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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • On a related note, I think libraries do need a bit of a facelift, and not just be “the place where books live”. It’s important to keep that function, but also expand to “a place where learning happens”. I know lots of libraries are doing this sort of thing, but your average person is probably still stuck in the “place where books live” mindset, as you allude. I’m talking stuff like 3D printers, makerspaces, diybio, classes about detecting internet bullshit, etc.


  • Threads like this, with highly upvoted comments like

    americans are more propagandized than they think citizens of the DPRK are

    They also use sarcasm try to push the narrative that North Korea is actually just fine, OK?

    Guys you don’t understand; the West has spoken; we MUST hate North Korea, our governments have already decreed it so.

    Many of them are also seemingly physically incapable of communicating without hexbear’s custom reaction images, which is a weird behavior common to many cults. Makes it harder to communicate with the outgroup.

    I think LW is defederated from them (or vice versa) so you can’t post over there, but for further examples, try making an account over there and saying that maybe, just maybe, Putin did a bad thing by invading Ukraine, and they’re defending an imperialist.




  • Not the person you’re asking, but I’d say yes. Don’t bother charging for bits, except for something like the bandcamp model, i.e. “yes, i could pirate this but i want to support the creator and it’s really easy to do so”.

    We have better funding models now that we’ve solved the problem of copying at zero cost. Patreon is a good and popular one, as well as kickstarters. You can’t pirate something that doesn’t get made, which is the perfect solution. Other art like music also makes money off of things like live performances that can’t be digitized.

    Note that the one aspect of copyright that I like is attribution requirements. I think it’s perfectly fine to hand out information to anyone, as long as you say “here’s this cool thing, this is who created it, and this is how you can give them money”.


  • I’d be fine with copyright going away altogether. People sometimes object to this on the grounds of “But Disney will just steal your ideas and make money off of them”. If their works don’t have copyright though, you can do the same right back to them.

    This is also one reason that I appreciate generative AI. Short-term, yes it will help Disney and the like. Slightly longer-term, why would anyone give Disney money if you can generate your own Marvel movie yourself?

    The genie also isn’t going back in the bottle. Copyright is a dead man walking. If you dislike what large companies like Disney are doing/going to do with generative AI, push for anyone training a model to be forced to let anyone whose work went into that model for free.


  • The original duration in the U.S. was 14 years, plus the option of a renewal for another 14. IMO we should move back to something close to that. One idea I’ve seen is that there’s an initial cost of however much for 7 years, and then the price doubles for every 7 year extension beyond that. Not even Disney can beat exponential growth, and it would force them to pick what they actually care about.

    I’d also prefer explicit registration. We’re losing too many works because nobody’s sure who owns the copyright, and nobody knows if it’s safe to archive them.

    I’d say that the original Star Wars trilogy should be public domain by now, for a concrete example. Disney can make new stories and characters in the universe and make money off of them, but everyone else should be able to as well.

    Also as an aside, here’s Richard Stallman on why the term “intellectual property” shouldn’t be used. It’s an umbrella term that doesn’t really make sense, and more explicit terms like copyright or patents or trademark should be used.


  • From here:

    On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. “Factoid” was a term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn, “Factoids…that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” Of late, factoid has come to mean a small or trivial fact that makes it a contronym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as “cleve” (to cling or to split), “sanction” (to permit or to punish) or “citation” (commendation or a summons to appear in court). So factoid has become a victim of novelist C.S. Lewis’s term “verbicide,” the willful distortion or deprecation of a word’s original meaning.










  • You don’t need a level 2 charger at home. You don’t need gas stations equivalents. EV companies won’t make infrastructure, because we’ve already built tons of infrastructure for EVs and it’s called the electric grid. Everywhere has electricity. I was recently in a very remote area for vacation in my EV, and just plugged my car into a regular outlet to charge it up. To get there, I stopped for lunch and plugged my car in at a supercharger while I ate.

    Target is putting in superchargers at lots of their locations around me. Other places are or will follow suit. If you can’t charge at home, you’ll simply stop by the store/mall/whatever, do your normal shopping, and have your car charge in the meantime. Or you’ll charge at work, or any number of other places.

    EVs aren’t hard, they just require a mindset shift. People worry about this and that, but it’s because they haven’t actually tried it and have given too much weight to FUD spread about EVs.



  • I charge my car off of a regular outlet outside in a very cold climate, and charging like that will actually likely make the battery last quite a while. The only way to find out for sure is to wait, but it has been 4 years and the battery hasn’t lost any capacity. My car also has a 320 km range, so even in your scenario, if you charged 50km away and came home, you’d still have 270km of range.

    I think you may have given too much weight to FUD about EVs from companies that would like to see them fail. I’ve seen a lot of concerns posted online that just don’t practically matter, once you actually try it. There’s also some really nice minor things about owning an EV, like not having to breathe in toxic fumes when walking around the car. Especially nice if you have kids that are right at the level of the tailpipe.

    It is also fine to wait a bit, of course. In my area chargers are springing up in lots of places, and I think we’re not far off from a tipping point away from ICE cars, which will spread even to rural areas pretty quickly when gas stations start becoming unprofitable.