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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2025

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  • public domain code can’t really be released under the GPL

    Disney created films based on old fairy tales. Disney has a copyright on those films even though they include elements from the public domain because the films also include the artists’ original expression. The linux kernel (probably) contains public domain AI-generated code alongside original work from its many contributors. If you wanted to get the entire project into the public domain, you’d have to get permission from nearly all its contributors or wait for their copyright term to expire. The small snippets of code which were AI-generated are public domain. The bulk of the project isn’t, and the project as a whole isn’t.

    As much as I dislike AI, I can’t say I understand forbidding AI-generated contributions on the grounds that the submitted code is public domain. I suppose somebody can come along and “steal” the public domain snippets, but I suspect it’s difficult to definitively tell apart the human-written code from AI-generated and strip out the human-written bits. If they do, what’s the issue? It wasn’t yours to begin with and you can still keep it in your project. Moreover, now that the magical plagiarism machines exist, who’s going to be lifting code in this way, anyway?






  • The NoScript extension will properly do this. The extension blocks domains from running scripts except those you’ve whitelisted. There’s a drop down that displays a list of domains from which the page wishes to run scripts. It makes much of the web a pain to use, though. I sometimes have to go through a loop of whitelisting a subset of domains which want to run followed by a page refresh until the page works. Javascript is often not optional. If you had to live like Richard Stallman professes you should, you’d probably have to join the Amish.


  • I think the trouble young people have with using desktop computers is overstated. It’s a bit of a satanic panic situation. You can learn it pretty quickly. A common complaint is that “they don’t know hierarchical file systems” because the mobile devices have only flat file systems presented to the user or something. A tree structure is not a challenging concept and the basic things you can do in a file system you can count on 2 hands. Open a file, save a file, rename a file, delete a file, move a file, copy a file, create a directory, enter a directory, move up a directory. The physical interface is the mouse with 2 buttons, a primary and a secondary for opening context menus; and the keyboard which has the characters printed on them. There’s a bit more to it, but it can be explained in, like, a page of text. And the rest you can learn through experimentation. Touch typing is another thing entirely, though. That takes dedicated time to learn.

    I wonder if ineptitude with tech shared between the young and old are different kinds. Maybe the old are just completely inept, but, for the young, it’s just temporary. It’s a shock when we find out they don’t know something, but, after explaining it, they’re productive within minutes. A 20-year-old still has plenty of mental plasticity. Having to teach somebody the desktop metaphors isn’t a huge bottleneck.

    I’ll end by contending that I don’t think schools should not be teaching computers. Rather, they should be teaching computers in more depth. Teach students basic programming and they will have to learn the desktop metaphors along that journey anyway. Computers are way too important to leave the future stewards of the Earth in the dark about how they work. I had to learn how the energy of a photon relates to its wavelength and I had to read and analyze the Canterbury Tales. Not entirely useful. But it’s at least a little interesting. Kids are very capable. They won’t all be programmers. They should learn it all anyway. Don’t let Silicon Valley have it all to themselves.


  • Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it. You don’t even need to read a manual. I wonder if this is all a holdover from the 70s when the computer interface was likely to be a paper teletype which is naturally difficult to use without instruction. We’re living in the future. Teach the difficult stuff. The teachers need a wetware update.


  • Also, other sites on the Net can collate links posted to reddit and the users and times that they were posted with users accessing pages on their own site. For example, if you’ve posted a sufficient number of youtube links, youtube can possibly link your reddit account and youtube account, say, as belonging to the same person. Just about any popular site can link your reddit account with your IP address. And your facebook account with your IP address. Etc. And thereby link reddit accounts with facebook accounts in cases with long-lived IP addresses. If X is a scrapable site on which users with fixed pseudonyms can submit links and Y is a site popular enough and has enough content, then Y can collate user accounts on X with IP addresses. This is not to say anyone is doing this. There are not many sites that meet the criteria to be a Y. I would say it includes mainstream news sites. The authorities could compromise some of the Ys or create their own through astroturf and thereby link users on the Xs with IP addresses and then with location.

    These days, this might be a bit harder because reddit closed up when the AI companies started scraping. I don’t know the situation with Facebook with regard to scraping. If it’s scrapable, they’ve got your name linked to your reddit account.

    What I’ve said about reddit equally applies to lemmy, even more so because lemmy is open by principle.







  • The administration didn’t threaten to take down the IA or investigate it or anything like that, so it’s not similar at all.

    It’s conspiratorial to think the FBI is doing this to censor or hide something. archive.is is primarily used to get around paywalls. The most likely explanation is news sites complained to the FBI that their copyrights are being violated (which is true), so the FBI is investigating. They’ve had a problem with falling revenue for a decade or more at this point as everything went online and people expected to get instant access for free in contrast to print media.