Good to see Khoshekh on this site!

Subscription-based models are a plague, but at least Jetbrains products eventually offer a perpetual fallback license for if you stop paying.

It’s absurd that Adobe can just take tools you might depend on away after years of paying the subscription.

They know that suppressing disability benefits will cause excess death, they just don’t care.

It doesn’t matter to them if their decisions drive vulnerable people to destitution or even suicide, so long as they can feed a few extra bodies into the gears to pump their numbers.

People with mental health conditions and other disabilities need support that the health and social care services can’t provide because the government have spent over a decade cutting them.

Instead we get thinly veiled eugenics, a cynical revival of social Darwinism.

It’s not as though the existence and mechanisms of piracy are a coveted secret. There’s a decent chance that they’ll learn about and attempt it independently, and the method they learn about online might expose them to greater risk than if they did it with more consideration.

On that basis, I think that knowledge transfer is at worst harm reduction. If it’s immoral, which I don’t believe it is, then at the very least your intervention could prevent them from being preyed upon by some copyright troll company when they do it despite your silence or protestations.

You might be thinking of the 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics by the Russian ultranationalist and neofascist Aleksandr Dugin.

There have been many reports over the years that it’s popular amongst those close to Putin - and there are definitely comparisons to be drawn between the book and actually occurring events.

Not particularly surprised.

By most accounts they’re very capable pieces of hardware, but the prices are way too high for current conditions.

Think there’s also a case of incremental performance improvements in the form factor becoming less perceptible, and also more people favouring phones and tablets over laptops for everyday use.

Those titles don’t, the person you’re responding to is being sarcastic because the article sorta implies that removing the microtransactions from an indie title is somehow novel.

It’s not configurable through the UI, but if you’re the admin of an instance you can change the character limit with some fairly simple source code tweaks.

This data is for South Korea only, which unfortunately itself has the highest suicide rate of the OECD countries.

It felt like it happened practically overnight when Let’s Encrypt released.

I don’t think it’s especially likely that you’ll find consistently interesting, well-reasoned discussion through any platform bringing together anonymous strangers in an ephemeral manner.

I think consistently interesting discussion has shared stakeholding as a foundational aspect - participants need to actually care, either because the discussion is a product of some commitment they’ve each made (e.g. reading something for a book club), or because the participants are familiar with each other and the outcome tangibly matters (e.g. a physical town hall meeting).

Otherwise, I think you’re more likely to get what you’re looking for from adopting some tangential hobby and having those discussions with the friends you get through that.

Doctor-patient power dynamics deserve so much more scrutiny than they get.

It’s always heartbreaking to hear of somebody who died or continued to suffer because they couldn’t convince the gatekeeper of care to examine them properly.

Not well versed in the field, but understand that large tech companies which host user-generated content match the hashes of uploaded content against a list of known bad hashes as part of their strategy to detect and tackle such content.

Could it be possible to adopt a strategy like that as a first-pass to improve detection, and reduce the compute load associated with running every file through an AI model?

Some of the replies here are absolutely vile: if you're going to endorse locking people in cages for years if not decades and pretend that's a justified response to anything short of their being an immediate physical danger to the people around them, then the least you can do is accommodate their most basic needs and ethical positions.

Prisons are pitched to us as places of rehabilitation - somewhere to pay penance and right wrongs before returning to the community, better for having served the time. I think it's a deeply disingenuous characterisation which serves mainly to let people avoid facing up to the reality which is prison's purposeless and ultimately harmful cruelty, but it is the dominant characterisation nonetheless.

But, if we blindly accept the rehabilitation narrative, then how exactly do we expect to rehabilitate people by fracturing them psychologically? By forcing them to violate ethical commitments which are sacrosanct to them, by alienating them from their communities and forcing them to abide by a clockwork dictatorial regime without any semblance of comfort or dignity, by leaving them to rot miserably for years?

No, and no wonder prisons are factories for broken people and recidivism if this is how people think about them. Get a hold of yourselves.

Also, before anybody retreats to the flimsy position of "but prisoners shouldn't eat better than schoolchildren" or "but what about the poor" - yes, those people are also underserved, and we have resources available to improve conditions for all of them too. All that's lacking is will.

Last but not least, if you concede that you care about neither the incarcerated nor the society they come from and will return to in time - then there's also the question of why animals should suffer? If people aren't even worthy of being afforded their basic preferences, then why should the default be the option which necessitates the lifelong suffering of sentient beings on an industrial scale?

Seriously, develop a sense of empathy.

I feel like you’d be interested in the Web Monetization API, if you’re not already aware of it.

I would say that for an action to be considered censorship in the strictest sense, it would need to be the suppression of information as imposed and enforced by a monopolistic authority.

If the State were to declare a book banned, that would be censorship because the State establishes itself as the single totalising authority over the people in the territory it governs. Should you contravene that ruling and possess the material in question, you’re opening yourself up to the threat of violence until you start respecting it. You’re not able to opt-out, the single authority imposes itself and its ruling on you.

Meanwhile, on federated social media there are many concurrently operating instances with different rulesets and federations. If the instance you’re part of decides to defederate with another, then you can move to another instance which continues to federate with the defederated instance in question if you’re unhappy with the decision. You’re able to opt-out of that ruling without consequence.

Plus, even if you decide not to move instance, the content hosted by the defederated instance will still be available through the instance itself.

Defederation doesn’t meaningfully suppress information, whereas censorship does.

There actually is a Web 3.0, and it predates the cryptocurrency-oriented conceptualisation of “Web3” by quite some time.

Web 3.0 is otherwise known as the Semantic Web, a set of standards developed by the W3C for formally representing (meta)data and relationships between entities on the internet, and for facilitating the machine-reading and exchange thereof.

I find it amusing that language is classified based upon frequency of use. If your average thirteen year old hears fuck once, maybe they’ll be okay - but how profane for them to hear it twice or even three times in a two hour timespan.

It’s fairly silly that this course of action is the consequence of a desire to manipulate search engine results, but at least they’re archiving the articles before taking them down.

To address the headline, though, I don’t think that anybody reputable ever seriously claimed that the internet was forever in a literal sense - we’ve been dealing with ephemerality and issues like link rot from the beginning.

It was only ever commonplace to say the internet was forever in the sense that fully retracting anything once posted could range from difficult to impossible after it’d been shared a few times.

Only in the modern era dominated by corporations offering a platform in perpetuity have we been afforded even the illusion of dependable permanence, and honestly I’m much more comfortable with the notion of less widely distributed content being able to entropy out of existence than a permanent record for everything ever made public.

I could understand upgrading so frequently at the advent of mainstream smartphones, where two years of progress actually did represent a significant user experience improvement - but the intergenerational improvements for most people’s day-to-day use have been marginal for quite some time now.

Once you’ve got web browsers and website-equivalent mobile apps performing well, software keyboards which keep up with your typing, high-definition video playback working without dropped frames, graphics processing sufficient to render whatever your game of choice is for the train journey to work, batteries which last a day of moderate to intense use, and screen resolutions so high that you can’t differentiate the pixels even by pressing your eyeball to the glass - that covers most people’s media consumption for the form factor, and there’s not much else to offer after that.