aaronbieber

Didn’t even notice the brief AI disclaimer at the end until @Jiberish remarked about it! The piece is about 200% longer than it needs to be.

TL;DR: guy willfully violates copyright commercially for years, moves to Dominican Republic in the hopes the government won’t follow him there… They do. The end.

This isn’t likely to stop Reddit themselves from monetizing the data for AI training purposes. Deletion is typically “logical” in these types of systems, meaning that it’s “marked as deleted” but not actually deleted.

What it does affect is the ability for others to see the posts, which might be companies accessing the API for AI training purposes. At this point, we don’t know whether this is a meaningful path that Reddit wants to go down. If it is, they could allow the API to return deleted posts and comments (theoretically).

I’m going to date myself here, but when I was in high school in the late '90s, a friend of mine introduced me to Linux and helped me get it set up. He gave me the distro he used at the time: Debian. He explained to me how Debian, unlike other distros, compiles everything it installs, which is why it takes so long. I recall him explaining that this would make things run better in some way (but I was a teenager and don’t remember too clearly). The install took hours. Many hours. I don’t remember what kind of computer I had, it was a Pentium something.

There was such a sort of romance and intrigue to Linux back then. It was so challenging to get working, the desktop environments were janky AF, getting some drivers working was like a day’s work. I miss it, though.

Sure, but it doesn’t mean it won’t cause problems for our kind admin, Ernest. Eventually, someone will probably make it troublesome enough for him to reconsider.

There’s a fair bit of skepticism about DDG in here, and I’ve heard it before, but I feel like a lot of people are being pretty unfair to them. Are there search engines that don’t ultimately use Google or Bing? Yes, there are. Are they good? It depends on what you mean by that.

It takes enormous resources to index even “most” of the internet on a rapid, ongoing basis. This is the main reason why Google and Bing overall provide the most thorough results. The only independent search engine I would trust is perhaps Neeva, because it’s subscription-based. An engine claiming to be as thorough as Bing or Google that doesn’t take money directly from you is up to something.

A lot of what DDG is trying to do with its browser and search-ancillary features is find some way of making money because they have to pay Microsoft for Bing results.

It’s worth thinking about what our expectations are for search engines. If they must be free, but also not ad-supported and data-gathering… How can they afford to exist?

Dad to a five-year-old here. I think our kids are growing up substantially more shielded, and I think it’s a bad thing. Still, as this article outlines, it isn’t something we can simply decide to change (in many or most cases). We live in what I would describe as a relatively affluent suburb of Boston with an attentive local government and a lot of resident participation. Yet what the article describes as an environment seemingly designed to be treacherous for kids feels very familiar to me.

I’m a staunch urbanist and I believe that many of these problems can be traced back to zoning and urban design shifts over time. I grew up on a 25 mph cul-de-sac in the '80s when maybe a couple of people in the neighborhood drove what today would be considered “small” trucks for work.

Today, our entire town is signed 35 mph, and almost everyone disobeys it (because the roads are too wide, have generous shoulders, have curb-tight sidewalks if any, have long and straight sections, etc.), and the Ford F-150 is the most-sold vehicle in the country. The rise of the SUV over the last ten years has decimated the safety of our towns; there are so many Tahoes, Expeditions, and Escalades with ridiculously high hoods and poor visibility speeding around, I would be insane to let my young kid play by himself out there at this age.

I think what @fritz is getting at is this trend (conspicuously, at least, in the US) toward more and bigger cars and trucks. I’m 41, and I grew up on a cul-de-sac street where all the kids played by ourselves outside until the street lights came on. That was my experience. My parents never seemed to have a worry that we’d take care of ourselves and come home for dinner.

But today, even in that same neighborhood (which we moved away from when I was 10), there are many more cars, and the rise of the pickup truck and SUV has created a minefield for kids. The drivers of most pickup trucks in the US couldn’t see a five-year-old who is less than about 10 feet from the hood. You see parents buying trucks and SUVs because they consider them safer, which is true in the sense that we’re in a battle of who can drive the biggest, heaviest truck. But to pedestrians, they’re fatal. If you’re struck by a car, you roll over it. If you’re struck by a pickup truck, it rolls over you.

The truck problem is mainly regulatory, and it bothers me personally only because I know that the Ford F-150 is the most-sold vehicle in America, and that some 70% of those truck owners don’t use them to haul anything, ever. Now I have a five-year-old son, and we live on a sort of main road in town, and we’re hesitant to let our kid play even in the front yard of our own house. Last year, a distracted driver failed to follow the curve of our street two doors down from us, chopped a telephone pole in half, crashed into a tree and their car caught on fire.

My kid’s bus stop is at a crosswalk on our street, and drivers don’t even slow down for it, even with a bunch of kids and their parents standing there. Something culturally has changed with how drivers behave. We are auto-centric here, and we design our towns and cities to strongly broadcast that.

If you’re up to the challenge, you can run a “Subsonic” server at home for streaming your own music, including all of your hi-fi downloads from Bandcamp.

I’ve been very pleased with Navidrome, which is a server that implements the Subsonic API (so you can use any Subsonic desktop or mobile client). I basically have my own private Spotify that I can stream to my phone, and it’s got all the weird music I’ve accumulated over the years.

The example I give again, and again, and again is Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Craigslist remains private (which shields it from being gutted by Wall Street vultures, for sure) so we don’t know for sure, but Craig is believed to retain a controlling stake alongside current CEO Jim Buckmaster and eBay (which purchased a large stake from an exiting employee).

Craigslist makes about $600 million annually, and I’m sure provides a nice living for the executives and employees there, but has remained true to its core function of providing transparent and easy classifieds posting to everyone (mostly for free, even!)

Notice what happens when an organization becomes a vehicle for profit, beyond simply “self-sustaining profit.” Notice how taking on investors practically guarantees that outcome.

I thought Reddit was dead the day Conde Nast bought it. They’ve survived quite a bit longer! This day had to come. Let’s move on.

We can build something that primarily exists to create a community.

If they force a reopen, we should all get ready to post Never Gonna Give You Up music videos all day long.