• 9 Posts
  • 797 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m not a lawyer, but I’m also not entirely unfamiliar with this sort of thing. In particular, I remember Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org and thus do not accept at face value the notion that the data in question being “summaries and explanations of cases” necessarily means Westlaw is in the right. Even if the Westlaw materials aren’t “officially” incorporated into the law itself the way Georgia did, that doesn’t mean Westlaw should necessarily be entitled to monopolize them, especially if the judicial system is heavily leaning upon them to inform its decisions.


  • Ah, fuck, is that what the case is about? That sucks; that’s the kind of case where they both need to lose:

    • The law shouldn’t be copyrightable
    • AI companies shouldn’t be allowed to ‘launder’ copyright (and more to the point, copyleft) by reproducing chunks of copyrighted works divorced from their license

    If I were more conspiracy-minded, I would almost think that somebody intentionally decided to resolve this case first in order to guarantee that they set a disastrous precedent.






  • In the last decade, I’ve had that sort of issue affect me twice:

    1. I bought an AMD Vega 56 on launch day, and I had to run it with the proprietary driver for a while.
    2. I recently upgraded my three monitors, and was having trouble getting them all to do the 1440p/100Hz they were rated for. After a bunch of fiddling with xrandr etc. and trying to add modelines and whatnot, it turned out the real problem was that I needed to upgrade from HDMI cables to DisplayPort ones.

    Anyway, I guess the gist is that I wouldn’t have expected Windows to do any better in either case.






  • For all I know that user may indeed be sus, but not because of those comments, which don’t say what you claim they say:

    1. The first comment wasn’t “talking up the Greens;” it was accusing the Democratic Party of disregarding leftists. It did not say that people should not vote for Harris; it only explained why they might make that choice. Furthermore, it cast that schism between leftists and Democrats as a bad thing that would lead to disaster, which is the opposite of advocating for it. Especially in retrospect, his criticism of the Democrats was correct, and so was his prediction that Harris would move further right and then lose.

    2. The second comment did not say that Trump’s environmental policies were better than Biden’s; it said that the pandemic was a good example of degrowth. At most it was a fatalistic “the outcomes under Trump will be better for the climate because he’ll fuck everything up so bad that the whole economy will grind to a halt” sort of argument.

    3. In the third comment, he was arguing against protest-voting for third-party candidates under our current first-past-the-post voting system.

    Frankly, I think @federalreverse@feddit.org acted hastily and should double-check your “research.”









  • Also, it’s more and more clear that it’s a bad idea that websites can just execute arbitrary code. The JS APIs are way too powerful and complex nowadays.

    Javascript in general was a mistake, and always has been.

    The web should’ve had Scheme or Python instead. Or better yet, we shouldn’t have given up so quickly on Java Web Start because then we could’ve had proper web applications with their own windows and native UIs and such.

    Maybe websites and apps should’ve stayed separate concepts instead of merging into “web apps”.

    Damn straight!