly trust what the free speech absolutists say about it.

A more serious case of unsportsmanlike conduct that was (and still is) within the Laws of Cricket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyline

IIRC, their operation relies on enormous vacuum tubes that the BBC can’t get replacements for any more.

One of the things I've noticed here in Britain is that journalists don't even try to make sense of events, and instead the 'analysis' is just the opinions of uninformed bystanders.

You chose to buy the car with the big blind spots. You’re responsible for checking your blind spots, by moving your head as necessary. This is part of the driving test.

Your poor consumer choices do not absolve you of your responsibilities and obligations.

It will matter to you when you’re sentenced, though.

Speaking as a fellow immigrant, your attitude is what gives immigrants a bad name worldwide.

Those A pillars are MASSIVE liabilities in the UK where people just hop right out onto "zebra crossings" expecting the right-of-way to be yielded to them.

Those pedestrians do have the right of way; you need to have another look at the Highway Code.

Sorry. You can refuse the covid vaccine, but that won't stop everyone else from blithly accepting it.

I agree with this part, but then, I personally don't have a problem with everyone else giving up their privacy.

Then once the critical mass is reached, your ability to buy groceries can just be terminated. The 20% of the population that refuses just isn't important enough to matter.

Wut? Can you provide any information about a supermarket chain (or law affecting supermarket chains) anywhere in the world that prevents (or prevented) people who weren't vaccinated against COVID-19 to enter or buy groceries from those supermarkets?

Taking these age-assurance laws at face value, I don't have a problem with them, because I think algorithmically-personalised social media feeds are an intrinsically bad product and I don't see anything that any society would lose if they went away. My concern about these laws is how far politicians are willing to go to close loopholes like VPNs, because I think that's where the potential is to cause inadvertent collateral damage to systems that really matter.

There’s also a lot of bureaucracy involved in participating in the gilt market directly, rather than using an intermediary.

https://www.dmo.gov.uk/investor-information/retail-investors...

I don’t think the Treasury really wants to deal with amateurs.

The headline is a reference to the phrase ‘bread from air’, which was used to describe the applications of the Haber process.

To be (slightly) more charitable to the genre and to AI, self-help books are a blog post's worth of content padded out to look worthy of the sticker price, so LLMs provide a fair bit of value in extracting the signal from the noise (assuming they do it accurately).

Are you the Sisyphus of goalposts or something?

You know perfectly well what I meant.

I think underestimate how suspicious the British people are of carrying ID. You don't have to have your driving licence with you when driving a car. Having to show ID to vote was controversial when introduced, remains controversial, and backfired on the party that introduced it. We don't even have a proper ID system here; you need to use utility bills to provide proof of identity for a surprising number of government services. This is a crowded little archipelago; we're fiercely protective of our privacy, in ways that would surprise someone who hasn't lived here.

Suppose the user isn't using a device that leaks its location to any userland software that asks?

Of course, it'll be possible to circumvent this with a VPN or a proxy. So what this will achieve is it will reduce the number of British muggles on social media, thus bringing us a bit closer to the Good Old Days when only nerds were online. I'm fine with this.

This comment was brought to you by the British Class System: Making Nanny Proud.

I thought this was going to be about LLM-generated conspiracy theories, but the website was funny anyway.

There's a technical documentation link at the bottom of the page that documents an actual working hand-crank-powered Raspberry Pi that runs a local model.

Microsoft is called Microsoft because they make software for microcomputers. Networking and multi-user systems aren’t in their DNA.

Attachments are a feature of PDF; I often attach LaTeX sources to the PDF output.

Bill Bryson claimed to have received a letter addressed to ‘Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire’.

I have some cousins who live in a small town in Australia where the houses have neither names nor numbers. You just address the envelope to ‘<name>, <street>, <town>’, and it’s the postie’s responsibility to know where everyone lives. (‘Postie’ is the official job title in Australia Post because it’s gender-neutral.)

These tools are here. They’re not going away.

They might very well go away. There is definitely an AI bubble, and it remains to be seen whether it deflates gradually or pops spectacularly. Geoeconomics might destroy them by constraining their access to hardware. The capabilities are real, but whether those capabilities are realised is a different matter.

By 'architecture of the internet', the authors mean the nature of social media feeds.

The documentation is a work of art. Every time I try to work out what just one of the unexplained ideas is, it just introduces new unexplained ideas. I don't know where these ideas came from, how they fit together, or why putting them together is useful. I certainly don't know why I would want to write a program in this language, as opposed to any other language I already know.

Speaking as someone who subscribed earlier this year, the Lex column does provide subtle stock tips, but my real interest in it is the fact that it’s aimed at people who have a financial interest in accurate news, so the reporting doesn’t veer off into pushing moralistic narratives like other UK news sources.