bentley

You misunderstood. He’s saying that Google provides 7 years of device updates only for the Pixel 8 and later. That’s true: Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 only get 5 years of updates.

Pixel 7:

> Ends in 1 year and 10 months (01 Oct 2027)

Pixel 6:

> Ends in 10 months (01 Oct 2026)

Quoting Wikipedia:

“The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published by [E. L.] James episodically on fan fiction websites under the pen name ‘Snowqueen Icedragon’.”

> Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.

It’s based on both. For example, a translation or other derivative work whose copyright expired “early” in the US due to non‐renewal would still be encumbered by the copyright of the original. That’s basically what happened to It’s a Wonderful Life—the film is technically in the public domain, but is still held in Paramount’s iron grip by way of the renewed copyright of the original short story.

The last (general) copyright extension in the US was the CTEA in 1998. What’s happened since then? Google, who has power, money, and incentive to lobby against future copyright extensions.

> gifted kids or the ones from religious zealots will all live in their bubbles

If you’ve read this thread, then you know most homeschoolers dispute that they live in a bubble.

> Sure, let's make homeschooling the norm, problematic kids will be the only ones who fill the ranks of public schools

I don’t see anyone in this thread advocating that. But I did see several arguing that homeschooling should be illegal. And homeschooling is illegal in countries like Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Part of homeschoolers’ outspokenness against the usual tired stereotypes is because there’s real risk of governments prohibiting home education even in situations when it would be superior to the local public schools.

If the school system is damaging kids, it’s good to work to improve it, but you won't see results (if any—effecting systemic change is hard) until after your kids have already graduated, facing irreversible damage in the process.

If you’re willing to homeschool well, the positive impact on your kids is immediate.

Childhood and youth are anything but “low‐stakes.” The social experiences I faced in public school were far worse than even the worst parts of my adult life. The direction I was headed was one of dark cynicism and misanthropy thanks to the bullying I faced and the lack of care from the adults in the system. When I switched to homeschooling, I began interacting with rational adults (my parents’ friends) and in turn learned what functioning human relationships look like. My ability to weather the difficult storms of adulthood in a healthy way came from the social growth I gained through homeschooling, not the regressive “socialization” that public school inflicted on me.

In the same sense that a farmers’ market is like Walmart, sure.

Did you make a point to interrogate all the non–socially awkward people you met at university to determine if they were homeschooled or not? Yeah, thought not.

When I was in university, there were several instances where people who’d known me for weeks or months found out for the first time that I’d been homeschooled, and expressed their surprise. (Surprise that I was “normal,” I guess, and not a social basket case, as the prevailing stereotype of homeschoolers seems to be.) They simply never thought to ask.

In fact there were even a couple of friends who surprised me by turning out to be homeschooled—when I should have known better than to assume one’s schooling background. But when society spends your entire childhood hammering you with untrue stereotypes about what you are (I heard well‐meaning “But what about socialization?” countless times growing up), some of it is bound to stick.

My public school experience was that the ones beating up other kids were usually the jerks.

> I missed my slipstick. Dad says that anyone who can’t use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate and should not be allowed to vote. Mine is a beauty—a K&E 20″ Log‐log Duplex Decitrig. Dad surprised me with it after I mastered a ten-inch polyphase. We ate potato soup that week—but Dad says you should always budget luxuries first. I knew where it was. Home on my desk.

Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)

Do you also spell out the implicit <tbody> in all your tables for clarity?

Implicit elements and end tags have been a part of HTML since the very beginning. They introduce zero ambiguity to the language, they’re very widely used, and any parser incapable of handling them violates the spec and would be incapable of handling piles of real‐world strict, standards‐compliant HTML.

> I wish all these tolerances wouldn't exist in HTML5 and browsers simply showed an error, instead of being lenient.

They (W3C) tried that with XHTML. It was soundly rejected by webpage authors and by browser vendors. Nobody wants the Yellow Screen of Death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yellow_screen_of_death.pn...

> That is the wonder of BSD like licenses for big corps.

You mean any free software license, BSD or otherwise.

Notice how NetBSD isn’t asking for code contributions, but for monetary contributions. The GPL doesn’t cover that either. Observe the current rugpulling fad to relicense free software (both permissive and copyleft) to nonfree protectionist licenses like BUSL and SSPL in order to monetize.

As a 12‐year‐old I encountered this passage during my first complete read of the Bible and wasn’t bothered by it. It’s a colorful metaphor that uses sexual promiscuity to symbolize Israel’s religious impiety, a common theme that occurs elsewhere in the Bible (e.g., Hosea whose commitment to his unfaithful wife was used as a symbol for the love of God to an unfaithful Israel). These are basic theological ideas that were not hidden from me at church even at that age.

I encountered actual prurient material on the shelves of the school library, and heard far worse obscenity in the locker room during gym class. The most erotic stuff in the Bible, Song of Songs, is quaint by the standards of a century ago, let alone today.

