zero_iq

You know the phrase "business genius"?

Spez is a business idiot.

He's had money thrown at him from VCs, thousands of people generating content, and administering content for free, sitting on a goldmine of data and goodwill and Community spirit, and he's managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue and a bruised ego. All while others make millions and gain significant community support using the exact same data with business models he could have just copied or shared in.

He's had every opportunity. He's fucked it up at every step.

Business idiot.

Fire spez.

Why is everyone up in arms about this?

The legislation specifically excludes open source software. Has nobody in this discussion actually read the proposed legislation?

From the current proposal legislation text:

In order not to hamper innovation or research, free and open-source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity should not be covered by this Regulation. This is in particular the case for software, including its source code and modified versions, that is openly shared and freely accessible, usable, modifiable and redistributable.

There is also a clause that states those using open source software in commercial products must report any vulnerabilities found to the maintainer.

That article is absolute trash. It's a pulsar. There are no "perplexing messages". They don't "strongly believe" that it's aliens or any deliberate communication at all.

The article is just making stuff up.

If you go to the source of the story, The Mirror (the fucking Mirror!), despite the misleading sensationalism, even that points out that the scientisits ruled out artificial sources within hours of its discovery, concluding it is a neutron star or white dwarf.

You really have to do a shit job at reporting to do worse than the Mirror!

OMG I can't believe you had the audacity to write an answer about cats in response to a serious question that is clearly about goats.

In addition to other reasons already given, commercial software may contain licensed code, libraries, assets, trademarks, and other IP that cannot legally be given away for free, or under an open source licence.

Sure, it may be possible to strip those things out, but that may leave the software broken or fundamentally changed, and it may be a significant amount of work to do, which am author or publisher is not likely to spend on abandoned software, especially if their free release would compete with any current products.

If its possible to watch the video, then it's possible to watch the video without ads.

Worst case scenario: videos can be downloaded and adverts stripped from them. (If you can watch it, you can copy it.) Would you be prepared to trade, say, a 20 minute timeshift delay on your YouTube videos' initial publish time for no adverts? I would.

And many "circles" aren't circles either, but 2D torus approximations. The edge of a true circle is made of infinitesimally small points so would be invisible when drawn. And even if you consider a filled circle, how could you be sure you aren't looking at a 1-torus with an infinitessimally small hole? Or an approximation of all the set of all points within a circle?

Clearly, circles are a scam.

Sorry, but this is completely wrong.

Windows has ACLs and they are an important part of Windows administration, and used extensively for managing file permissions.

Windows has supported ACLs on NTFS since Windows NT & NTFS were released in 1993 (possibly partly influenced by AIX ACLs in the late 80s influenced by VMS ACLs introduced the early 80s).

ACLs were not introduced to standard POSIX until c.1998, and NFS and Linux filesystems didn't get them until 2003. In fact, the design of the NFSv4 ACL standard was heavily influenced by the design of NTFS/Windows ACL model -- a specific decision by the designers to model it more like NTFS rather than AIX/POSIX.

Technically, at the filesystem level, exFAT also provides support for ACLs, but I am not sure if any implementation actually makes use of this feature (not even Windows AFAIK, certainly not any desktop version).

In this thread: people who don't understand what power is.

Power isn't something that is "pushed" into a device by a charger. Power is the rate at which a device uses energy. Power is "consumed" by the device, and the wattage rating on the charger is a simply how much it can supply, which is determined by how much current it can handle at its output voltage. A device only draws the power it needs to operate, and this may go up or down depending on what it's doing, e.g. whether your screen is on or off.

As long as the voltage is correct, you could hook your phone up to a 1000W power supply and it will be absolutely fine. This is why everything's OK when you plug devices into your gaming PC with a 1000W power supply, or why you can swap out a power-hungry video card for a low-power one, and the power supply won't fry your PC. All that extra power capability simply goes unused if it isn't called for.

The "pushing force" that is scaled up or down is voltage. USB chargers advertise their capabilities, or a power delivery protocol is used to negotiate voltages, so the device can choose to draw more current and thus power from the charger, as its sees fit. (If the device tries to draw too much, a poorly-designed charger may fail, and in turn this could expose the device to inappropriate voltages and currents being passed on, damaging both devices. Well designed chargers have protections to prevent this, even in the event of failure. Cheap crappy chargers often don't.)

Back in the day, I discovered I could i) print over IR to our office's HP laser printer from my Psion organiser, ii) print control codes from the built-in OPL language to change the display message on the printer. I would occassionaly send messages like "insert coin", "too much paper", "grammatical error", etc. when colleagues were printing.

