Joking aside, it’s actually not. It was invented to explain why a particular group of captives were critical of the cops who arrested their captor — but it turns out it was because the cops were incredibly incompetent and nearly got them all killed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norrmalmstorg_robbery

Came here for this. How can they legally use a headline like that. This is why we can’t have nice things.

You’re not wrong, but, like with critics of other “abolish such-n-such” statements, you’re missing a core part of it: replacing “such-n-such” with something better. Copyright has a few important purposes, and I don’t think anyone would want to eliminate it without covering those — and the need for creators to survive, and maybe even flourish, is chief among them.

(Same thing with “defund the police” — the intention was to redirect that funding to crime prevention and “alternative policing” (eg send therapists to mental health emergencies instead of cops). That was arguably the biggest PR fail of the century.)

Also, very very minor point, but as a librarian:

content libraries

I think “content collections” would be a better term, to preserve the free-to-share subtext of the word “library” — and “collection” has more of a hoarding context, which fits.

Most people say things like “fuck copyright” because it’s currently set up to benefit employers, large companies, and wealthy people; creators are an obstacle in copyright law. Current copyright law hinders creativity and centralizes wealth. Fuck copyright.

If copyright law was creator-centric, there would be a lot fewer people saying “fuck copyright”.

Personally I’d probably still be against copyright, but only if there was some other way to take care of artists, like a UBI or something.

If copyright protected the creatives then there would be a lot less antagonism against copyright. Most people are against it because it’s become a lever of control for big companies to use against both the creators and the public.

My journey was Windows-> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch.

(Infuriatingly i still use windows for gaming, but nothing else.)

Did i mention that i use arch?

More importantly:

fucked up all my data with no backup.

One time i messed up a script and accidentally copied 40,000 mp3s to the same filename. 20 years of music collecting, literally going back to Napster, all gone.

Well, not completely gone. I’ve got everything uploaded to iBroadcast, and I’m pretty sure i can download my library. But I’m not sure i deserve to.

Surely it’s because they want to increase the amount they pay the musicians.

If you like to upload your own music (like Google music), iBroadcast is the tippy tops. You can still use bandcamp (with or without yt-dlp) for discovery, and then upload what you like to iBroadcast.

iBroadcast is what i use. That plus rutracker and you can sail the high seas like it’s 1699.

HTML is pretty straightforward so just understanding the very basic stuff is probably all you need. CSS is where html gets any challenge it might have.

CSS is weird because it’s very “easy” so “real developers” kind of object to learning it, but the truth is, if you gave any of them a layout design, they probably couldn’t build it. There are tools like tailwind to help, but, IMO, tailwind just helps you avoid learning css’s vocabulary, but you just replace it with having to learn tailwind’s vocabulary.

JavaScript on the other hand is a “real” programming language, though decidedly quick-n-dirtier than other languages. It lets you be a lot more sloppy. (Tbh it’s a lot more forgiving than css!). As a result, it lacks the elegance and control that “real developers” like – and, as most people’s first language, it lets newcomers get into bad habits. For these reasons, JavaScript is a bit derided – but, unlike CSS, most developers can’t avoid it.

There are a few key ideas in JavaScript that, once you understand them, things make a lot more sense. (I won’t get into them now, since it doesn’t sound like you’re at the point where that kind of clarity would help, but, when you are, come on back here and make a post!)

TLDR: HTML is definitely something you can just pick up along the way. JavaScript is a real language that will take a little while to feel comfortable with, and it will take a career to master. CSS will never be easy, so don’t let it hold you back.

Hi everyone, JP here. This person is making a reference to the Weird Al biopic, and if you haven’t seen it, you should.

Weird Al is an incredible person and has been through so much. I had no idea what a roller coaster his life has been! I always knew he was talented but i definitely didn’t know how strong he is.

His autobiography will go down in history as one of the most powerful and compelling and honest stories ever told. If you haven’t seen it, you really, really should.

ITT NO SPOILERS PLS

This isn’t true. AI can generate tan people if you show them the color tan and a pale person – or green people or purple people. That’s all ai does, whether it’s image or text generation – it can create things it hasn’t seen by smooshing together things it has seen.

And this is proven by reality: ai CAN generate csam, but it’s trained on that huge image database, which is constantly scanned for illegal content.

I guess my question is, why would anyone continue to “consume” – or create – real csam? If fake and real are both illegal, but one involves minimal risk and 0 children, the only reason to create real csam is for the cruelty – and while I’m sure there’s a market for that, it’s got to be a much smaller market. My guess is the vast majority of “consumers” of this content would opt for the fake stuff if it took some of the risk off the table.

I can’t imagine a world where we didn’t ban ai generated csam, like, imagine being a politician and explaining that policy to your constituents. It’s just not happening. And i get the core point of that kind of legislation – the whole concept of csam needs the aura of prosecution to keep it from being normalized – and normalization would embolden worse crimes. But imagine if ai made real csam too much trouble to produce.

