AlecSchueler

> Do you think software patent trolls filing lawsuits on protected IP like "Phone application with informational dashboard" are good now because you hate and fear AI so much? Becoming pro-patent troll and pro-DRM would be a wild turn for the HN userbase, but seems to be what you're suggesting.

Could you quote where I'm suggesting that? It seems like you're putting words in my mouth here and it makes discussion feel quite unpalatable.

> There have been a million IP disputes over creative/artistic outputs going back hundreds of years.

Yes and that's why I'm not allowed to torrent thousands of books to learn a particular style of painting or writing or whatever. I'm not allowed to scrape the whole Spotify library to help my music studies. But for these companies it's accepted practice. Odd

And with a more broadly applicable example we could share the link with friends, family and coworkers who aren't on HN.

> I never thought I’d see the day when the open source “information wants to be free” crowd is complaining about intellectual property and “stylistic inspiration sources.”

The difference is twofold: firstly people are intrinsically driven to be creative, that even with inspiration taken there's a desire to create something fresh. As you say, not just mechanical regurgitations of pre-revolutionary French style.

Secondly, "the courts have already ruled in this?" Have they? Are we not doing the IP thing anymore? Does that go for you and I and everyone else, or only for a handful of billion dollar companies?

I get the meaning of "third world" but the USSR hasn't existed for decades, is China the modern equivalent? And it wasn't made clear why a neutral country like Switzerland would be expected to be highly corrupt while Russia would be low in corruption. Or indeed why Switzerland would be seen as a country in the process of becoming financially rich.

> "Developing nations" if you will

I wouldn't, I'm not sure which nations are developing or that they're developing into. Aren't we all developing all the time?

> Whatever terms fancy you, the underlying reality remains the same.

That's great, could you just explain the underlying reality without the loaded terms then?

What is the third world in 2026?

> 85% of people do not create any art, software, music, etc.

Etc.? I think you're overlooking a very broad range of occupations. From people getting into politics by doing newspaper summaries for party offices to people editing newspapers.

And if you're really pushing that it's 99% benefiting while 1% lose out then where do the kids whose schools get bombed or the women harassed with deepfakes fit in? Do they still benefit because they don't have to go to the trouble of writing a song about their pain?

It's the same companies and the same technologies doing all these things.

Let's not even get into the inauguration gifts in the US etc...

> You’re pretending everyone was a rich aristocrat nobleman in the past

I'm not pretending anything and my world model isn't "wrong." I don't mind having this discussion but I would ask you to mind your manners.

> There was never a time when getting everything made bespoke was cheap.

In my lifetime my family had many things made to order; from clothes to furniture. And I grew up in one of the poorest parts of the country, a working class area. But that meant that everyone worked and everyone had trades. My grandfather made me toys from scrap wood at the shipyard, my uncle was a joiner who made us better quality tables than I can get now, another was a plumber who ensured everything ran smoothly in our pipes. My aunts knitted and sewed everything we wanted. When a new fashion came out like skinny jeans they would tighten the ones we had; at Halloween I only had to say what I wanted to dress up as and the costume would appear.

Now if I go to the same area everyone is surviving on state benefits, the skills are all automated away and everyone is sitting in the same gray houses with the same gray furniture. And everyone looks miserable.

But at least no one has to do any expressionist painting to let their emotions out, they can just prompt it now and enjoy more and more consumption.

> The hypocrisy is downright silly.

> The 99% collective benefits from mass production at the expense of the 1% of artisans

And in this case it's looking more like less than 1% benefiting at the expense of 85%?

> I don’t see any of the AI protestors here exclusively wearing ... commissioning ...

I would love to order more bespoke goods but mass production has driven most of the makers out of business and that ones that remain I can't afford. You're saying this as though I actually wanted this ugly IKEA closet.

Transportation was around way before container ships and diesel powered lorries.

> The more difficult part of playing the guitar is not fingering/picking, it's the fretboard.

I would have said the opposite. The fretting hand only needs to press onto the strings in the correct places whereas the picking hand is responsible for all the subtlety of expression in terms of how you attack the string.

Saying this as a professional mandolin player fwiw.

They said the given example took 2-3 iterations. If you think it could be done in 4-5 etc maybe you could share your own result?

Don't forget deepfake harassment and spreading misinformation.

And this is the best the results will ever be! There's so many sites now that are themselves just the unreliable output of AI that it will soon be summarising the summary of a summary of an hallucination and presenting it just as confidently as ever.

I never experienced it but somehow I still feel nostalgic for it. For all we've gained there's so much we've lost as well, I'm sad my kids won't grow up with anything like this.

Why?

> Do you think Amazon and Google disappeared after 2001?

I don't think that was implied at all, just that the context of the web is what allowed those companies to pop up.

There's even some good stuff in the big cinemas. Barbie was excellent for example.

I understand what you mean by "corruption," but could you give examples? Of something ignored in Northern Europe that would be a scandal in Malta?

I'm still using an old x200 with 2GB RAM as my daily driver. I just run xmonad and everything is pretty snappy. I can browse with multiple tabs without an issue, as long as I avoid very heavy sites like GMail.

For me it was when del.icio.us was "sunsetted" by Yahoo!

> in many north western European countries and at the municipal level I personally witnessed the same levels of corruption, that in my native Malta would be considered the biggest scandal of the year.

Could you give examples of a few of these to illustrate the kind of thing we're talking about? It currently feels a bit hand wavy from both sides.

> It helps me remember the details and review

Note that they said "remember the details" not "capture the details."

I understand what you're asking and why, but the phrasing reads very dismissively and that's what I was asking about. Generally a friendly tone will get you a lot further.

> Did you have the kind of life where you were never really challenged to build that skillset,

Do you really think phrasing a question like this will ever induce a productive response?

Care to share some of these thoughts?

Some people are writing CLIs

You say that as if a tonne of people haven't already hooked their agents up to all their services on YOLO mode.

Again, I can't quite fathom how you're spinning that.

> "may also come under," "it is likely that," "potentially including."

And that's potentially including only " measures to prevent the misuse of VPNs to bypass legal protections" which is a very specific thing.

And it even comes as part of a report that also lists genuine uses of VPNs including secure remote work, protection from surveillance and circumventing authoritarian censorship.

> Trump was "researching" and not "implementing" taking Greenland by force,

No? He was making direct threats.

> Oh it's just research, they're not actually going to do it."

Yes, would you rather they just legislate by pure vibes?

> My understanding is that the research service is providing legislation with research to inform them on how to implement

And do you think the research would be complete or honest if it didn't present criticisms and a comprehensive list of use cases for VPNs? It says so many positive things about VPNs and describes them as "essential" so it's really difficult to comprehend how anyone could spin it as somehow calling for a VPN ban.