Fair point. And yes, there's just so many ways he could have made money from third party apps and their users without trashing them. The AI explanation just didn't make any sense to me at all.

A business brain would have followed the money. He's just following half-witted ideas/ego. I don't think he really realises or understands what he had.

It is possible to an extent with certain breeds, e.g. Egyptian Mau. However, they are curious and skittish so may not follow you everywhere if they find something interesting or get spooked. When you get too far from their known "territory" they may stop and wait for you to come back, (while also yelling at you to come back to the concern of passers-by!).

I used to go for walks with my gf and her egyptian maus. They would follow along like a pride of tiny lions but spread out a bit, so while we walked on paths their parallel routes would go through gardens, over roofs, fields, fences, etc.

In fact it was more of an effort to train them not to follow us everywhere, e.g. to the shops, work, etc. They would often follow neighbours' children to school and back (and sometimes follow the wrong child home and get lost!).

Maus are also more amenable to being on a leash than most breeds, although you need to get them used to it early in life.

The main problem is if they decide to run away from something they are blazingly fast and near impossible to catch and recover from whatever inaccessible perch or hidey-hole they run to. My gf's cats had been trained to return to the sound of jangling keys, but that only worked most of the time.

Hasn't left the UK top 100 singles chart for 372 consecutive weeks! Longest charting single of all time.

Over what time period? How many hours did you need to grind to earn that amount?

People who use Chromebooks are also really slow and aren’t technically savvy at all.

Nonsense. I think your opinion is clouded by your limited experience with them.

ChromeOS supports a full Debian Linux virtual machine/container environment. That's not a feature aimed at non-tech-savvy users. It's used by software developers (especially web and Android devs), linux sysadmins, and students of all levels.

In fact I might even argue the opposite: a more technically-savvy user is more likely to find a use case for them.

Personally, I'm currently using mine for R&D in memory management and cross-platform compiler technology, with a bit of hobby game development on the side. I've even installed and helped debug Lemmy on my chromebook! It's a fab ultra-portable, bullet proof dev machine with a battery life that no full laptop can match.

But then I do apparently have an IQ of zero, so maybe you're right after all...

In the latest version of the emergency broadcast specification (WEA 3.0), a smart phone's GPS capabilities (and other location features) may be used to provide "enhanced geotargeting" so precise boundaries can be set for local alerts. However, the system is backwards compatible -- if you do not have GPS, you will still receive an alert, but whether it is displayed depends on the accuracy of the location features that are enabled. If the phone determines it is within the target boundary, the alert will be displayed. If the phone determines it is not within the boundary, it will be stored and may be displayed later if you enter the boundary.

If the phone is unable to geolocate itself, the emergency message will be displayed regardless. (Better to display the alert unnecessarily than to not display it at all).

The relevant technical standard is WEA. Only the latest WEA 3.0 standard uses phone-based geolocation. Older versions just broadcast from cell towers within the region, and all phones that are connected to the towers will receive and display the alerts. You can read about it in more detail here.

Every US state has official state foods, sometimes getting as specific as state vegetable, state dessert, state grape, etc.

This list should give you a head start: list of official US state foods

While a 3 year service contract was clearly overkill, your estimate of 1 hour is ridiculously tiny. Nothing of any worth can be audited with a 1 hour phone call.

The more time I spend on lemmy, the less I'm missing reddit.

Lemmy feels fresher, more positive, and faster. It's a bit rough around the edges, but things will only improve, and there seems to be a large number of people willing to get involved and help out.

Even if the current blackout amounted to nothing, at least Lemmy has had a boost in users and engagement. Lemmy and the fediverse will learn lessons, improve, and fix bugs, and will be here for the next time reddit fucks up, and gain even more users.

I think I'll be staying regardless, reddit has been pissing me off for the last couple of years. It was mainly the lack of a viable alternative that kept me there.

Sp*z has fucked up badly this time. And he will continue to fuck up.

There are myriad ways to make money off third party apps that benefits both reddit and the apps. Spez is an absolute moron, who has thrown a spanner in the works of both, when he was sitting on a golden opportunity. I don't think he has any business sense at all.

Jolly Ranchers

Firefox + uBlock origin, and reVanced for YouTube ad-blocking/other features.

I was once asked by our CTO to remove all instances of the word "nonce" from our crypto code. (British slang for paedophile/pervert)

And writing code to find, kill, and reap orphaned children is routine stuff. I mean, you wouldn't want to risk pesky zombie orphans running amok in your system!

Ah, OK. So it seems it's a case of the spirit of the text not matching the precise technical wording used. IMO, the legislation clearly intends to exclude freely-distributable open-source software, but the issue lies with what constitutes a commercial activity. (I've not yet checked the rest of the document to see if it clearly defines "commercial activity" in relation to the legislation.)

