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First, copying information isn't wrong to begin with. It is literally the one thing that makes our species special.

Second, even if you are a copyright maximalist the output of an LLM is either

a) not subject to copyright because it is not the creative work of a human or

b) a derivative work of the original training material to which the LLM's operator has no rights.

Since the LLM's operator forcefully asserts that it is not infringing, any wrong that arises from taking their word for it and distilling one model into another rests squarely with the operator of the former.

It's not just good PR for politicians to pass "<specific instance> case of already illegal <generic> is explicitly illegal"-laws. Prosecuting a violation of <generic> tends to be a lot harder because in addition to providing evidence for <specific instance> it requires convincing a judge that <generic> even applies to <specific instance> in the first place. You get to short-circuit that ordeal by passing a law that clarifies the intent that yes, <specific instance> is in fact an instance of <generic> without having to go all the way through setting precedent in higher courts.

Resetting Xbox 16 days ago

50 years ago, publicly listed companies understood that chasing short-term growth targets undermined long-term sustainability. The current failure mode is not an inherent property of being a publicly listed company, it's a consequence of incompetent leadership and bad regulatory policy.

It is somewhat infuriating (though not unexpected) that the EC is parroting the AAA industry talking points when said talking points were/are blatantly obvious lies about what remedies the Stop Destroying Videogames ECI is actually seeking.

Unfortunately, the charitable interpretation of the EC's behavior is that they lack reading comprehension. Less charitably, maybe if the EC had fewer shady backroom meetings with industry lobbyists and more meetings with the constituents they are meant to serve, they would act differently.

It's jarring to see instant changes that don't make sense. Animations are primarily a way to paper over UI that sucks to begin with.

Many transitions in Android are perfectly fine at 0x animation speed. The majority of transitions that suck without animation suck because the pre-/post-transition layout sucks and the transition between the two states doesn't make sense as a result.

It's the same with several of the transitions in TFA. For example, the address bar placeholder text[1] should just be left-aligned all the time. The save dialog[2] should leave all the basic controls in their original location[3] when switching from the basic mode to the advanced mode. That means the "Where:" label should also remain in the advanced mode, and the controls[4] that pop up to replace it should either be moved to the right or below. The search bar should also be moved down.

These are some really basic details and it is my understanding Apple used to not screw them up nearly as badly.

[1]https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/safari@2x.mp4?t=1...

[2]https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/save@1x.mp4?t=178...

[3]https://imgur.com/ZpHLCsv Artist's rendition. Please excuse the minor jank and criminal amount of empty space; I couldn't be arsed to fiddle with the screenshots to get pixel-perfect positioning and shrink the advanced dialog horizontally. Bikeshedding over where exactly the new controls belong is welcomed but irrelevant to the point I'm making.

[4]Is it just me, or are their icons uselessly, impenetrably, unhelpful?

There is potential danger with a lens that can suddenly change to a second prescription. For example: imagine you're driving and your whole field of vision suddenly starts flickering in and out of focus. That would be incredibly distracting and pretty dangerous. Even if they just started focusing on 1 foot away it'd be quite bad.

just so that grandma doesn't accidentally install malware

That's the stated reason. The actual reason is that they are salivating at the sight of how much money the app store and play store are making. They just don't want to move too quickly for fear of customers revolting.

The dislike stems from two (and a half) reasons:

1) Push vs pull. As you identified, ls doesn't stop you from doing the thing you wanted to push the man page on you when you don't need/want it. ls just does the thing you ask. man also just does the thing you ask. The product tour is a sign that the developer doesn't understand consent and is trying to get the user to do what the developer wants, not what the user wants.

2) It's infantilizing. The product tour assumes the user doesn't know what they want, and doesn't know how to RTFM to learn how to do the thing they want to do. It treats the user as having no agency.

2.5) It's a tacit admission that TFM sucks and R-ing it isn't a productive use of your time.

The USB Situation 3 months ago

Here's a lifehack that will extend the life of the socket by ~1000x: you can buy a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm "adapter" that you keep plugged in to the female end. Now you have a wear part that is trivially replaceable.

Of course that doesn't work all that well for laptops where it would stick out and easily break when you put it in a bag, but for that one pair of headphones you like that is no longer being manufactured it's great!

Further, "porn tokens" are the pointy end of the wedge, because it's easy to misconstrue any opposition as advocating for "kids should have access to porn, actually". The broad end that is being hammered towards is "kids aren't allowed on social media because it's harmful to them" AKA "free speech tokens".

