Or authors could preëmptively declare their works to be in the public domain upon their death.

I wish Creative Commons had a license like that. Something like CC PDD (Public-Domain-on-Death) which would activate upon the creator’s death, allowing them and publishers to freely monetize their work while they’re alive, but which would release the work into the public domain immediately after.

It might even incentivize music and book publishers to get their artists health insurance. 😃

“Create a python script to count the number of r characters are present in the string strawberry.”

The number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry' is: 2

Based on my cheatsheet, GNU Coreutils, sed, awk, ImageMagick, exiftool, jdupes, rsync, jq, par2, parallel, tar and xz utils are examples of commands that I frequently use but whose developers I don’t believe receive any significant cashflow despite the huge benefit they provide to software developers. The last one was basically taken over in by a nation-state hacking team until the subtle backdoor for OpenSSH was found in 2024-03 by some Microsoft guy not doing his assigned job.

deleted by creator

So, you’re telling me my plan to measure atmospheric oxygen isotope trends over geologic time by grinding up sharks is bust?

The best tool to improve intelligence will be indistinguishable from a room that accelerates time within itself so that the outside world, and all its distractions, appears to slow to a crawl. See Age of Em (2016) by Robin Hanson.

I landed at Domodedovo in Moscow in 2013. Ready to see this incredible new place I’ve never experienced before, I walked out into the main arrivals area, and right there was a Cinnabon.

Reminds me of the penultimate verse of the Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris (2010) by Pig With The Face Of A Boy.

And now the wall is down, the Marxists frown
There’s foreign shops all over town
When in Red Square, well don’t despair
There’s Levi’s and McDonald’s there
The US gave us crystal meth
And Yeltsin drank himself to death
But now that Putin’s put the boot in,
Who’ll get in our way?

Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.

Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd’s 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).

Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.

See List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet for the graveyard list. Sorting by Price helps. Some other notable companies that Google acquired rather than compete with:

• Nest Labs (home automation)
• DropCam (home automation)
• DoubleClick (advertisement)
• FitBit (wearables)
• Waze (GPS navigation)
• Skybox Imaging (satellite mapping)
• Like.com (shopping)
• Meebo (social network)
• GrandCentral (VOIP)
• Picasa (photographry)
• Tenor (GIF search)
• PhotoMath (LLM; became Bard)

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started.

In my opinion, it was when anti-trust laws did not trigger upon Google acquiring YouTube because Google Video couldn’t compete. That meant it was open season on start-ups that otherwise might have grown to kill Google or other big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

Donate to Mozilla Thunderbird. Free software isn’t free.

Nvidia: I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further.

Duolingo, the dominant player, can simply buy competition like busuu, bypassing the need they’d otherwise have to improve their software.

Amazon replacements:

• Audiobooks: Libro.fm (no DRM)
• eBooks: eBooks.com (specifically, their DRM-free section)
• Shopping: basically any major online retailer’s website
• Electronics: System76 (for gaming machines), ThinkPenguin (for FOSS machines)
• Groceries: your local grocer, lol.

As for video streaming, it’s going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.

Can we have space settlement without the war and genocide? It’s not like killing Indians and robbing trains is a fundamental requirement.

I’m pretty sure fanfics have that territory covered. 🐍🐍🧶

Keyboards were so nice when you wanted to accurately input characters without putting your faith in auto-correct. God help you if you need to input something not in its dictionary like someone’s name.

I would argue the original theft was when the publisher coerced creators to sign away their copyright power due to the monopoly the publisher has on the market: i.e. if you don’t sign your rights away, you can’t play.

In theory, creators could punish publishers by going on strike, but publishers abuse copyright law to remove potential competitors striking creators might flee to. The DMCA’s overly broad application of DRM that also prevents creators from freeing their content from publishers also inhibits competition by increasing switching costs for customers who build up a library or DRM’s content that they cannot transfer to another publisher.

Breaking up monopolies by restoring anti-trust law to a pre-Reagan state would prevent the original coersion-theft of rights from creators since creators could reassign copyright from misbehaving publishers, enabling customers to transfer their purchased libraries to another publisher.

Jannondorf