I’d be careful of pushing the narrative about computers not being a good choice for regular users. I’m going to channel a bit of Stallman and say that that’s how we end up without The Right To Read

For your bullet points:

• Yeah, GNOME can be flakey with extensions. Almost no regular users will install extensions though. Windows also has tons of bugs and issues that users just ignore because it’s the “default”
• Regular users won’t care about desktop scaling. I’ve seen people using the blurriest, weirdest aspect ratios on Windows because they liked it that way
• Bluetooth sucks on all hardware and with all software, to various degrees.
• Syncing files is trivial with Syncthing
• MacOS keeps breaking my coworker’s setups with every update.

GPU issues can be hard, but that’s not really Linux’s fault. There’s a reason this image exists of Linus giving nvidia the middle finger:

That being said, it’s getting better. As of this year, nvidia has started putting some real effort into making things work with wayland.

EDIT: I’ve found nirvana with NixOS, speaking of GPU drivers. I just add a few lines to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and it goes off and ensures that the nvidia drivers are present. I also run lots of CUDA stuff on top of that and it all works about as seamlessly as possible.

I respect that you work in the arts. However, I think too many people worried about copyright think that things would look similar to the way they are today, but the situation would be radically different without copyright. For example, Disney wouldn’t exist. You wouldn’t have large corporations taking and not giving back, because those large corporations wouldn’t exist like they do now in the first place.

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.

mapcomplete has integration with this site:

https://mangrove.reviews/

I’ve also seen this project:

https://lib.reviews/

Thanks, yeah. There weren’t any immediately nearby, but I’ll try searching farther out.

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IMO it’s the weakest of the series. The next two books, The Player of Games or Use of Weapons are much better, at least to me. Use of Weapons is great, but has a somewhat challenging narrative structure of two intermixed timelines, so if that’s not your thing The Player of Games would probably be a good one to try.

Nice! It’s been a while since I’ve read any of his stuff. I should be done with my current book soon, what are a few of your favorites from him?

I’m pretty meh on the arguments there. It would be different, but we’d adapt. And we’d fix a lot bunch of problems.

The difference is that you’re not changing how time is kept. Countries can change their timezone offsets right now to screwy things like +12:45 and it changes how time is recorded and stored. If we switch to UTC, a country can just declare their official hours are shifting and nobody has to fundamentally change how clocks work.

IMO people would figure it out and life would go on. Yes, lots of people would have the calendar date advance in the middle of the day but that’s fine, we’d get used to it. People wouldn’t work 9-5 jobs, but we’d come up with different terminology.

I don’t really see the argument about people waking up at different times. Yeah, some people would wake up at 02:00 and some at 16:00, but when someone says they wake up at 02:00, there’s 0 confusion about when that is. You’d have to know when someone is awake to do an international call, but you have to do that anyways.

Have you read the other Culture books, or is this your first one? I just found out now that there’s !theculture@lemm.ee that could use some posts if you have anything you want to share about it. If you haven’t read it yet (or if anybody else is curious for a quick taste of the series), here’s the author writing a few notes on it:

http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

I thought this was also a good read, though it does have a few spoilers across the first few books:

https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2017/11/12/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/

Listening to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobook. I read it once ages ago, and am enjoying getting to all the good parts I only vaguely remember. It holds up pretty well, there’s a reason people are still quoting it. I use the term “excitingly chunky” to describe the “developer chic” style of buildings that are getting slung up around me.

The biggest issue so far is that Trillian is the most fleshed-out woman in the series, and she’s basically a cardboard cutout that has “girlfriend” hastily written on it. It might get better later on (I’m almost done with the 3rd book), but I don’t recall it happening. I know it’s not really the point of the series, but as someone that doesn’t tend to notice this sort of thing, it was very noticeable.

Oh also, it was kind of strange how little he mentioned AI. I like how he wrote that the AI wasn’t trusted to be a Swordholder because it was “too logical”. Completely missed the boat on ChatGPT. “Write a play in which Harry Potter pressed the button to destroy humanity, and then act it out” or something like that would be all it takes.

It was also strange that hundreds of years in the future, humans are still doing hard manual labor. Where are the robots?

IMO Hacker News handles this better. Threads/comments are rarely deleted, they’re mostly minimized and you have to log in to expand them

Unfortunately there isn’t one easy source that I’ve found. This is based on reading the stuff you linked to, as well as discourse/matrix discussions linked to from those sources. I compare it mentally to Guido van Rossum as BDFL of Python (though not any longer). He did a much better job of communicating expectations, like here

It made some people unhappy that there was no Python 2.8, but everybody knew what was happening. The core Python team also wasn’t surprised by that announcement, unlike with stuff like Anduril or flakes for the nix devs.

There was also a failure to communicate with stuff like the PR that would switch to Meson. The PR author should have known if Eelco broadly agreed with it before opening it. If there was a process that the PR author just ignored, the PR should have been closed with “Follow this process and try again”. That process can be as simple as “See if Eelco likes it”, since he was BDFL, but the process needs to be very clear to everyone.

Those verses don’t conflict with evolution. They don’t conflict with anything, because they don’t mean anything. What scientific advancements happened because of those verses? None, because science advanced to the point where we understood how evolution works, and some religious people copied their homework and went looking for meaning after the fact. If those verses meant something, there would have been centuries of progress on evolution before Darwin. There wasn’t.

There’s plenty of things you can convince me of, you just have to provide evidence, which you haven’t done.

What could I say that would sway you into realizing that your religion is as silly as the rest? If the answer is nothing under the sun, then you’re using a cheap rhetorical trick of projecting your intellectual shortcomings onto other people in order to make yourself feel better about them.