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Comment Re:You know what I think (Score 2) 52

Well, he was accused of unauthorized access to a computer system, but the owners of the computer system involved made it emphatically clear they didn't want charges pressed. So technically you're correct, which is the best type of correct, but the nuance is that, no, the law he supposedly broke was too much for this specific case.

The other thing he was accused of was copyright infringement, but that's not illegal unless you intend to profit from it (simplification), it's normally merely a civil, not criminal, matter. And the entire point he was making was that the files shouldn't have been protected by copyright in the first place.

Swartz almost certainly had more issues than criminal charges that would inevitably have been dropped, or gone to court and been dismissed as soon as the "victim" refused to testify or testified in Swartz's favor. So while there's been a pile-on for the prosecutor in this case, I'm reluctant to join it beyond thinking she should have listened to MIT/JSTOR. People who are accused of crimes, even crimes they know are under uncontroversial laws and for which they're dead to rights, don't generally kill themselves. Rather, given his background, I suspect depression caused by you-know-what is far more likely.

Comment Re: Footgun... (Score 2) 45

macOS's Unix-like userland (ie the command line tools that weren't written for macOS, tools like "ls" and "rm") are mostly from FreeBSD (at one point I think there were some GNU tools mixed in, but I have a vague memory they started to remove those in earnest). None of the rest - the kernel, the GUI, the file systems, device drivers, the equivalent of init/systemd, et all are from BSD derived code, they're mostly proprietary Apple/NEXT.

Comment Re:Reminds me of SQLite's stance (Score 2, Interesting) 45

And this is a massive concern when it comes to LLMs. To date, there's no evidence that the output of LLMs really is "public domain", the courts are divided on it, and the sloptivists aren't going to be able to assure us LLM code is free of copyright risk until literally the UN intervenes and convenes an international AI copyrights treaty that declares it public domain. Until then different countries may legislate, but as long as any significant jurisdictions tag LLM output as belonging to the people whose works fed the LLM, incorporating LLM code into a program you intend to distribute is risky to say the least.

Not that that's going to stop anyone for now, because the machine tells me what a good boy I am and how my ideas are so good so it must be good yes it is yes it is yes I am a good boy!

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 4, Insightful) 65

Well yeah, our search results are shit these days because Google is, from what I can tell, intentionally enshittifying it to push people towards Gemini.

And what does AI have to do with Amazon package delivery? Anything at all?

Or are you ignorant of what the complaints are about "data centers". Nobody's opposing classic data centers here. They're opposing AI buildings. And they should. And you should too.

But you don't.

Because you're easy manipulated by the chatbot. It makes you feel good! It tells you what a good boy you are and how your ideas are so good all the time. Over and over again. And... you've only ever suffered abuse your entire life. Constant being told your ideas are bad. That your code isn't good. And here it is, a dopamine inducing device that praises you for the first time in your life. And you don't want to consider the possibility it might be terrible. It might be making you dumber - but it is. It might be saying those things... because it's been programmed to, in order to prop up an unsustainable business just long enough to make everyone dependent upon it, which it is. Trillions of dollars diverted from things that might actually help people into creating RAM shortages, destroying privacy, destroying incentives to create, and creating dependencies on sociopath-run businesses in the hope that, after crypto and other scams failed, this might be the one, the tech that'll steal the economy. And you've fallen for it.

So you repeat this tired and obviously bad faith criticism of anti-data center protestors because you've been indoctrinated into a cybercult so fucking thick you don't even consider how much of an out of touch moron you appear by pretending this isn't about AI.

I don't think I'm going to get through to you, but to those reading this and being on that knifeedge of thinking "This karmawarrior guy's a bit mean" while for the first time wondering why it is that the chatbots insist on the ridiculous over the top fawning behavior, why the studies show AI is causing skill losses among its users, why so much money is being poured into tech that cannot possibly make a profit, and why the peer reviewed studies seem to say one thing about AI productivity (spoiler! in most cases, it's not having a massive impact) and programmers who are using the tech enthusiastically are saying another (10X productivity!!!?!)... think about those things some more, and draw the obvious conclusions.

Comment Re:It's pretty much illegal everywhere (Score 4, Interesting) 198

> Which begs the question -- why are US safety laws so lax?

It's more different priorities. The US (and Canada) has safety laws (and indeed a whole policy on roads) oriented towards protecting the driver and passengers. While the rest of the world tends to consider the lives of those outside of a car to be more important.

Of course, some times those policies will mesh and vehicles can be made that match both priorities. Other times, they won't. And other times, there's no reason why a vehicle can't be built that considers both priorities to be important, but for whatever reason, the designer decides to focus on one market at the expense of the others.

The Cybertruck is probably not the only design that can't be exported to Europe for the same reasons, and there are reasons why most car manufacturers have "US" and "non-US" portfolios so different they'll slap the same name onto two entirely different vehicle designs knowing that there's no confusion because one is intended for Americans, and the other not.