If F‐Droid is trying to drum up opposition to the UK’s extreme suppression of pornography, they've muddled it. They could have defied the unjust restrictions, or they could have leaned into it and marked Wikipedia apps, Reddit apps, Mastodon apps, and Project Gutenberg apps the same way.

That they did neither indicates that they have chosen to specifically target religious content, and not just by marking it. F-Droid developers openly state (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026) that (1) new NSFW apps will not be added, and (2) existing NSFW apps will be removed.

It's bad on principle: F-Droid is akin to a distribution package repo, and should not prohibit apps based solely on ideology (nor should Debian, Gentoo, BSD ports…); and it's also impractical: given the looming threat of government suppression of app stores, F‐Droid (already an underdog) should not be driving away supporters by taking up anti‐religious ideology.

> Many

How many? Can you provide some examples?

The article provides ancillary hyperlinks to nearly every topic mentioned, but fails to link the actual video of Kernighan speaking. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg

In reality the subject of the talk is Kernighan’s perspective of the history of Unix at Bell Labs. The questions covered in the article are the least interesting part, and make up about six minutes at the very end—a small fraction not just of the 70-minute video, but even of the 30-minute Q&A session.

In short, the headline and article are disappointing clickbait, but the video itself is worth watching for Kernighan’s relating of history and his theories about what confluence of factors made Unix successful (collegial environment, good management, overall mission…).

Another worthwhile video from the same conference (in a different year) is Kernighan’s interview of Ken Thompson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o&pp=ygUSdmNmIGVhc...

Notice how I said “some exceptions,” precisely to head off a comment like that. Or did you read “some exceptions” and think your example wouldn’t qualify?

No, I don’t care what Pakistan thinks of me. But I've been to the UK, and I'll probably go there again. I live my life according to American law, without regard for UK law, but if UK law enforcement publicly announced an investigation of me, I'd find legal representation and respond. (Remotely.)

> If they think that UK law doesn't apply to them (which seems very credible) why react at all?

If I get a speeding ticket in the mail from another state I've never been to, I'm not going to ignore it, I'm going to explain to the court why it's invalid. Ignoring legal notices, even from other jurisdictions than one's own, is generally unwise (with some exceptions). So is responding with insults instead of concrete legal justification for why this is inapplicable.

Not even the multiple cases of an individual doing nothing but call a politician a dick on social media?

> Last year, Andy Grote, a city senator responsible for public safety and the police in Hamburg, broke the local social distancing rules — which he was in charge of enforcing — by hosting a small election party in a downtown bar.

> After Mr. Grote later made remarks admonishing others for hosting parties during the pandemic, a Twitter user wrote: “Du bist so 1 Pimmel” (“You are such a penis”).

> Three months later, six police officers raided the house of the man who had posted the insult, looking for his electronic devices. The incident caused an uproar.

...

> In response to a message by [politician] Mr. Jurca criticizing Muslims, Mr. Mai posted a link to a picture of the mural [saying “Du bist so 1 Pimmel”].

> Several weeks later, four police officers pounded on Mr. Mai’s door at 6 a.m. with a warrant to confiscate his electronics. Mr. Jurca had filed a police report claiming the link to the photo was an insult.

> There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god.

The Bible even has the example of Naaman the Aramean, who after being convinced of the might of Israel’s God, asked for a gift of two mule‐loads of Israeli earth so he could worship Him after returning home. (2 Kings 5:17)

> Basically if you are an observant Jew then you are forbidden from doing work on Saturdays. There are some extremely specific rules about what "work" is.

This was cause for major debate in the founding days of Christianity. Jesus’ ministry as a Jewish rabbi often involved condemning the religious leaders of the time for focusing on minutiae of the law, particularly Sabbath law.

Matthew 23:1–7 — “Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to His disciples: ‘The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So practice and observe everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.’”

Matthew 23:23–24 — “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You pay tithes of mint, dill, and cumin. But you have disregarded the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” [Referring to the pious practice of straining one’s drinks for bugs to avoid violating dietary law.]

Luke 14:1–6 — “One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. There in front of him was a man suffering from abnormal swelling of his body. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?’ But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him on his way.

“Then he asked them, ‘If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?’ And they had nothing to say.”

Mark 2:23–28 — “One Sabbath Jesus was passing through the grainfields, and His disciples began to pick the heads of grain as they walked along. So the Pharisees said to Him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?’

“Jesus replied, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? During the high priesthood of Abiathar, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which was lawful only for the priests. And he gave some to his companions as well.’

“Then Jesus declared, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’”

Mark 3:1–6 — “Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, ‘Stand up in front of everyone.’

“Then Jesus asked them, ‘Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?’ But they remained silent.

“He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.”

And there are further examples, like John 5.

> I don’t understand why people are ok with Google scraping their site (when it is called indexing), fine with users scraping their site (when it is called RSS reading), but suddenly not ok with AI startups scraping their site.