AI generated csam could put real csam out of business. If possession of fake csam had a lesser penalty than the real thing, the real stuff would be much harder to share, much less monetize. I don’t think we have the data to confirm this but my guess is that most pedophiles aren’t sociopaths and recognize their desires are wrong, and if you gave them a way to deal with it that didn’t actually hurt chicken, that would be huge. And you could seriously throw the book at anyone still going after the real thing when ai content exists.

Obviously that was supposed to be children not chicken but my phone preferred chicken and I’m leaving it.

Follow up question – I’m not OP but I’m another not-really-new developer (5 years professional xp) that has 0 experience working with others:

I have trouble understanding where to go on the spectrum of “light touch” and “doing a really good job”. (Tldr) How should a contributor gauge whether to make big changes to “do it right” or to do it a little hacky just to get the job done?

For example, I wanted to make a dark mode for a site i use, so i pulled the sites’s repo down and got into it.

The CSS was a mess. I’ve done dark modes for a bunch of my own projects, and I basically just assign variables (–foreground-color, --background-color), and then swap their assignments by the presence or absence of a “.dark-mode” class in the body tag.

But the site had like 30 shades of every color, like, imperceptibly different shades of red or green. My guess was the person used a color picker and just eyeballed it.

If the site was mine, I would normalize them all but there was such a range – some being more than 10-15% different from each other – so i tried to strike a balance in my normalization. I felt unsure whether this was done by someone who just doesn’t give a crap about color/CSS or if it was carefully considered color selection.

My PR wasn’t accepted (though the devs had said in discord that i could/should submit a PR for it). I don’t mind that it wasn’t accepted, but i just don’t know why. I don’t want to accidentally step on toes or to violate dev culture norms.

Me: Oh, I get it, this “Lemmy” website – it’s like The Onion but for nerds?

My fellow lemmings: No, they’re serious. run0 is real.

Me: Hah. The Onion, but for nerds! I love it.

Imo they’ll add typing to vanilla js, which will kill ts.

Tell me it was “Top 10 Steven Universe Betrayals” without telling me it was “Top 10 Steven Universe Betrayals”

This is the core issue with the traditional dead man’s “switch” – it doesn’t require death to go off, just letting go of it, and there are other reasons why that might happen. By extension, a switch that requires you to log into something periodically might be problematic if you’re predisposed. Personally I’d just set a longer timer, a month is probably fine and, unless your “exposure” is extremely time sensitive, a month won’t matter once you’re dead.

This is a good point – it didn’t have to look like spam tho, it could look like anything. Or it could look like many things. Write up a 10-20 line text file of bullshit emails from one person, or even a few people – or even have Chat Gippity write them, tho that might have a paper trail, depending on your attacker.

All you have to do is put some “flag” word in the first few words so you recognize it. Then, any reply to that inbox (which could have many aliases) resets the timer.

The big problem is, imo, if you’re “dangerous” enough to de-alive, then you’ve already exposed something big. Would you have something left to expose after that?

Ethics are interesting because you can ignore them. It’s like, ethics exist within you regardless of whether you agree to them; if you don’t listen to that little voice, it gets easier and easier to ignore it. To put that in practical terms: murdering someone is pretty ethically difficult. Murdering a second time is less ethically difficult. It’s like we build a climate around ourselves; the more you listen to your ethical beliefs, the more repugnant the idea of ignoring them becomes.

That said, I’m not sure I’m on board with you on RHCP – but that’s maybe just me. I used to listen to them a lot in jr high (I’m old) when blood sugar sex magic had just come out. And while your opinion is totally valid, for me, like, I never thought he was much of an ethical role model. His lyrics are pretty misogynistic. (And, not great regardless, from a “objective artistic/poetic” perspective.) So like yeah he’s not a great person, but he never pretended to be, so to find out he isn’t doesn’t change much.

(As opposed to, say, Jowling Kowling Rowling, who used to talk about hating bigotry, but then turned out to be a super terrible bigot.)

Flea, on the other hand – I’ve never looked into him. I’m also a bassist and his influence on my bass education is so deep that I’m afraid to find out if he’s toxic lol. But he’s been in a band with Anthony Keidis for like 40 years, so, he’s probably not perfect.

(I’m not a slap or funk bassist, but what I learned from Flea was how to feel it. You can’t play Flea’s bass lines mechanically, they literally don’t sound correct; you have to feel the vibe, the groove has to move your fingers, not the time signature. That dude, ffs I hope he’s not an asshole, because he’s fucking incredible.)

Though IDK – after long careers together, from what I understand, people tend to see each other less.

For example, after the whole Me Too thing started, I heard an interview with Bob Weinstein, Harvey’s brother, the two of them started Miramax together and were basically partners. But he knew his brother was a piece of shit, and, at that time a few years ago, hadn’t actually spoken to him in “many years.” He didn’t dwell on the topic, he just said that, basically, and his tone was like, obviously disgusted, but he didn’t want to spend the time talking about that, so he didn’t.

He wasn’t exactly going to snitch his own brother into prison, and that’s asking a bit too much imo, but it shows ethical strength to not slip into that same kind of toxicity, especially when it’s so close to you, and probably so easy.