I should not have to enter into a business relationship with google just to hand my non-technical friend an APK any more than I have to enter into a business relationship with the Linux Foundation to hand my friend an AppImage.

But laws against selling/giving alcohol to minors are moderately successful at curbing teen alcohol use because they carry with them a risk of punishment that grows with the scale of the operation. If all it took was one adult who thought "kids should be allowed to drink if they want" to provide all the kids in the country with free booze and that adult had no meaningful fear of repercussions, the laws would be nothing but sternly worded advice.

If the proof of adulthood scheme is truly anonymous, one adult with some technical chops who thinks "kids should be allowed to watch porn if they want" would be able to, say, run an adult-o-matic-9000 TOR hidden service that anyone can use to pinky promise that they are an adult without fear of repercussions. If such a service comes with a meaningful risk of being identified and punished, it is by definition not anonymous.

I suppose I'm just not convinced giving up some basic liberties for a law that converts into sternly worded advice if just one adult chooses to break it is a great idea.

Precisely. To rate-limit attestations you either need government somewhere in the loop so that they get notified and can revoke certificates when they detect abuse (but then they can correlate requests to prove adulthood with the service provider), or you need the proof of adulthood to be tied to the certificate in some way that the service provider can tell if a certificate is being re-used. But then anyone with a copy of all the certificates (read: the government) can re-run the proof on their end and figure out who is who.

The point of this is that you can use the credentials on your phone to prove that you are an adult to a website using zero-knowledge proofs to avoid disclosing your identity to anybody.

It is my understanding that this is not possible. I would be happy to be shown to be wrong, but to me it seems like you can either prevent people from lending out their credentials, or you can preserve the anonymity of the user, but not both.

You can use 0KP to prove you have a signed certificate issued by your government that says you are an adult, but then anyone with such a certificate can use it to masquerade as however many sock puppets they like and act as a proxy for people who aren't adults. You can have the issuing government in the loop signing one-time tokens to stop Adults-Georg from creating 10k 18+ attestations per day, but then the issuing government and the service providers have a timing side-channel they can use to correlate identities to service users. Is there some other scheme I'm missing that solves this dilemma?

Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.

It does if that's the law. Every jurisdiction routinely overrules contracts as unenforceable on the basis of some overriding law, so it wouldn't even really be that unusual. Whether it's a good idea or not is another question and one that depends almost entirely on second, third and higher order effects.

There probably is a world where all software is libre software and we still see similar rates of development, but it's not at all clear how you could get there. Especially not if you cared about the damage caused by upending the business models of a significant fraction of the world economy.

It's clear how insane this culture war against trans people is when you consider this only applies to trans women and not trans men?

In most sports, the "mens" division is actually an open division that accepts all participants regardless of sex. Women just don't compete in it because they have no shot at getting a decent placement. The fact that males and females can't fairly compete with each other is the raison d'être of the women's league. This, and not culture war propaganda reasons is why only the most deranged bigots have an issue with trans men competing in "mens" sports.

The EU is perfectly capable of collaborating even when it can't reach full consensus or when it wants to include peripheral states without them becoming full members. See for example the Schengen area, Eurozone, European Economic Area, and more recently (and specifically to circumvent member state vetos) when the enhanced cooperation procedures were invoked to lend money to Ukraine.

As the complexity of a system increases, the number of single points of failure also tends to increase. Sometimes you can make sure that several subsystems need to fail before the whole system fails. Often, the best you can do is swap one SPoF (e.g. unreliable power grid) for another, more robust SPoF (unreliable UPS).

"Actual malice" is confusingly not about if the defendant was acting maliciously. It is specific legal jargon meaning that the defendant knowingly or with reckless disregard for the truth made the false statements.

That wasn't actually what I was implying. Just that if the plaintiff isn't even willing to assert that the statements were false, what are you wasting the court's time for?

  > He falsely claimed my wife is cheating on me!
  > So you assert that your wife didn't cheat on you?
  > No.
  > ???

Ah, so it does leak your identity through the timing side channel. In other words, your anonymity is only dependent on the govt not coordinating with service providers to de-anonymize users. I assumed the 2fa app just held cryptographic keys and did some 0kp magic to show that the cert belongs to a government-attested adult. Phoning home all the time makes it trivial for the government to abuse people's privacy; they can just compel service providers to provide logs of logins.