kevincox
@kevincox@lemmy.ml
https://kevincox.ca
- Comment on This scammer pretending to be Greenpeace 1 week ago:
It honestly sounds more like someone convincing you that crypto is great than someone convincing you that Greenpeace is great.
- Comment on (In Python) Can you save an object that is in memory to disk and reload it at a later time? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t want the end executable to have to bundle these files and re-parse them each time it gets run.
No matter how you persist data you will need to re-parse it. The question is really just if the new format is more efficient to read than the old format. Some formats such as FlatBuffers and Cap'n Proto are designed to have very efficient loading processes.
(Well technically you could persist the process image to disk, but this tends to be much larger than serialized data would be and has issues such as defeating ASLR. This is very rarely done.)
Lots of people are talking about Pickle. But it isn’t particularly fast. That being side with Python you can’t expect much to start with.
- Comment on Which one is selected? The "Yes" option or the "No" option? 2 months ago:
Yeah. I like old school tabs that were clearly attached to the thing that they switched.
- Comment on Which one is selected? The "Yes" option or the "No" option? 2 months ago:
I don’t think it is that simple. I think that outline is about the “focus”. So if I press enter it will activate that tab, if I press tab it will move the focus to the “Entire Screen” tab.
The UX issue is that there are two concepts of focus in this UI. There is “which tab is active” and “what UI element will pressing enter activate”. These two are not sufficiently differentiated which leads to a confusing experience.
Or maybe there can just be no keyboard focus indicator by default, but that may be annoying for keyboard power users. But this is generally how it works on the web, you have to press tab once to move keyboard focus to the first interactive element.
- Comment on Which one is selected? The "Yes" option or the "No" option? 2 months ago:
The one that always gets me is GNOME’s screen sharing portal.
a screenshot of the screen sharing dialog.
There is this outline around the “Application Window” tab which makes it seem selected. I use this UI multiple times a week and I need to pause for a sec every single time. I always think “I want to share a window”, “oh it is already selected” then stare at the monitors for a while before I realize why I can’t understand what I am looking at.
- Comment on Which one is selected? The "Yes" option or the "No" option? 2 months ago:
The one that always gets me is GNOME’s screen sharing portal.
- Comment on Why do many search engines seem to ignore operators (e.g. exact phrases, term exclusions, OR, etc.)? Is there a good reason for having a dumb 1997-level search logic that I'm not seeing? 4 months ago:
There are a few reasons. Some of them are in the users’ interest. Lots of people phrase their search like a question. “How do I turn off the wifi on my blue windows 11 laptop?”
While ignoring stopwords like “the” and “a” has been common for a while there is lots of info here that the user probably doesn’t actually care about. “my” is probably not helping the search, “how” may not either. Also in this case “blue” is almost certainly irrelevant. So by allowing near matches search engines can get good articles even if they don’t contain all of the words.
Secondly search engines often allow stemming and synonym matching. This isn’t really ignoring words but can give the appearance of doing so. For example maybe “windows” gets stemmed to “window” and “laptop” is allowed to match with “notebook”. You may get an article that is talking about a window of opportunity and writing in notebooks and it seems like these words have been ignored. This is generally helpful also often the best result won’t have used the exact same words that you did in the query.
Of course then there are the more negative reasons.
- Someone decided that you can’t buy anything if your product search returns no results. So they decided that they will show the “closest matches” even if nothing is anywhere close. This is infuriating and I have stopped using many sites because of it.
- If you need to make more searches or view more pages you also see more ads.
- Comment on How did we switched from "Dinosaur are giant lizards" to "Dinosaur are giant birds" 4 months ago:
I don’t think that is quite accurate.
We discovered many more Pluto-or-larger sized things that were closer to the sun than Pluto. It became increasingly obvious that there was nothing special about Pluto and we either needed to add hundreds of planets or “demote” Pluto.
- Comment on Trying to buy right size bicycle wheel online 5 months ago:
I thought that was the problem at first too. But unless there are fields that are searchable but not visible at all to end users I have definitely found many cases where the term (and no stemmed version of it etc…) was in the listing.