TBH, it seems that what is needed here is a clarification and tightening up of definitions, not wholesale rejection of the legislation.

In that case you'd be better off installing and learning Debian. It's what Linux Mint and Ubuntu are based on, as well as many other distros such as Knoppix, Raspberry Pi OS, Kali, and many more. What you learn about Debian will be transferable to many other systems.

3D printer that can print fully-populated functional electronic devices. Design or download a schematic for, say a new camera or phone, make whatever modifications I want, and just hit print!

Basically a replicator for electronic devices...

Lots of traffic, lots of posts, lots of comments, ... That's going to need more storage, more bandwidth, more CPU power, higher running costs. The original instance hosting the community bears a higher load than the instances that duplicate it.

Ideally, there would be a way to more evenly distribute this load across instances according to their resources, but from my (currently limited) knowledge, I don't think Lemmy/ActivityPub is really geared for that kind of distributed computing, and currently I don't believe that there's a way to move subs between instances to offload them (although I believe some people may be working on that).

Perhaps the Lemmy back-end could use a distributed architecture for serving requests and storage, such that anyone could run a backend server to donate resources without necessarily hosting an instance.

For example, I currently have access to a fairly powerful spare server. I'm reluctant to host a Lemmy instance on it as I can't guarantee its availability in the long term (so any communities/user accounts would be lost when it goes down), but while it's available I'd happily donate CPU/storage/bandwidth to a Lemmy cloud, if such a thing existed.

There are pros and cons to this approach, but it might be worth considering as Lemmy grows in popularity.

The German equivalent of the traditional Mr Punch / Pulcinella character is called Kasper. There are several variations in spelling in different countries/ languages, so i guess Kaspar must be one of them (or OP misremembered the spelling.)

Which will just push people towards file sharing. If your DRM makes your service less convenient than copyright infringement, people will infringe copyright.

If companies start getting too draconian, the ad-blocking/circumvention/copying/sharing technologies will start getting smarter and harder to detect and circumvent. It is a battle that cannot be won.

I'd say the main obstacle in the short term is that as Google controls both client side (Chrome) for the majority and server-side can manipulate web standards to make ad-blocking harder, by exploiting their near-monopoly. They've already done this to an extent by modifying browser extension APIs. But people can just switch browsers. I've already done that on mobile. And if ChromeOS prevents it, I'll be erasing it and installing native Linux.

The modern definition we use today was cemented in 1998, along with the foundation of the Open Source Initiative. The term was used before this, but did not have a single well-defined definition. What we might call Open Source today, was mostly known as "free software" prior to 1998, amongst many other terms (sourceware, freely distributable software, etc.).

Listen again to your 1985 example. You're not hearing exactly what you think you're hearing. Note that in your video example the phrase used is not "Open-Source code" as we would use today, with all its modern connotations (that's your modern ears attributing modern meaning back into the past), but simply "open source-code" - as in "source code that is open".

In 1985 that didn't necessarily imply anything specific about copyright, licensing, or philosophy. Today it carries with it a more concrete definition and cultural baggage, which it is not necessarily appropriate to apply to past statements.

I heard a rumor that even non-vegetarians can eat salad.

Users get a service, so it can be argued they are paid in kind. That's the price of their "free" services.

Whether you agree with that or not, websites are unlikely to pay users to use their services (unless they're at least providing content) any more than a coffee shop would pay its customers to drink their coffee.

True, but I'd still like to see the explanation for why a mouse driver needs to be 300MB...!

Trademarks and copyright are intellectual property.

You are partially correct. The general public also has protection written into in law in Canada (Yukon and Nunavut being current exceptions).

From the Ontario "Good Samaritan Act (2001)", Section 2:

Protection from liability

2. (1) Despite the rules of common law, a person described in subsection (2) who voluntarily and without reasonable expectation of compensation or reward provides the services described in that subsection is not liable for damages that result from the person's negligence in acting or failing to act while providing the services, unless it is established that the damages were caused by the gross negligence of the person. 2001, c. 2, s. 2 (1).[12]

What you are saying really only applies to people who are rendering aid in some kind of professional capacity, or for remuneration. (So a higher bar of competence should be met if it is part of your job to give such assistance, as the above text would not apply to you if it is your job.)

If you are simply helping someone with no expectation of payment, you are not liable for any damages due to your negligence, unless you are acting with gross negligence. And educating yourself in first aid would be a good first step in avoiding negligence.

