nybble41
@nybble41@programming.dev
- Comment on Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting AI-generated explicit content 5 months ago:
You’re restricting speech whether or not you confine your censorship to only AI-generated images.
- Comment on Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting AI-generated explicit content 5 months ago:
Correction: Fortunately, not unfortunately. A rule like that would prohibit any form of public / street photography, news videos, surveillance videos, family photos with random strangers in the background… it’s not reasonable at all.
- Comment on Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting AI-generated explicit content 5 months ago:
Since you don’t understand, quotes denote emphasis or specificity, not emotion.
Actually quotes denote quotations. When used casually around an individual word or short phrase they generally indicate that the writer is emphasizing that these are some else’s words, and that the writer would have chosen a different description. As in: These people are described as “teens” but are probably not only/mostly teenagers. That may not be what you meant, but it’s how that text will be read.
If you just want emphasis you might consider using bold or italics rather than quotes.
- Comment on Unity bans VLC from Unity Store. 5 months ago:
The GPL in most cases only requires that derivative work must also be shipped with the same license. The source code from providers doesn’t have to be distributed by unity, it has to be distributed by the provider.
This is incorrect. The distributor of derivative works in binary form is responsible for providing the source code. They can refer to a server operated by a third party, but if that third party stops providing the source code the distributor remains obligated to ensure that it is still available. The only exception is for binaries which were originally received with a written offer of source code, where the offer can be passed on as-is, but that only applies for “occasional and non-commercial” distribution which wouldn’t work here.
- Comment on European Union set to revise cookie law, admits cookie banners are annoying 5 months ago:
Geoblocking in such cases would not be sufficient. For one thing your geo-IP database will never be perfectly accurate, even without considering that “data subjects who are in the Union” can connect to your site via proxies or VPNs with non-EU IP addresses. For another you still need to respond to GDPR requests e.g. to remove data collected on a data subject currently residing in the EU, even if the data was collected while they were outside the EU, and you can’t do that if you’re blocking their access to the site. For a newspaper in particular the same would apply to any EU data subject they happened to report on, whether they had previously visited the site or not.
- Comment on European Union set to revise cookie law, admits cookie banners are annoying 5 months ago:
They never should have made opt-in an option in the first place. All the legitimate reasons to store data are already permitted without asking permission (required for the site to function, or storing data the user specifically asked the site to store such as settings). All that’s left is things no one would reasonably choose to consent to if they fully understood the question, so that should have just legislated that the answer is always “no”. That plus a bit more skepticism about what sites really “need” to perform their function properly. (As that function is understood by the user—advertising is not a primary function of most sites, or desired by their users, so “needed for advertising to work” does not make a cookie “functional” in nature. Likewise for “we need this ad revenue to offer the site for free”; you could use that line to justify any kind of monetization of private user data.)
- Comment on xkcd #2867: DateTime 6 months ago:
Good point. You’d need at least 215 bits to represent all measurably distinct times (in multiples of the Planck time, approximately 10^-43 seconds) out to the projected heat death of the universe at 100 trillion (10^14) years. That should be sufficient for even the most detailed and lengthy simulation.
- Comment on xkcd #2867: DateTime 6 months ago:
If you want one-second resolution, sure. If you want nanoseconds a 64-bit signed integer only gets you 292 years. With 128-bit integers you can get a range of over 5 billion years at zeptosecond (10^-21 second) resolution, which should be good enough for anyone. Because who doesn’t need to precisely distinguish times one zeptosecond apart five billion years from now‽
- Comment on xkcd #2867: DateTime 6 months ago:
It might be more accurate to say that Unix time is the number of days since Jan 1st, 1970, scaled by 24×60×60. Though it gets a bit odd around the actual leap second since they aren’t spread over the whole day. (In some ways that would be a more reasonable way to handle it; rather than repeating a second at midnight, just make all the seconds slightly longer that day.)
- Comment on xkcd #2867: DateTime 6 months ago:
Technically isn’t the Earth itself a sort of space ship which is orbiting (…a star which is orbiting…) the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy? Not really close enough for time dilation to be a factor, but still.
- Comment on Can anyone tell me what format this uh.. nested dictionary is? 6 months ago:
It’s similar, but JavaScript would use
:and,for separators rather than=and;. I don’t know of any exact matches and I considered quite a few languages, both common and uncommon. - Comment on Music Publishers Sue Amazon-backed AI Platform for Copyright Infringement 8 months ago:
Not every work produced by a LLM should count as a derivative work—just the ones that embody unique, identifiable creative elements from specific work(s) in the training set. We don’t consider every work produced by a human to be a derivative work of everything they were trained on; work produced by (a human using) an AI should be no different.
- Comment on I mean it could be right 8 months ago:
I’m fairly certain that last one is UB in C. The result of an assignment operator is not an lvalue, and even if it were it’s UB (at least in C99) to modify the stored value of an object more than once between two adjacent sequence points. It might work in C++, though.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase. 8 months ago:
Historically speaking, people have gone to the trouble of manually digitizing hard copy books to distribute freely. There were digital copies of print books available online (if you knew where to look) before e-books were officially available for sale in any form. That includes mass-market novels as well as items of interest to historians. Ergo, your scepticism seems entirely unjustified.
OCR is far from perfect (though editing OCR output is generally faster than retyping), but even without it we have the storage and bandwidth these days to distribute full books as stacks of images if needed, without converting them to text. The same way people distribute scans of comics/manga.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase. 8 months ago:
The average person would just download it. Only one needs the equipment to digitize it. And that equipment isn’t as specialized as you seem to think. For printed (mass-produced) books you can just cut the pages from the spine and feed them in batches through an automated document feeder, which comes standard with many consumer-grade scanners. Automated page-turning on an e-reader can be done with a software plugin in some cases, or externally with something like a SwitchBot. Capturing copy-restricted video is frankly much more involved, and that hasn’t stopped anyone so far.
- Comment on There's a big misconception about mobile phones and driving, and it's putting us at risk 8 months ago:
Phone calls are not the feature they would be most likely to disable. You’re more likely to have passengers talking to you with their phones stuck in “driving mode” as they can’t use them to quietly pass the time playing a game or reading or browsing social media or whatever else the driver shouldn’t be doing with their phone.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase. 8 months ago:
with books there’s basically no reasonable way to create an ebook from a hardcopy
On the contrary, tons of books have been digitized from hard copies through a combination of OCR and manual editing. (E.g.: Project Gutenberg.) The same basic process works for both printed books and pages displayed on an e-reader. It’s quite tedious but not exactly difficult. Anyone with a smartphone can submit usable scans, though some simple DIY equipment speeds up the process and improves the quality, and OCR is getting better all the time.
In the worst case the book can simply be retyped. People used to copy books by hand after all, using nothing more sophisticated than pen/quill and paper/parchment/papyrus. Unlike in those days the manual effort is only needed once per title, not per copy.
- Comment on Unity deleted these terms, don't let them get out 9 months ago:
The most valuable thing is an experienced team who thoroughly understand both the specifications and the implementation as well as the reasoning behind both. Written specifications are great as onboarding and reference material but there will always be gaps between the specifications and the code. (“The map is not the territory.”) Even with solid specifications you can’t just turn over maintenance of a codebase to a new team and expect them to immediately be productive with it.