- Comment on Trying to buy right size bicycle wheel online 5 months ago:
Not to mention that Amazon search is happy to ignore most of the words in your search. So you end up sorting through pages of results that don’t match. Absolutely infuriating and one of the reasons that Amazon is my last choice now. Someone decided that it was unacceptable to show “no matching results” and lost my business.
- Comment on Trying to buy right size bicycle wheel online 5 months ago:
What I do is take a capture of the page, then if they haggle on the refund I can clearly show that the product is not the one I ordered.
- Comment on Japan forces Apple and Google to open their mobile platforms • The Register 5 months ago:
Most credit card issuers don’t issue credit cards to random apps by solo developers.
- Comment on Japan forces Apple and Google to open their mobile platforms • The Register 5 months ago:
- I can usually pull out my phone faster than taking a card out of my wallet.
- Phone-based cards typically have significantly higher limits than physical cards. (I can tap hundreds of dollars with my phone, only about $100 on my card.)
- The phone needs to be unlocked which is safer than the card which just needs to be tapped with no other authentication.
- One less thing to carry around.
- Comment on Japan forces Apple and Google to open their mobile platforms • The Register 5 months ago:
Because to implement this you need to negotiate with individual credit card issuers. Basically how this works is that your phone is being issued a virtual card with the keys locked inside the phone’s HSM. Then it can be used to make NFC payments just like any physical card. So you need 1. contracts with many card providers, 2. card issuance processes with these providers 3. huge amounts of compliance bureaucracy. At the end of the day it isn’t really worth it unless you are a huge company and expect to have tons of users or see it as an essential feature of your phone OS.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
It’s not “inherently insecure” at least not to that degree. (Once could argue that lack of E2EE is insecure.) If you stand up an unrelated instance you shouldn’t be able to access private messages that don’t relate to an account on your instance. So only bugs in your instance, or your conversation partner’s instance, will be able to leak those messages.
- Comment on Lemmy Mods: How do you keep track of the reports you receive? 5 months ago:
It would be great to have an RSS feed of reports in a community. This way it can be piped into external tools and notification mechanisms.
- Comment on Why is currency so essential? 6 months ago:
A lot of cultures ended up with effective currencies. Whether that was grains of rice or chickens there ended up a small number of items that had a well understood value and ended up being the default item of trade, not because the receiver needed those items but because they were known to be easily exchanged with others.
- Comment on How does harddrive failure work when there's multiple partitions? 6 months ago:
Yup. I would try to stop using it if at all possible. As soon as you can dump a full disk image to some other storage. Tools like ddrescue can be useful as they will try to re-read failed sectors to get a more complete image.
Once you have the data (or at least as much is available) to a reliable medium then you can start sorting through it and discarding or saving individual bits.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
Are you a lawyer?
I am not. Are you?
Including a link to a Creative Commons license in a comment footer will not do that.
It is when you give it a different name which doesn’t reflect the actual behaviour of the license.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
Ok. So you should probably frame your license like that. Instead of saying “Anti Commercial-AI license” say “Pro Non-commercial-AI license”.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
No, it is more. You aren’t restricting anything, it is just a superset of uses. If you want to explicitly license your comments for wider use that is fine, but don’t misrepresent it as “Anti Commercial-AI”. Just frame it as licensed for non-commercial use.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
Pasting a copypasta is probably actually copyright infringement. Same with memes.
The thing about copyright is that it really only matters if you choose to enforce your protection. Presumably the owners of the copypasta don’t care enough and the owners of the memes think it brings more popularity to the move than any licensing costs they could possibly gain from selling the stills.
(Some memes may be considered transformative enough to be fair use, but some of them almost certainly are not.)
Video game streaming is a clear example of this. Almost certainly live-streaming or doing full gameplay videos are infringing the game owner’s copyright. The work is often commercial, is often a replacement for the original (at least for some people) and very rarely transformative. But most game publishers think that it is worth it for the advertising. So they don’t enforce their copyright. Many publishers will explicitly grant licenses for streaming their games. A few publishers will enforce their copyright and take down videos, they are likely well within their rights.
