mihaic

You're basically saying that since open source projects can be reused by others, the people making closed source projects shouldn't complain when the same thing happens to them.

Everyone posting on Stack Overflow knew it would be public and free. Book authors put an explicit copyright notice, which includes derivations of their work.

The paradox is that their IP was obtained by distillation of the collective IP of humanity.

Romanian here. There really were admin accounts with the password Passw0rd, created so that some incompetent political apointees could browse the data.

How is this not gambling? I mean, any mobster bookie could simply claim prediction market in this case, and simply take a cut. Where is the line drawn? On how much money the organizers give to the Trump family?

I think I've known about him for 20 years right now, ever since I discovered his code to compute pi to an ungodly amount of digits. The man sure was prolific.

Interesting counterpoint. I think this is the Peter principle in software: a lot of people are great at prototyping, but not great at the next stages of the project. Other people step in for those, but their existence is mostly ignored, since they can't easily fit inside a narrative.

One think to note though is unelected dictators do have their benefits, even if they come with obvious downsides.

Yes, if it's done with an intent to defraud the general population, which could be the case here. Effects and intent really matter when deciding actions.

You're just repeating that your purpose is your message. Do you honestly not see a qualitative difference between the understanding of ants and of humans of the world around them? Heck, even ants and dogs or cats?

Yes, but we have a system to understand the universe and ants don't. Using relativism, to simply destroy point of view without putting anything in their place, is simply destructive without any purpose.

I've learned SQL around 20 years ago, and in all this time I've felt it was just a poorly designed language. It was always infuriating to write because of its verbose nature. Keywords were split into two words. I'm still shocked it's not "GROUPBY". There is no composition and modularization of logic, queries become massive expressions.

I know I'm in the minority in places like this, but I've spent all my life using ORMs, and never once regretted it. And I'm the kind of person that actually likes low-level C from time to time. SQL just feels like a poor abstraction layer: either go higher or lower.

Vaguely related, am I the only one that is getting Rosalind Franklin fatigue?

I don't have anything against her, but she's become sort of symbol of signaling inclusiveness and hipness in science. Especially since her assistant Raymond Gosling also gets the same real dismissal in the story of DNA that she's reported to have received.

Sure, I've been a start-up founder before, I know the trap of "if you build it, they will come". It's just that AI is evolving so fast that book do seem like the market for vinyl (as the article said).

No amount of marketing can help you out is your entire market is shrinking daily. Shriking markets are also not won by quality. The more competition, the more marketing then becomes the main thing, and you also need to alter the book in the process so that it fits the bite-sized pills you can push on most channels, or worse change it so much for the audience until it becomes something else entirely.

For the past 5-6 years I've been writing a book in my spare time. The outline of it is how reason emerges in past societies from the needs of social complexity, how it's lessons get converted into rules and rituals, which in turn remove any competitive advantage of aquiring reason, ending it to setup a new cycle. And in the meanwhile LLMs became the ultimate heuristic of humanity.

I've gotten it 60-70% ready, and I really don't know if it'll have an audience in a post-AI world. I never meant to strike big with it, but I'm now wondering if thousands of hours of research and writing can amount to more than a novelty gift I'd give to friends.

Can you first define what you'd be comfortable considering as evidence before I spend time on this? I don't want to provide research just so the other party complains that there's still some cultural bias somewhere.

Also, what kind of humans do you generally interact with? How many of these are children?

Yes, but you also get vastly different outcomes when you don't impose these as well.

A snide and vitriolic remark that observes on how the first paragraph actually addresses the concern of the person which hasn't read the article. A further continuation on this being representative of the state of modern online discourse.

I like this story, but I never liked the wording "made out of meat", as if the word exists in a world without animals. I could have accepted "proteins", but that's not a catchy title.

Good luck with the project, especially in this day and age.

