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Comment Re:decriminalize sharing (Score 1) 14

Reselling is definitely shady. But there would be no scope for such schemes if the price was fair. It's not.

A thief is a thief, and there is nothing more ignoble than a thief who commits his crimes in the name of a worthy cause.

The legendary Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Was he wrong? Was his cause not worthy? He was fighting greed-- excessive, damaging taxation and hoarding of wealth. Today, greed has again arisen to become one of our biggest problems, with these super rich using their immense wealth to corrupt our systems to unfairly direct even more wealth to them.

Your use of the term "thief" prejudices your argument. Copying is not theft. Copying is copying. Pirating a TV signal, maybe that should be a crime, but it shouldn't be lumped in with theft. For years, the entertainment industry has been trying to convince the world that sharing is theft. Don't do their dirty work for them.

Yes, I am aware TorrentFreak ran the story. They are one of the few exceptions to the near universal censoring and propagandizing the media does on this issue.

Comment decriminalize sharing (Score 1) 14

Society must acknowledge that sharing of info should be encouraged, and be thankful that technology has made sharing incredibly easy. Need to work harder on systems that can fairly compensate producers while encouraging sharing, not continue to base compensation on the restriction of sharing. Especially not to the point of outlawing sharing and wasting resources enforcing that and causing still more waste of lives that have to spend ruinously to fight to defend themselves from the legal mess.

One thing that makes this issue most intractable is that the organs who report on it are thoroughly convinced that sharing is contrary to their own interests. How is the public to hear unbiased reporting on this matter when no one with a metaphorical megaphone will give one?

Comment Re:No problem (Score 5, Insightful) 63

Big tech companies don't really know what to do with 10x engineers. 1x engineers they manage out or warehouse until the next layoff, 1.5x engineers get promoted, but when they get a 10x engineer they try to make them into something different. Typically this means taking them away from hands-on engineering and trying to get them to do things that are more "high impact", such as engineering management or tech leadership. If they're not good at these things this frustrates everyone involved. If they are... well, they've probably traded a 10x engineer for a 1x manager or tech lead, which likely isn't a good trade.

Comment Innovation has nothing to do with it (Score 5, Insightful) 63

Most employees at big companies, including tech companies, don't innovate. They're not allowed to innovate, and if they try to do so they're told to keep working on their TPS reports or Jira tickets. Laying off such engineers won't reduce innovation at a big company.

The people big companies allow to innovate are either product/marketing types, or in tech companies people with titles like "principal" and "distinguished". Most of these people don't actually innovate either (and the innovation coming from the product/marketing types is usually bad), but occasionally you get people who can, and that's where all the innovation from big companies is.

If you want to innovate, become a founder. If you're at a big tech company, you can probably ask management and they'll tell you the same thing.

Comment Re:Too Simplistic (Score 1) 84

Karo is not HFCS , but yeah, lot of kitchens have hydrogenated oils (a.k.a "shortening", also "margarine"), artificial colors ("food coloring"), and flavors (vanillin probably is most common). HFCS would be unusual in a home kitchen, but "invert sugar" is less so and pretty much the same thing. Sucrose itself is already highly processed, it doesn't exactly come out of the beet as a white granular substance.

The UPF thing is woo, by people who should know better. At least the bro science people know they're bro science people. Or it's just a scam.

Comment Re:Hardware will be fine (Score 1) 56

OpenAI and Anthropic are betting that this time will be different, that the payoff will come fast enough to pay back the investment. Google is betting this somewhat, too, but Google has scale, diversity and resources to weather the bust -- and might be well-positioned to snap up the depreciated investments made by others.

I think this makes sense. OpenAI pays Google for compute, Google uses that to build more DC capacity. If OpenAI goes bankrupt, Google keeps the compute (and whatever they've already been paid) and it's very unlikely they can't find other uses for the compute, so while they'd have better off if OpenAI stayed around, they don't lose too big.

Comment Re:Just make the penalty a fine (Score 1) 28

Make the fine for paying ransomware 3x any ransom paid. If a company is really set one paying the ransom, it will come with a much higher price, and use that money to fight cybercrime and protect infrastructure.

You might want to consider how the incentives for the government work in that situation.

Comment Re:Writing is kinda useful (Score 2) 245

We were just talking about how one of the most useful, long term skills I picked up in school was my architectural drafting class in high school where they drilled us on perfect print.

Sure, but that's print. As other have pointed out, most of the advantages of cursive have gone away since the introduction of the ballpoint pen. Some of the simplified letterforms (e.g. the lowercase 'a') are useful, but looping and joining aren't. Cursive is long obsolete as a writing form. At best it's more aesthetically pleasing while being less readable; more commonly it's just ugly unreadable scrawl

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