thenonsequitur

Now you're shifting the goal posts. Please re-read the comments/replies up to this point and you'll see no mention of laws anywhere. That's not what the discussion is about. It's about whether AI consumers of publicly accessible content should be required to pay for that content when human consumers should not.

That's actually an excellently apt analogy.

If you don't want to engage in the argument, that's on you. I don't think ChatGPT not being a human makes any difference and I think the onus is on you to explain why it should.

Well if you are blocking access to their crawler, I'd imagine they'd have no need to use an incognito crawler to check for malicious content. Why would they care if that content is not ending up in their index anyway?

Presumably, the incognito crawlers are only used on sites that have already granted the regular crawler access. That's content that ends up in their index which they want to vet.

This reminds me a lot of this Kurz Gesagt video:

"The Ultimate Conspiracy Debunker" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hug0rfFC_L8

The idea in this video is also that most conspiracy theories are easy to debunk without even analyzing the contents of the theory, just looking at political factors.

What's preventing them? If they did that, they'd have to give up a fraction of their sales. Also, it's not easy to set or agree on a commission percent when Tesla and the dealerships have such opposing interests to begin with.

In other words, they are not trying this simply because selling direct is a better choice.

This part of the interview seems relevant here:

"People can clone the app because of its simplicity," Nguyen says, "but they will never make another Flappy Bird."

Not impossible, no. But we absolutely have enough control over software to make it highly improbable for someone to accidentally delete something important and make it unrecoverable.

First, let me start by saying I'm a day-to-day Ruby developer and I absolutely love the language. That said, there are things besides the speed that prevent the acceptance of Ruby among people:

* No static type checking, potentially resulting in more bugs * Ease of monkey-patching, potentially resulting in insecurities * Rampant use of hash-as-arguments, resulting in method definitions that don't actually define their arguments (though Ruby 2.0 fixes this with named parameters, it's still a common pattern) * Heavy use of symbols, which some people see as the moral equivalent of magic strings

I personally think all of these arguments are bunk except for the over-use of hash-as-arguments even in Ruby 2.0. But some people give them credence.

Interestingly, Ruby is also approaching its 20-year anniversary. Of course, PHP has been popular much longer than Ruby.

I think he's taking as axiomatic that there only a few people using ruby, thus claiming this demonstrates the general rule people don't use ruby. Thus he is, in fact, using the phrase correctly.

But by taking it as axiomatic that few people use ruby, he is begging the question.

Luakit must be wrong. You should probably switch to Internet Explorer. :S

Yeah, I agree with you. I should have qualified what I said. I meant to say, "I'd only be using it with my computer anyway, and I don't think this will ever beat a keyboard/mouse in terms of practicality and ease of use with a computer". Agree that for a tv in the living room, or any environment where a large flat surface in front of you is impractical, that a keyboard/mouse is not so good.

I think it's great that Valve is innovating on controllers.

Personally, I won't buy one -- I don't intend on getting a steam machine so I'd only be using it with my computer anyway, and I don't think this will ever beat a keyboard/mouse in terms of practicality and ease of use.

But that aside, I'm glad they are at least trying to make a next-generation controller -- gives me hope there might one day be a controller I actually like. Though I'm not particularly hyped about the controller-specific features via API. For a game system that usually ranks accessibility very highly, the idea of device-tied game features strikes me as a somewhat regressive move, even if the features themselves are progressive.

Not sure where that argument comes from -- it's certainly not one I've ever made. I personally really prefer the nub over touch pad, but it has nothing to do with not having to move my fingers away from the keyboard.

I mean, given the option of a physical mouse, I will always prefer that over both nub and track pad -- and the physical mouse requires the most movement away from the keyboard (of course, to avoid all three mouse input methods I use keyboard shortcuts when possible).

Anyway, my reasons for preferring the nub are:

* Less movement required on the actual input device. Just a slight tilt of the finger can move the mouse cursor from anywhere to anywhere else.

* Higher accuracy. This one may be subjective, only personal applicable, and/or biased, but I think the nub just makes it so much easier to navigate compared to the touch pad.

It could be to cause a failure in an ancillary github service that results in opening up a new attack vector which could then allow the attackers to steal code from private repos.

The goal may be to potentially open up a new attack vector to steal code, some of which may contain secrets. This is pure speculation, but a definite possibility.

I remember reading Rendezvous with Rama when I was a kid, and the whole time in my head I was pronouncing rendezvous in completely phonetic English, which also happened to make my mom laugh hysterically when I first said it out loud.

Actually, at least one mainstream browser (Safari for iPhone) doesn't support Flash, and that's a part of why Flash has been declining (HTML5 capabilities being another important part).

1. "Even if W3C decided to drop EME, there are enough important companies working on the spec--including Netflix, Google, and Microsoft--that a common platform will be built. The only difference is whether it happens under the W3C umbrella..."

This is probably true, but that doesn't make EME a good thing. Okay, so some powerful media companies are colluding to develop a shitty content delivery platform. How does that at all entail the idea that HTML should throw support behind it? Just because it's going to happen doesn't mean you have to officially endorse it.

2. "Deprived of the ability to use browser plugins, protected content distributors are not, in general, switching to unprotected media. Instead, they're switching away from the Web entirely."