Gross negligence requires recklessness, or purposeful ignoring of health and safety. If you are acting with good intentions and with due consideration for the health and well being to the best of your ability, it is difficult to see how the bar for gross negligence would be met.

Such "good samaritan" laws are a common feature in many countries around the world, although it should be noted that there are regions (including some in Canada: Yukon and Nunavut) where such laws do not exist.

Idk man, I think it might have some reliability issues... I tried restoring my data and all I got back was a badly-typed copy of the complete works of Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. Theoretically, if everyone was using state-of-the-art designs of fast-breeder reactors, we could have up to 300,000 years of fuel. However, those designs are complicated and extremely expensive to build and operate. The finances just don't make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.

As for Uranium for sea-water -- this too is possible, but has rapidly diminishing returns that make it financially unviable quite rapidly. As Uranium is extracted and removed from the oceans, exponentially more sea-water must be processed to continue extracting Uranium at the same rate. This gets infeasible pretty quickly. Estimates are that it would become economically unviable within 30 years.

Realistically, with current technology we have about 80-100 years of viable nuclear fuel at current consumption rates. If everyone was using nuclear right now, we would fully deplete all viable uranium reserves in about 5 years. A huge amount of research and development will be required to extend this further, and to make new more efficient reactor designs economically viable. (Or ditch capitalism and do it anyway -- good luck with that!)

Personally, I would rather this investment (or at least a large chunk of it) be spent on renewables, energy storage and distribution, before fusion, with fission nuclear as a stop-gap until other cleaner, safer technologies can take over. (Current energy usage would require running about 15000 reactors globally, and with historical accident rates, that's about one major nuclear disaster every month). Renewables are simpler, safer, and proven ,and the technology is more-or-less already here. Solving the storage and distribution problem is simpler than building safe and economical fast-breeder reactors, or viable fusion power. We have almost all the technology we need to make this work right now, we mostly just lack infrastructure and the will to do it.

I'm not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying there's no place for nuclear, and I think there should be more funding for nuclear research, but the boring obvious solution is to invest heavily in renewables, with nuclear as a backup and/or future option. Maybe one day nuclear will progress to the point where it makes more sound sense to go all in on, say fusion, or super-efficient fast-breeders, etc. but at the moment, it's basically science fiction. I don't think it's a sound strategy to bank on nuclear right now, although we should definitely continue to develop it. Maybe if we had continued investing in it at the same rate for the last 50 years it might be more viable -- but we didn't.

Source for estimates: "Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?", Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. It's an older article, but nuclear technology has been pretty much stagnant since it was published.

No it hasn't, and if you don't see why, and why your explanation is incredibly simplistic and insufficient as an explanation of consciousness, you may not fully realise or understand the problem.

I don't believe in life after death etc. and I believe consciousness is indeed manifested somewhere in the brain (and tied to those electrical impulses in some way), yet find your explanation utterly insufficient to address the "hard problem" of consciousness. It doesn't explain qualia, or subjective experience.

Now obviously we do seem to have proved that consciousness is somehow related to such electrical impulses and other processes in the brain... but to say that we even begin to understand how actual subjective conscious experience arises from this is simply not true.

For starters: your logical steps from brain uses electricity -> consciousness is in the brain -> therefore consciousness is in the electrical impulses is a non-sequitur.

To illustrate: CPUs are made up of logic gates that utilise electricity to perform many operations. We know mathematical calculations are done in the CPU. Therefore mathematics is in the logic gates. Does that sound right to you? Is that in any way a satisfactory explanation of what maths is, or where mathemarical concepts exists or how marhs came to be? Does maths only exist in electrical logic gates?

Doesn't seem at all right does it? Yet that's precisely the same leap of logic you just used.

Now before you reply with "ah, but that's totally different" carefully examine why you think it's different for consciousness...

In addition, there are more than just electrical impulses going on in the brain. Why do you choose electrical or only electrical? Do you think all electrical systems are conscious? What about a computer? What about your house electrical system? Do you draw a distinction? If so, where is the distinction? Can you accurately describe what exactly about certain electrical systems and not others gives rise to direct subjective experience and qualia? What is the precise mechanism that leads to electrons providing a conscious subjective experience? Would a thinking simulation of a brain experience the same qualia?

If you really can't see what I'm getting at with any of this, perhaps you might be a philosophical zombie.. not actually conscious yourself. Just a chemical computer firing some impulses that perfectly simulates a conscious entity, just like an AI but in meat form. Carefully consider: how do you personally know if this is or isn't true?

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Ah, of course! And it does have extra buttons too. Remarkable they squeezed all that advanced engineering in under half a gigabyte, tbh. I clearly didn't think it through!