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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I think the question of fair use is separate from the question of piracy, and probably separate from the question of intellectual property in general. Even if we were to protect fair use, that doesn’t make it legal to wholesale copy books. Individual piracy from people who can’t really afford it is one thing and largely harmless, even a net good. I know people who only started reading books from particular authors because they pirated one copy and bought others. That’s very different from a company downloading entire libraries of books without paying. Shifting the question from piracy to fair use is just another way of making you think of the wrong question.

    I’d like to live in a world that doesn’t gatekeep property. But we live in a world where artists aren’t paid for their work directly, and in that world intellectual property is necessary.


  • I’d say don’t be hesitant to try to get her into things. Don’t push it multiple times, but if she’s genuinely never heard of, for example, South Park, just show her an episode. If she doesn’t like it, that’s that and it’s not your fault or anything and it sounds like she’s at least willing to give things a shot for you.

    Then of course try to find things you’ll both like. But do it together cause it’s more fun that way and it sucks to feel like you’re the only one trying.

    But also maybe you don’t have a ton of interests to share and just enjoy each other’s company and that’s fine 🤷



  • You should give Claude Code a shot if you have a Claude subscription. I’d say this is where AI actually does a decent job: picking up human slack, under supervision, not replacing humans at anything. AI tools won’t suddenly be productive enough to employ, but I as a professional can use it to accelerate my own workflow. It’s actually where the risk of them taking jobs is real: for example, instead of 10 support people you can have 2 who just supervise the responses of an AI.

    But of course, the Devil’s in the detail. The only reason this is cost effective is because of VC money subsidizing and hiding the real cost of running these models.















  • I think mint is crazy better these days compared to 10 years ago, and it probably just came down to “we want to be user friendly to those who need their hands held” crashing into “actual users who need their hand held are trying it out.” 10 years ago, I think there simply wasn’t enough interested in Linux outside of Linux circles to properly test and figure things out, not to mention the strides the software itself has made in supporting more hardware more seamlessly.

    The thing about RTFM is that users don’t, and the users that stuff like Mint is geared towards is those who when asked to read a wiki page, will simply give up. Windows has a cottage industry of people who do various things to make it easier for that kind of user. For example, just installing Windows on a device for you (albeit with bloatware usually) complete with all the drivers for your hardware. For most of the hardware on a laptop (audio, internet, HIDs, USB), that’ll have you set for life without having to touch anything and for the graphics that’ll at least have you set for several years without having to touch anything. And it’s not like Linux doesn’t have this level of support, it’s just that Windows has this level of support for consumers and Linux typically has it relegated to the enterprise sphere.

    That being said, it’s insane how easy it is now to just install Mint, or PopOS, or even Ubuntu and have a working system. But most users don’t even install their Windows, much less a completely foreign OS.