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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 8th, 2023

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  • and if you consider that “economic barrier to entry” can make any bigger company, who is able to scoop a startup’s code & sell the use of it, can extinguish the startup who created the code

    then, yes, there are definitely situations where protection-against-competitors, some of whom have DEEP pockets, could be an actual requirement, for opensourcing one’s code.

    “Coopetition” Bill Gates coined, where you “cooperate” with your competitors, but, being Microsoft, you do it so you can snuff them, soon.

    I can definitely see why a company would want to be able to allow limited use of their code, globally, but to legally-prohibit using it to destroy them.


  • I’ve been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female…

    : P

    The book “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess” by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women’s-rights simply don’t progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages…

    So, Anglo cultures pushed women’s-rights, whereas Latin cultures … won’t, don’t, drag their heels, etc…

    That book is now a couple ?decades? old?

    It’s still true.

    Conditioning an entire population’s System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place…

    Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas…

    … digging …

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

    ( that isn’t a quick read… may come back to it some day… )

    Bingo!

    “The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic.”

    from

    https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/

    So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people’s System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.

    What about Hebrew?

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/

    No wonder women can’t get equal-validity in Jewish culture…

    ( I read a Jewess’s writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ … which explains the damage in the stereotypical “Jewish mother”, a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature… )

    So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is … baseless, in some/many cultures…

    Interesting, but depressing.

    : \



  • The problem is the end of civil-rights: WHEN the only internet left is the internet that IS for-profit propaganda, auto-deleting all non-compliant human thought, discussion, intelligence, objectivity, etc,

    THEN humanity is just managed “steers” whose lives are being consumed by corporations which graze on us.

    Since another dimension of ratchet is the concentration-of-wealth, you can see that working-destitution is being enforced on more & more of humankind, and real wealth being limited to fewer & fewer…

    What happens when the working-poor try fighting for a fair share of the economy?

    Rigged legislation, rigged “police” ( I used to believe in the police ), anti-education Florida-style for the public, etc…

    AI tilts the playing-field, and it does-so for the monied special-interest-groups.

    They don’t have humanitarianism at heart.

    Neither do the politically motivated.

    Neither do for-profit-psychopaths ( corporations are psychopaths ).

    Living in a Decorator Prison is all humanity can hope for, now: inmates, … except for the fewer & fewer oligarchs & the financial-class.

    'tisn’t looking good.

    Without Divine Intervention, which is statistically improbable an event, these are The End Times, but not for the reason that the religious claim.



  • Wikipedia has an ISB# search system, but the only way I know-of to use it,

    is to bash around on wikipedia until one succeeds in finding a link that uses that search-system, in some page’s References section,

    …and then when I get to that system, then change the ISB# to the book I’m trying to find…

    I WISH that Lemmy had an inbuilt facility for giving it a book, and it would produce the wikipedia-book-search link that is required for that book,

    because then the viewer gets ALL venues for the thing, plain as day.

    : )

    Here’s seconding your vote for OpenLibrary, btw: they showed me that a couple of textbooks weren’t skippable or replaceable ( “Principles of Yacht Design”, e.g. )

    As for links to Amazon: I do that, specifically because the reviews for the books are so important to deciding what the worth of the book is, for any individual reader!

    You need to read the sample AND the reviews, often, to decide if it’s worth that amount of money.

    I wish I could provide both the Amazon link AND the Wikipedia ISB# link ( for the paper version, obviously, as every ebook platform has its own ISB#'s ), and then people could see the sample, the reviews, AND could see all the options for getting it, laid-out before their eyes.

    ( :