This is one of those “technically true but functionally useless” arguments, and I hate arguing the other side here… Valve always has the option to stop using Visa and, I don’t know, have customers write out and physically mail checks or money orders.

Obviously the number of customers who would do this is microscopic. It’s not a real thing anytime would ever do. But because the option exists, they aren’t technically making the content impossible to sell.

Suppose a person owns an apartment building. What’s the process they should follow to behave as a good person should?

Devs make mistakes. We want to put up guardrails so mistakes don’t hurt us so much.

Please don’t deliberately line the guardrails with barbed wire.

The N=16 keeps getting buried. Deliberate?

N=16 developers

Dungeons of Daggorath. I had a Color Computer 2 growing up, while we lived in a trailer park. I was still a little afraid of the dark, and the hallways and first person view with jump-scare monsters were a bit intense for me. I’d have to run from one end of the hallway to the other, to get to the bathroom and back.

The impressive event queue system in that game felt like magic to me, like I wondered what happened to the monsters when you turn the computer off.

I was a “smart kid” but I don’t think I was a smart kid.

(Something something original author, something something signed copy of the original source code on my github)

I feel like there should be a third box with Wall Street raider types, for scrapers that use Selenium browser automation.

I don’t think it’s entirely unblockable - adsense seems to know to only serve unmonetized PSA ads - but I think it’s very difficult to discriminate between “this is a real browser controlled by an end user” and “this is a real browser being controlled by automated test software”.

Marco! Polo!

CW (continuous wave / Morse code) over RF in the 1900s.

Walkie talkies and car phones in the 1940s.

AMPS cell phones in the 1980s.

Mostly though they’re right. When you used telecommunications systems you were largely communicating with a location or a known station, not a personal identity. Fascinating to think about.

Wait… I just had an idea.

Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)

One part white vinegar to four parts water. Maybe a little apple cider vinegar for flavor. But soak your fresh berries for like five minutes, then rinse in clean water, dry, then put back in the fridge. Not in the same container or the contamination goes right back on.

I’m an American in that third group, theoretically quite comfortable, as a software developer with a six figure salary living in the Midwest.

I have no rebuttal. What you wrote is scarily accurate.

This.

My units and integration tests are for the things I thought of, and more importantly, don’t want to accidentally break in the future. I will be monumentally stupid a year from now and try to destroy something because I forgot it existed.

Testers get in there and play, be creative, be evil, and they discuss what they find. Is this a problem? Do we want to get out in front of it before the customer finds it? They aren’t the red team, they aren’t the enemy. We sharpen each other. And we need each other.

Love this, 100% accurate. QA people are amazing, protect us from ourselves in so many ways we didn’t even think of.

Yeah same, I make noise to be less “I’m being sneaky” because I’m not trying to be. It never occurred to me this could be taken as “I’m trying to start a conversation, while not being in your field of view at all and also not saying any words.” I don’t do this when walking with my wife.

That’s right. Even if you have to use a windows app that Linux compatibility layers don’t support, you can banish Windows 11 to a virtual machine.

Oh, weird, even in a virtual machine it wants an account. Anyone know where I can find a bypass method? :-)

I think this might be hypocritical of me, but in one sense I think I prefer that outcome. Let those existing trained models become the most vile and untouchable of copyright infringing works. Send those ill-gotten corporate gains back to the rights holders.

What, me? Of course I’ve erased all my copies of those evil, evil models. There’s no way I’m keeping my own copies to run, illicitly, on my own hardware.

(This probably has terrible consequences I haven’t thought far enough ahead on.)

I think you’re right about style. As a software developer myself, I keep thinking back to early commercial / business software terms that listed all of the exhaustive ways you could not add their work to any “information retrieval system.” And I think, ultimately, computers cannot process style. They can process something, and style feels like the closest thing our brains can come up with.

This feels trite at first, but computers process data. They don’t have a sense of style. They don’t have independent thought, even if you call it a “<think> tag”. Any work product created by a computer from copyrighted information is a derivative work, in the same way a machine-translated version of a popular fiction book is.

This act of mass corporate disobedience, putting distillate made from our collective human works behind a paywall needs to be punished.

. . .

But it won’t be. That bugs me to no end.

(I feel like my tone became a bit odd, so if it felt like the I was yelling at the poster I replied to, I apologize. The topic bugs me, but what you said is true and you’re also correct.)

Look instead for the reported causes. The effect “is sundown town or not” might be difficult to conclusively prove or disprove. The causes are sometimes documented though.

Unfortunately true. It’s disturbing to see the non-policy-related causes from that page:

Police discrimination (a crime)

Vandalism (a crime)

Discriminatory housing practices (currently a crime)

Gentrification (a market effect)

Supplemented with actual policy change. They don’t need the help.

In this age of ubiquitous phone cameras and instant social judgement, I look forward to the backlash as racists reveal themselves.

What’s the civic process for replacing senators and representatives who fail to impeach him?

(Please stop saying Luigi. We need to talk about actual civic processes that can work, instead of criminal fantasies.)