Tom Scott has a fairly good overview of basic copyright knowledge: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
I don’t know if I would say the internet is opposed to copyright. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of not caring. If the average internet commenter posts a meme it is of such minuscule cost to the owner of that work that it doesn’t make sense to go after them. So it sort of just happens. This makes people think that it is allowed, even if it probably isn’t. Most people would probably also agree that this is morally ok. But I don’t think that means that they are against copyright in general. I think if you asked most people. “Should I be allowed to download a CGP Grey video and reupload it for my own profit” they would say no. Probably similar for “Should I be allowed to sell cracked copies of Celeste for half price”.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
I should add that there is one approach that could be taken here. Take this with a huge grain of salt because I am not a lawyer.
When you are posting on Lemmy you are likely granting an implicit license to Lemmy server operators to distribute your work. Basically because you understand that posting a public comment on Lemmy will make it available on your and other Lemmy servers it is assumed that it is ok to do that.
In other words you can’t write a story, post it on Lemmy, then sue every Lemmy instance that federated the comment and made it publicly available. That would be ridiculous.
There is a possible legal argument that twists this implicit grant to include AI training. Maybe you could have a disclaimer that this wasn’t the case. I don’t know how you would need to word this and if it would actually change anything. But I would talk to a lawyer.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
It doesn’t work.
By default you have complete ownership of all works you create. What that license link is doing is granting an additional license to the comment. (In this case likely the only available license.)
This means that people can choose to use the terms in this license rather than the default one. It can’t take away any of their default privileges.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
Because you are effectively spreading misinformation.
Your behaviour leads people to believe that in order for their comments not to be used for commercial AI training they need to have a signature. But that isn’t true, at most the signature is allowing more uses of your comment, not restricting anything.
People already struggle to understand copyright. Adding more confusion is doing everyone reading your license a disservice.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
I don’t understand what you are trying to say.
Congress is getting lobbied for new laws on who owns the content that AI models are being trained from
Training AI from something definitely can’t change who owns that thing. This is ridiculous and I’m pretty sure isn’t being considered.
If I let AI watch Frozen does that change who owns it? No Disney still does.
who has to pay who for the privledge of using that data
IIUC most of the laws talk about if AI training is “fair use”. If it is fair use copyright protections don’t apply. But granting a license to your work won’t change that.
The only thing I could see potentially being done would be changing the default copyright protections to allowed a revocable default grant for AI training. But it isn’t even clear if granting a new license would implicitly revoke that default grant. It also seems unlikely that this is the way the law would work.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
Yes. However whether or not it has protections under copyright is not always clear. Likely your comment is too short and simple to be protected. But if it can’t be protected claiming to grant a license to that work doesn’t change it.
Basically by adding this note they are effectively granting a license to the work. There is no situation in which granting a license can restrict how a work (which is effectively maximum protection).
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
You don’t need to license each of your comments. By default you retain all ownership. So you applying a license is strictly allowing more use. Basically if AI training was not allowed due to copyright than they can’t use any comment by default. If AI training is fair-use (which seems to be most companies’ claim) then it is irrelevant how you have licensed the comment.
In no situation does granting an additional license to a work restrict the ways in which works can be used under other licenses.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 months ago:
Because people don’t understand how copyright works.
In most countries any copyrightable work that you produce is automatically covered by copyright. You don’t need to do anything additional to gain that protection.
Most Lemmy instances don’t have any sort of licensing grant in their terms of service. So that means that the original author maintains all ownership of their work.
So technically what these people are doing is granting a license to their comment that allows it to be used for more than would otherwise be allowed by the default copyright protections.
What they are probably trying to accomplish is to revoke the ability for commercial enterprises to use their comments. However that is already the default state so it is pretty irrelevant. Basically any company that cares about copyright and thinks that what they are doing isn’t allowed as fair use already wouldn’t be able to use their comments without the license note. So by adding the license note all they are doing is allowing non-commercial AI to scrape it (which is probably not what was intended). Of course most AI scraping companies don’t care about copyright or think that their use is not protected under copyright. So it is again irrelevant.
- Comment on I just heard about Brazilian Butt Lifts which is a procedure where they take fat deposits from somewhere on your body and place it in your butt? 6 months ago:
TL;DR is yes, but typically slowly. So the BBL won’t last forever but for most people it can last quite a while.
I have seen claims from 5-10 years. But it will depend on your lifestyle. I have seen some sites saying that if your weight is fluctuating it will dissipate faster than if you keep a fairly stable amount of body fat.
