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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Not necessarily? You’d retain first-to-market advantages, particularly where implementation is capital-heavy - and if that’s not enough you could consider an alternative approach to rewarding innovation such as having a payout or other advantage for individuals or entities which undertake significant research and development to emerge with an innovative product.

    I think the idea that nobody would commit to developing anything in the absence of intellectual property law is also maybe a bit too cynical? People regularly do invest resources into developing things for the public domain.

    At the very least, innovations developed with a significant amount of public funding - such as those which emerge from research universities with public funding or collaborative public-private endeavours at e.g. pharmaceutical companies - should be placed into the public domain for everybody to benefit from, and the copyright period should be substantially reduced to something more like five years.






  • It’s fairly silly that this course of action is the consequence of a desire to manipulate search engine results, but at least they’re archiving the articles before taking them down.

    To address the headline, though, I don’t think that anybody reputable ever seriously claimed that the internet was forever in a literal sense - we’ve been dealing with ephemerality and issues like link rot from the beginning.

    It was only ever commonplace to say the internet was forever in the sense that fully retracting anything once posted could range from difficult to impossible after it’d been shared a few times.

    Only in the modern era dominated by corporations offering a platform in perpetuity have we been afforded even the illusion of dependable permanence, and honestly I’m much more comfortable with the notion of less widely distributed content being able to entropy out of existence than a permanent record for everything ever made public.


  • I could understand upgrading so frequently at the advent of mainstream smartphones, where two years of progress actually did represent a significant user experience improvement - but the intergenerational improvements for most people’s day-to-day use have been marginal for quite some time now.

    Once you’ve got web browsers and website-equivalent mobile apps performing well, software keyboards which keep up with your typing, high-definition video playback working without dropped frames, graphics processing sufficient to render whatever your game of choice is for the train journey to work, batteries which last a day of moderate to intense use, and screen resolutions so high that you can’t differentiate the pixels even by pressing your eyeball to the glass - that covers most people’s media consumption for the form factor, and there’s not much else to offer after that.


  • The bill says that commercial entities serving pornography are required to do age verification through either verifying a driver’s license, verifying another piece of government-issued identification, or through the use of any commercially viable age verification mechanism.

    So, yeah, I’d imagine compliance to look like either uploading a photograph or scan of an identity card or document for the site operators to check, or uploading it to an affiliated service which does age verification on their behalf.

    Which is obviously horrendous from a privacy and information security standpoint for the consumer, and exposes the site operator to costs and legal risk associated with verifying and storing sensitive personal information.