AnyOldName3

The justification for patents is that after a (relatively) short period of being under patent, because patents have to disclose how inventions work, the idea isn’t secret and anyone can use it. The patent system is the whole reason why companies don’t and can’t hide their inventions anymore. If we just got rid of the patent system wholesale, they’d go back to keeping things secret. That might be a big problem, or it might mean that, because anything that’s been reverse-engineered would be fair game, more things end up available sooner, depending on whether companies can obfuscate things well enough that it takes longer for a hobbyist to figure out than the patent would have to expire.

Technically it’s just that particular English translation that’s copyrighted. The original text is public domain.

I’m baffled that I didn’t already know that lootboxes were created by the husband of the woman that the Pulp hit Common People was most likely written about.

Unlike Reddit, it’s possible to edit the link a post links to after the fact, so it’s possible to swap in an uncropped link later instead of just removing the post.

The context: the UK ended slavery within the empire by taking out a huge loan to buy all the slaves in the empire, then freeing them. The loan wasn’t fully paid off until recently, so UK taxpayers were effectively paying for money that had been given to slave owners. However, it quickly and decisively put a stop to slavery in a lot of the world without much fuss or objection, when it otherwise could have triggered wars.

One of the stills from one of the videos that the BBC showed identifying it as a Tomahawk showed it at a very un-cruise-missile way up, so it could just have malfunctioned during terminal guidance or been clipped but not destroyed by air defence, and then hit the wrong target. It could also just have been a governmenty-looking building close enough to an intended target that whoever was checking it didn’t notice it wasn’t the target. It’s a lot easier to get everything right when the whole mission is to hit one person with one missile when everyone’s got enough time to do their job perfectly and everything’s been rehearsed than when there are thousands of targets and people are doing things in a rush, especially if orders are coming from people who don’t care about international law.

There’s nothing inherent to small components to suggest that you have to review them. If they’re small, it’s easier to tell yourself that the LLM probably got them right and you’re justified in not checking.

Using an LLM to write tests and small components is still vibe coding.

Cultural appropriation is something like McDonald’s advertising a new Indian burger and it’s just a beefburger with some chillies in it, i.e. someone’s attempting to gain from a bastardised caracature of the culture that wouldn’t be something someone from that culture would participate in. Right wing pundits intentionally misrepresented it as things like eating a traditional dish from another culture to make it sound stupid so people would dismiss it, and then people who’d only heard the misrepresentation but wanted to do the right thing or at least appear to be doing the right thing started acting like it was immoral to participate in any culture you weren’t born into.

Premature optimisation often makes things slower rather than faster. E.g. if something’s written to have the theoretical optimal Big O complexity class, that might only break even around a million elements, and be significantly slower for a hundred elements where everything fits in L1 and the simplest implemention possible is fine. If you don’t know the kind of situations the implementation will be used in yet, you can’t know whether the optimisation is really an optimisation. If it’s only used a few times on a few elements, then it doesn’t matter either way, but if it’s used loads but only ever on a small dataset, it can make things much worse.

Also, it’s common that the things that end up being slow in software are things the developer didn’t expect to be slow (otherwise they’d have been careful to avoid them). Premature optimisation will only ever affect the things a developer expects to be slow.

While you can generally also earn them through gameplay, it’s normal for lootboxes to be available for sale, either directly with money or via an intermediate currency that can be bought with money (which is generally specifically to skirt anti-gambling law or to force you to buy an amount of the intermediate currency that doesn’t exactly match anything you can buy with it).

I think it’s possible that loot boxes (and real-world equivalents like trading cards) don’t violate existing anti-child-gambling laws, but if so, that’s a flaw in those laws that needs to be fixed rather than an indication that they’re totally fine and should be allowed to exist in their current form. They cost money and give an unpredictable reward where different options have different perceived value, so they’re quite clearly gambling to anyone who defines it based on its characteristics rather than an individual territory’s specific legalese.

Everyone starts off without references, and there’s already less of a pipeline from user to helpful contributor to fellow maintainer than most projects want without having to add more chokepoints. There isn’t a solution without downsides while there are people using LLMs.

They stock things they make more profit on. If the margins on sugar water are much higher, then they don’t need to sell as much to make it worth stocking it instead of juice. If the margins are higher because consumers are unaware they’re being sold a cheaper-to-manufacture product for the same price because the packaging is deceptive to anyone who hasn’t been told they have to look or is in too much of a rush to have time to look, then shops end up full of sugar water that few consumers actually want.

Pre-mixed 100% juice drinks are readily available (depending on where you live). You don’t have to buy several juices and mix them yourself if you’re thirsty when walking past a shop as long as the shop stocks them.

Or perhaps we shouldn’t create a society where buying juice requires having and using a skill.

You can cut strong juice with other juice instead of with water and HFCS. Mixing passion fruit and orange juice at a level where it still mostly tastes of passion fruit makes something nice and not so expensive that it has to be sold at a different price to other orange juice.

Liberalism is a really broad family of conflicting political and moral philosophies, and it’s really just the capitalist with minimal regulation bit that’s consistently there in all the branches. Most of the time, people are only dealing with different branches of liberalism, and depending on the local politics, there might only be one major political party in a country calling themselves the liberals.

Generally, leftists will talk about liberals and liberalism a lot because they’re living under some branch of liberalism, and they disagree to some extent with every branch of liberalism. Socialism, Communism and Anarchism are not Liberalism (and if you want to upset tankies and say it’s distinct from communism or upset other leftists and say it’s leftist Marxism-Leninism is not liberalism, too). Fascism and Conservatism are also not liberalism, but they’re not leftist, either, and to confuse things, lots of political parties calling themselves conservative around the world only want things that fit a definition of liberalism.

I mentioned anarchism and what anarchists think in the previous post because you replied to a post with a screenshot where an anarchist mentioned libs and seemed to think it was ambiguous what he meant, when it’s deducible from the fact that he’s an anarchist.

It’s the outside-the-US meaning that anarchists would typically use, and the US-centric definition is effectively a subset of the general definition when viewed from a leftist perspective, as they’re both capitalist with minimal regulation, just in the US it’s got the added connotations of being less homophobic and racist etc. then the centre of the Overton window, whereas classic liberalism isn’t incompatible with racism and homophobia etc…

TOML’s design is based on the idea that INI was a good format. This was always going to cause problems, as INI was never good, and never a format. In reality, it was hundreds of different formats people decided to use the same file extension for, all with their own incompatible quirks and rarely any ability to identify which variant you were using and therefore which quirks would need to be worked around.

The changes in the third panel were inevitable, as people have data with nested structure that they’re going to want to represent, and without significant whitespace, TOML was always going to need some kind of character to delimit nesting.