I really don't see this as a problem. The web simply doesn't need these DRM-enamored content distributors. It will do fine without them. In fact, if the web loses them, the web wins.

3. "Opposition to EME will produce" a situation where software and services are "locked away in a series of proprietary, platform-specific apps".

This is just a stupid thing to say. DRM requires a series of proprietary, platform-specific apps, regardless of how they're implemented. The proposed CDMs (content decryption modules) that EME requires are also proprietary and platform-specific. They are quite simply no better than traditional HTML plug-ins like Flash or newer delivery platforms like native mobile apps. "A rose by any other name". Except that DRM doesn't smell sweet at all.

4. "A case could be made that EME will make it easier for content distributors to experiment with--and perhaps eventually switch to--DRM-free distribution."

While it's technically true that EME might make it slightly easier for such experimentation, that's really besides the point. Ease of implementation is absolutely not what's stopping these content distributors from such experiments. Business politics is what's stopping them. If a business decides that it wants to try a DRM-free model, it will try it. The implementation details hardly affect the decision.

I also see them as equal, but I'd say I'd prefer the one that implies no official endorsement of a closed system by an open standards committee. That Flash also happens to be the one with more adoption is a bonus point.

There was once when I did this as well.

It was a contract web development company I was working for, about ten years ago. One of our clients wanted some SEO work done, and my supervisor had recently been reading a lot about SEO. He started out reading white-hat stuff, but by this point he was delving into some black-hat research, and he essentially asked me to program a message-board spam-bot. I just told him straight up that I believed that would be unethical and I refused to do it, knowing full well that simply refusing to do assigned work could cost me job.

Thankfully, not only did this not cost me my job, it caused my supervisor to re-evaluate his own position and he decided to go back into completely white-hat SEO. And in the end, he actually thanked me for refusing to do that work.

I feel like lucked out on that one.

To be fair, Windows 7 typically still has that network driver problem with new ThinkPads. Fortunately, ThinkPad is a good company, and they make it relatively easy to locate and download the right network driver to put on a thumb drive, if you don't have an install disk handy (happens more commonly than you suggest). This is easy if you know what you're doing, but, of course, next to impossible without some power user knowledge (it also requires access to another computer with a working internet connection and a thumb drive).

And also to be fair, XP is in a valid sense only one version out of date. Vista was a fiasco, and that's not just a meme -- Vista was released way ahead of schedule and still had a ton of known unresolved bugs. It was by far MS's most buggy release, and the whole thing was a disaster. Compared to the relative stability of XP, Vista was a step backwards. And while Windows 7 can rightly be called a newer version of Windows XP (and is better in nearly every way), it would be a stretch to say that Windows 8 is a newer version of Windows 7. Windows 8 is a fork into a different paradigm, and is so different it's not even comparable to Windows 7 along a number of dimensions.

All that said, XP is still pretty damn out of date, even with the latest service pack installed, and if Windows 7 is an option, it's usually a better one. Of course, XP uses less memory, so it may be suitable for particularly old computers. And for people that don't like to pirate software, owning a copy XP is a great reason to stick with XP (if it works well enough, why fork out the money for Windows 7?).

"If Windows were equally messed up as Linux I'd expect to run into the problems at around the same rate."

My personal experience (as someone who has been dual-booting Windows and Ubuntu for nearly a decade and uses both operating systems regularly) is that both have a lot of annoying problems, but Windows has always been way more of a pain in the ass, and I've run into more problems using it. Especially when it comes to driver issues, Windows has problems (it took hours to get a standard WiFi card to work, and once my video driver got corrupted so badly the system wouldn't even let my try to fix it, and restore failed -- I had to reinstall the OS to fix it).

I agree. I'd never guess what NT stood for. Even if I managed to deduce what it meant and how to use it by its usage patterns, I'd still not be able to guess. It reminds me of NB -- an acronym I learned how to use from context and even began using myself occasionally, only years later realizing I didn't actually know what it stood for.

EOM, on the other hand, is immediately clear to me because of it's similarity to EOL (end-of-line) and EOF (end-of-file).

Never mind what carried the day -- I'm adopting this protocol starting now, convention be damned!

Another game in a similar vein that came up on HN a couple months ago is http://bombermine.com/ -- that's the game that changed my perspective about the possibilities for javascript MMOs.

Bombermine's source code is not open though, so it's nice the source code for this one is open, to dig in and see the mechanics behind it!

Well, to be fair, what counts as value to computer enthusiasts is the specification and feature details. I couldn't care less if it comes packaged with some chat software that I'll end up formatting away along with the default OS (except to the degree that it makes the machine cost more), but let me at those specs. I and other people like me respond very well to this kind of features-heavy marketing.

Your point, however, stands. Most consumers really don't care/know much about what the specs mean, and this is very bad marketing to that demographic.

Tangentially, have you seen bombermine? It's an online bomberman clone that generally has several hundred people playing simultaneously, a ton of fun. Obviously not a console game, but your Saturn Bomberman reference made me think of it.

Really? For me that phrase definitely means "movies starring Adam Sandler". A lot of (most of?) the movies written/produced by Adam Sandler also starred him, but that doesn't exclude other movies. I definitely think of Punch-Drunk Love as an Adam Sandler movie.