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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • All IP laws are fundamentally “honor system”. The idea of digital locks is a pipe dream, only possible as long as legal threats scare people away from looking too closely at how the lock works.

    But every digital lock can be broken, because we only know how to make one type of computer: the turing-complete universal von neumann machine. It can run any program, as long as it’s presented the right way.

    So yes, it’s piracy. Just like how the crime of “breaking and entering” means “breaking the seal” and entering without permission (not necessarily breaking a physical lock), piracy just means unauthorized use of IP-law-protected content (not necessarily breaking a digital lock).

    Breaking a digital lock is an additional crime on top of piracy, under the DMCA. 5 years and 50k fine for a first offense, I believe.

    Now as to whether we should even have a concept of “piracy” to begin with… that’s a reasonable question.


  • Beautifully put.

    I especially like that they called out the “it’s just a tool” BS:

    Yet technological artefacts cannot be separated from the conditions under which they are created, or from the realities of who controls and profits from them. Today, developing these technologies expands racial capitalism, intensifies imperialist extraction, and reinforces the divide between the global North and South. The technology is inseparable from the labour that produces it — the expropriation of work by writers, artists, programmers, and peer-production communities, as well as the highly exploitative crowdwork of data annotation.









  • The cruel irony of our situation is that we have:

    • An anti-democracy faction, that claims to believe that majority rule and bureaucracy are ineffective, and need to be replaced by a powerful dictator… but has only been able to gain as much ground as it has, because of a multi-decade effort to persuade regular people, build consensus and coalitions, and dive deep into procedure and obscure case law in order to move their agenda forward, one sub-sub-sub-clause at a time
    • A pro-democracy faction, that seems to believe that it’s impossible (or immoral) to try to change people’s minds, and that if an action won’t result in radical, comprehensive, overnight revolution all at once then it’s basically not worth doing


  • Not to be confused with SOLID, SolidJS, or Solidity.

    It’s a neat idea. Because of the need to operate on data close to web servers and backend services for potentially long timeframes, I think we’ll need a widely-adopted CRDT solution in order for something like Solid to really take off from a technical standpoint.

    And from a business standpoint, there’s really no upside. Sure, you delegate some cost for storage, but compute tends to be the more expensive aspect, and if you’re spending more time to interact with these external data stores, it may be more expensive in the end.




  • Gamehub Lite is pretty wild. It does take some fiddling, but it’s amazing how well (and relatively easily) you can get x86 Windows games to run on a $200 ARM Android device.

    I’m 12/13 so far on getting games to work at an acceptable level.

    Inexplicably, Vampire Survivors causes the entire device to crash. I guess they pull some pretty silly memory tricks to keep that game responsive with potentially hundreds of thousands of projectiles, so maybe it’s not so surprising.