It lacks an appropriate number of ports and doesn't support DisplayPort.

USB DisplayPort alt mode says hello. Every rear USB-C port on the Mac Mini is also a DisplayPort. Just as it is on all of Apple's laptops.

Thunderbolt is a garbage, proprietary Apple standard.

Thunderbolt is an Intel standard. And in the case of Thunderbolt 4, it's just an additional set of feature requirements over base USB4, where those features are optional. In other words, TB4 is a superset of USB4.

The existence of countless freemium businesses disproves the validity of that take on its face.

I would say more, but I already wrote a more detailed response to a similar point here.

That's a pretty contrived hypothetical that AFAIK has never been litigated before.

Regardless, I don't see a problem with people doing that being legal. I'm not sure many other people would have a problem with it either.

That take is oft-repeated, but I just don't buy it. Never have.

File sharing being legal does not make it impossible for authors in any medium to make money. Anyone who believes that simply lacks imagination.

More than that, by now after decades of seeing new business models evolve with the internet, it's fair to say that to subscribe to that take lacks more than imagination â" it lacks observation. Many modern content creators incorporate the reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable into their business models. The most obvious examples are the countless successful freemium businesses.

If we did legalize file sharing, the result would be 1. little would change because most of the people who would freeload already were freeloading and 2. we'd see even more creative business models emerge to ensure creators continue getting paid now that nobody would be in denial anymore about the existence of a large, inevitable group of freeloaders in all aspects of content consumption.

Free at the point of consumption and creators getting paid are not mutually exclusive. Putting these two things in tension and creating artificial scarcity because for one side to win, the other side must lose is fallacious, zero-sum thinking. We can do better than that as a society, and I hope some day we will.

We all have strong opinions about rms. Some of his ideas are wacky. Some of his ideas are brilliant. I think this is one of his more insightful takes.

Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a criminal offense vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.

I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be fully legal, just as rms is saying.

Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.

Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.

People often forget this, but the origin of copyright law is important to remember. The Statute of Anne was passed to address the growing problem of people making and selling copies of books they were not the author of, an activity which became much more common once the printing press was invented. The law was passed with the intention of protecting London's publishing business from this unfair competition and in the centuries that followed, other countries passed similar laws. Notably absent from this law: a ban on libraries or noncommercial sharing of books.

That's why file sharing should be legal, and business models should adapt to the decades-old reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable. Some businesses have adapted rather well. While it's unfortunate that DRM is widespread, things like streaming services aren't that bad an adaptation. They just need a bit more adapting to truly embrace the 21st century.

Also, as a fun aside, one thing that baffles me is if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions? The courts are currently twisting themselves into pretzels to try to invent some kind of fair use exception for them out of whole cloth because it feels wrong to charge them all with criminal behavior. But the truth is the law is not being interpreted in good faith, in part because the law itself is horrifyingly outdated and needs to be updated and modernized.

But the modernization we need is simple: Reduce for-profit infringement to a civil offense and reduce noncommercial infringement to being legal. We don't need to tinker with copyright terms, we don't need a vast expansion of the public domain, none of that. Just make file sharing legal.

I'm less productive. Not only do I have to deal with a noisy and distracting environment, I also have to deal with the commute taking up time that I could otherwise spend more productively. Even if it is staying 15 or 20 minutes late or starting a half hour earlier, well, that's now part of my commuting time. But if leadership wants to play stupid games, they can win stupid prizes.

My guy, ChatGPT isn't running on a single hard drive with a file system that just deletes the reference to the files in the file allocation table and doesn't happen to overwrite the data for a while.

Next you'll tell me that people with AIDS who stop talking ART suddenly get the symptoms and effects of AIDS again.

Or that people suffering from schizophrenia who stop taking their anti-schizophrenia medicine suffer the effects of schizophrenia again.

Or that people taking anti-hypertensives get hypertensive 'all over again.'

Just wait until you find out that every person on the planet who ever had cancer also spent their entire lives being exposed to dihydrogen monoxide.

I'm looking forward to this. I actually found the Squid Game Challenge gameshow to be more entertaining than the actual Squid Game drama.

They're saying 'the issue isn't social media in and of itself; it's what's *on* the social media, what's being done *through* social media that's the problem.'

If everybody's feeds were nothing but affirmations, positive stories, and CBT tips and tricks, social media use would probably have much better mental health outcomes.

Unfortunately, it's full of hate, impossible physical standards being sold as 'I drink a thimble of lemon water after every meal' and negative content specifically designed to drive engagement.

"Study finds weak evidence linking being shot in the heart multiple times to fatal outcomes."

Yeah, being shot in the heart *once* does it for you.

Once you hit a certain social media threshold, it doesn't matter if you're over that threshold by five minutes a day or five hours a day.

Taking Ivermectin for parasites is an excellent treatment.

Taking it for cancer is, in fact, crankpot.

You can't even say 'well, it's safer than Tylenol, so it doesn't hurt you.' In this case, it *does* hurt you, because the longer cancer goes untreated, the more likely it is to kill you.

When there's proven treatments, and you decide to try de-worming treatment with zero medical basis, you are, in fact, doing harm.

It's always fun when well-known actors are willing to make fun of themselves. (also in this camp - Jon Voight's and Raquel Welsh's appearances on Seinfeld).

On the other hand, it's sad when a perfectly 'fine' actor gets so badly typecast that all they can do for the rest of their career is make fun of themselves.

The Batman: The Animated Series episode 'Grey Ghost' was the only one that actually treated West and his Batman history with respect and dignity.

So, how to get motivated to work out when the depression's got you by the yarballs?

Life requires effort, film at 11.