Not sure if the author might be here, but I'm just wondering if it might have take inspiration from old CS Academemy lessons. I worked on those, and recognize some UI ideosincracies that bring up nostalgia, like for https://csacademy.com/lesson/breadth_first_search

Fine, good enough. Still better than decabillionaire or top dog at the Fed.

By your logic, you didn't put in much effort into your message. Besides not capitalizing the first letter of every sentence, everything else looks great though for me, and I'd imagine it was low effort for you. Those messages between billionaire read like the worst texts from low IQ teenagers.

I've always found something profoundly deceiving about all these "just create value posts", as if absolutely everyone could simply by some hard work actually create significant value for others.

The barrier to being able to add any value along the supply chain is shriking daily, meaning that very few people can actually add value.

The people that have managed to get on top of the system by these mean rarely aknowledge that their methods don't scale, which is a terribly irresponsible and ultimately narcissistic way to use their ideological influence.

If you give advice to a group, it should either scale to most of the group or aknowledge up front it's exceptionalistic.

I was born in a communist country in Eastern Europe, which is now crony capitalist. The issue is extremely complex, and all I can say in such a short paragraph is that ideologically-driven implementations are doomed to fail. It doesn't matter if you believe in "free-market", "the state", "free-speach", "socialism" or "equality", if you put these above the concrete reality of modern parenting, and how much harder it's getting compared to previous generations.

If you wish to invite yourself into their responsibilities shouldn't you also invite yourself into their bedroom first?

You're turning of question of measure (how much should society be involved in raising children) into an all or nothing debate, which I explicitly want to reject.

Does that actually work?

Yes, because of mass education almost every adult you meet can read and write, something new for the last 100 years. Just because a system has (currently huge) faults, doesn't mean we should remove the system entirely.

In general, I argue for less state control on anything. But your argument seems flawed from its core. If someone is a bad parent, should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well? And the line is often blurry, so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents.

And, just to be clear on this topic, I think these age restriction laws are mostly bullshit, but I'm deeply against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.

I'm not sure how "commas inside strings in CSVs can cause bugs" becomes newsworthy, but I guess even the vibecoding generation needs to learn the same old lessons.

We have that implemented, it's just that nobody wanted it. Our pitch basically was that "Why can you buy today's paper on the stand, but can't do the same digitally?" Turn out the answer is complicated.

I've made a start-up that has really tried making micropayments work (blink.net) and I know there have been many other attempts.

Some of the pain points can always be addressed, as it's just implementation difficulty (having an auto-pay system when opening and article, and actually being able to get a refund within a short time window if the title was clickbait -- with some limitations of course).

The main problems that always remained were:

- the dificutly in convincing a user to actually pay, which was a psichological barrier. People also don't understand that many articles would have to be priced at 20-50 cents, even more, to be worth it, or there should be an issue pass with the actual price of the whole issue.

- the publishing industry being a mess, hard to coordinate as everyone wants to do their own thing, and early experiments failing, ruining the reputation of the idea itself. Many people say micropayments are something that needs a good time, but nobody knows when that time will come.

- the huge fees that processors take (2% + 29 cents), meaning we needed to load into a wallet a minimum of 5$. After learning all the tricks of the industry, I felt a need to throw rotten tomatoes at whoever thinks that cashback should be legal.

The combination always made it a horrible problem, and at this point I'm even considering making the existing project a non-profit, if that might get something off the ground, but now it's just in low-maintenance mode.

I've personally converted html to plaintext with beautifulsoup in python, and used that as the plaintext version. Did not have complaints, but I honestly don't know who actually reads the non-html version.

I've had a similar path, and I always recommend KDE with its taskbar on Ubuntu, it made the transition smoother for me in terms of preserving workflows.

Success doesn't have to mean getting your way, but rather making a meaningful change in your direction. Even opposing groups often can find a way so that both get a better situation. For instance, taxes can overall be lowered while teacher salaries can increase on average at the same time, if excess money is taken from other activities.