I’m pretty open‐minded about AI, and have no visceral objection to AI scraping in theory. However… the rise of AI scrapers is the first time in twenty years of running tiny websites that my servers—all my servers, consistently—hit CPU and bandwidth usage levels far above baseline, and even brush against my hosts’ monthly limits. When I check server logs, the traffic is largely bots repeatedly trawling infinite variations of version control history pages. Googlebot never crawled these enough to become a problem; Internet Archive never crawled these enough to become a problem. But the current scrapers are, and literally everyone I talk to who hosts their own VCS webservers is having the same problem right now. Many are choosing to reduce the problem by injecting Cloudflare or Anubis, which I as a user hate, and refuse to do myself—but what alternative can I propose to them? People running these servers are just users of Gitea and CGit and whatnot, they’re not capable of rewriting the underlying tools to reduce the CPU usage of diff generation.

> The activities that make life worthwhile have largely been priced out for the average person.

What activities make life worthwhile?

I primarily source my copyrighted audiobooks from Libro.fm and Downpour. Both have large (though not universal) catalogues.

Librivox has free, public domain audiobooks. The narrators are volunteers, so performance and recording quality varies, but there are some very good ones there.

Some podcasts provide legitimate audiobooks of copyrighted works, generally with similar quality caveats to Librivox. For example, the blog “Readings from Under the Grapevine” has a free, legally licensed recording of the Narnia series (except for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).

I never buy audiobooks with DRM, even if the DRM is trivial to break. Amazon has made clear their intentions to lock media down ever further. I shouldn’t have to put up with that, so I’m not going to support them financially.

If I can’t find a copyrighted audiobook at one of the DRM‐free shops, I get it from my library, either through Libby or by checking out a physical copy. Not that these would be helpful for someone using Audiobookshelf…

This is a straightforward consequence of how continents are defined by various cultures.

In Anglo cultures, there are seven continents, with a distinct North and South America, and Europe and Asia.

In Romance cultures, there are six continents, with a single America, and a distinct Europe and Asia.

In some eastern European cultures, there are six continents, with a distinct North and South America, and a single Eurasia.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? It’s kind of meaningless; it’s not like these definitions are based on some semi‐objective characteristic like counting tectonic plates. In the Anglosphere, nobody is actually confused about whether “America” refers to the country or the continents. Canadians don’t appreciate being called Americans, and (in my experience) Mexicans don’t desire it either. If one wants to refer to North and South America together, there’s a perfectly normal way to do so: “the Americas.”

USian, aside from its lack of euphony and its general connotation of being used by know‐it‐all scolds, is particularly silly since the existence of two countries named “United States”—two North American countries named “United States”—means it’s just as ambiguous a country name as “America” is claimed to be.

Even though I consider estadounidense silly (why aren’t people of Estados Unidos Mexicanos considered estadounidense, exactly?), I use it when speaking Spanish, because that’s the way people say “American” in Spanish. I don’t explain to Spanish‐speaking people how ignorant they are for using such a silly, ambiguous word. One wishes the same courtesy were offered in the other direction!

The average American knows that Canada is in North America, as does the average Canadian, the average Englishman, and the average Australian.

The average non‐American is from outside the Anglosphere, and so may be from a culture that considers North America and South America to be a single continent. But continents don’t have an objective definition, only a cultural one, and in the language and culture of the Anglosphere the Americas are distinct continents, America is a country, and Americans are that country’s people.

I’ve never met a Canadian who clamored to be called an American. (Except naturalized citizens!)

That’s way better than my example!

I hate --help.

First, I hate having to run the program. If I wanted to refresh myself on the shutdown command, running “shutdown --help” would make me extremely nervous!

There have been times where I’ve only had source code and wanted to read the documentation before taking the time to compile it or install dependencies or whatever. With a manpage I can just pipe it through mandoc.

Sometimes --help output is short, sometimes it’s 150 lines long and scrolls off my screen. So I hit up, end, |less, and I get nothing, because in some programs it goes to stderr instead of stdout. So I hit up, end, ^W, 2>&1 |less. Ugh.

And --help is not even close to a universal convention. In some programs --help will open HTML documentation in a browser (really!?). Often programs don’t print help at all, instead printing a generic “bad flag” error. Some will create a file named --help without asking! Some programs don’t use long options and relegate it to -h, or -?.

Manpages are a much more universal convention, thanks to Debian’s policy that all packaged programs have manuals. I don’t even use Debian, but I encounter manuals attributed to them all the time. I do my part by writing manpages for my own software and sometimes contributing new manpages to programs I encounter that don’t have one.

It’s fun to compare BSD alternatives to GNU software and BSD documentation to GNU documentation. For example, OpenBSD refused to integrate GnuPG for package signing due to its complexity, instead developing its own signify(1):

https://man.openbsd.org/signify.1

https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg24/gpg.1.ht...

Oops, sorry, this is GNU software, so we need the real documentation from texinfo:

https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/

GnuPG certainly has more features. Does that make it better software? For checking signatures (the only thing I’ve used GnuPG for in 15 years), I find the signify(1) documentation more readable and the signify(1) tool more usable.

Or how about tar(1), everyone’s favorite punching bag due to its weird options?

https://man.openbsd.org/tar.1

https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/tar/tar.1.en.html

https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/tar.html

Yikes!