Comment Re:Cybertruck (Score 1) 198

No, it *was* a Nazi car. But a little lesson in history:

In the late 1930s, the Nazis took their Germany Uber Alles nonsense to its logical conclusion and started invading other countries. So there was a big war, and in the end, because fascism is essentially a con-game at a governmental level, Germany collapsed and the rest of the world took over. Hitler shot himself.

So at that point, Nazism in Germany was essentially dead, and while there may have been quite a few people in Germany who still believed this bullshit, German industry was no longer in the hands of people who promoted fascism.

Interestingly, Henry Ford, who also promoted fascism, albeit reluctantly joining the efforts to fight Germany during the war, died two years later, so it's arguable Ford remained a fascist car company slightly longer than VW did.

If a company isn't funding fascism, it's not fascist and its products are not fascist. Conversely, if a company is funding fascism/neo-Nazism, today, directly or indirectly, then it is one. That's how it works. That's why if, say, hypothetically, a company called Edison was making cars and the CEO and owner of the most shares, Leon Scent, was promoting some political part(y/ies) that blamed the world's problems on convenient and blameless minorities and promoted cruel policies towards them, it would be reasonable for everyone to boycott Edison's cars, but would no longer be an issue if Scent were to sell his holdings, and sever all of his connections with Edison. At that point, Edison would no longer be a fascist or neo-Nazi car company.

Comment Re:Surprised (Score 4, Insightful) 198

I've seen them in RL, and I have to agree with the sibling post who says the kind of person who'd think they look cool would be the same that thinks putting gold veneer on everything makes looks elegant. They're just... gaudy with no redeeming qualities in terms of design, the kind of thing a 9 year old would draw as his concept of what a really cool car looks like. It's just weird, angular, and large. It looks as cool as a skip. Which not coincidentally its compared to on a regular basis.

The good news is between Ford and Slate, the options for something that does what the Cybertruck says, but has a utilitarian design, looks decent, and is actually affordable, are coming. Whether there's a market is another issue given the disproportionately high number of pick-up drivers who are likely swayed by culture war crap. But they're coming for those who want the advantages of EVs without having to drive a sedan.

Comment Re:Surprised (Score 1) 198

I've seen two or three in my neighbourhood but:

1. The neighbourhood is heavily MAGA (Florida, East Coast but North of Palm Beach)
2. When you think of all the cars you see, you're going to notice the Cybertruck because of what it is, but it's not like I'm seeing them every day. There's a very good chance I've seen more than 50% of the Cybertrucks in the area, making up some relatively small percentage of the population here as a whole.

To put it another way, if the area I live in has 20-40,000 people in it, and there are ten Cybertrucks, that means there are far more trans people (0.1% of the population vs 00.025% - 00.05%) in my area than Cybertrucks. They're just not popular.

Comment Re:just 290MB of RAM (Score 1) 74

I don't understand it either. I mean, yes, right now I'm using VSCode, Atom's bastard brother with similar issues, but this is mostly because if I want anything approaching support for a generic web development environment it's the only thing on the table. The entire industry took one look at VSCode and said "Good enough, who cares about RAM anyway?" and... well, that's our industry. Before that it was Eclipse. Eclipse isn't even a good IDE, it has the most obnoxious autocomplete I've ever seen, but somehow it became the defacto standard for almost all development, even when Java devs finally revolted and went over to IntelliJ.

Maybe the RAM shortage will help focus attention on the need to write light code. Unfortunately I know from experience that "light" now means something different to most developers out there.

Comment Re:just 290MB of RAM (Score 1) 74

I agree, that's insane. Why bother switching from Electron in that case? I've seen Atom and VSCode use less memory.

This is an IM client with some nice rich text features, emojis, and pictures/movie support. There's no reason for it to take more memory than 2000s era Microsoft Word.

Comment Re: lol, eat shit fascists (Score 1) 715

> Kamalan Harris and AOC were themselves chanting defund the police or something functionally identical to it

So they weren't actually chanting defund the police. What were they "chanting"? Reform the police?

Are you arguing that reforming the police to be more effective and less cruel is in some way extreme left wingism? If so, do you think maybe arewethebadguys.gif applies to you?

I mean, doubly think about it: you've had to jump through hoops here justifying claiming Harris and AOC said something they clearly didn't by adding the qualifier, and you've had it explained to you that even if they had said it, which they didn't, they do not mean "cut all funding to the police" but a more nuanced thing, even if the origins of the term are closer to the unnuanced version. So it's safe to say when you said "functionally identical to it", you meant reform, rather than cut all funding.

Well, assuming you're arguing in good faith. Which is unlikely given the stream of bullshit you posted earlier about what the left supposedly plan to do which was all actually what conservatives do but with the aims reversed.

But let's pretend you're not a troll. You think it's extremism to... want a better split of social services and policing to help make our society less brutal and more civilized. Hmm. Right.

I guess this explains why you side with the group that also wants to ban people from owning electric vehicles and make it uneconomic to walk or use public transportation or bicycles. It explains why you want deny people with a certain mental condition psychiatric treatment or allow them to live their lives in a way that's least likely to lead to their suicides. It explains why you want hiring practices to be biased towards straight white males and systems designed to knock down sources of such bias to be declared illegal.

Again though... are you sure you're on the right side of this?

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