I think that depends how you write your web scraper. Of course the web scraper is going to load the page, just like your web browser does, which by all accounts is not an issue. What happens after the page is loaded depends on how the software is written.

I could try to summarize it, but if you just do a web search for EFF and TikTok, you will come across a good explanation.

Of course we don’t know how the courts will rule. My belief is that the odds are in favor of TikTok and of TikTok users, but we’ll have to wait and find out.

Nothing. The law is unconstitutional.

He spoke carelessly, but he didn’t exactly say what the author said he said. You can in fact do many things with it. Copyright doesn’t care what you do if you aren’t copying. That’s the definition of the word.

To be clear, all of the big media groups and all of the big AI companies are in favor of expanding copyright law to give themselves more power. If one of them wins or loses on an issue like this, it doesn’t improve our life in any way.

Everyone has their own opinion, but I think the problem with AI is not that people are developing fancy Turing test machines, but rather that the whole industry is full of cynical speculation where people are getting rich knowing that they can’t deliver what they’ve promised, at great expense to everyone else in society.

Is there anything specific to open source about this question? If you’re a software developer, you might have to decide whether you want to work for a shady company, or whether you want your smaller company to contract with a larger shady company. Those are I think harder decisions to make, because it could be your job on the line.

In the open source world, at least you don’t know for sure what people are going to do with your work.

But we do know that if a company is looking to be evil, it’s probably going to find a way, whether or not it uses your library.

Comedy in general. Others have given specific examples of things that are discriminatory, including racism and sexism.

On the one hand, it’s sad to realize that your old favorite movie is no longer that, but when you realize why I think it’s actually uplifting. You can feel that you’ve learned something, you’ve improved as a human being, that you care more about society.

And because there are many genres other than comedy, it’s not like you lost all of your favorite movies.

Yes. My interpretation is that the above person knew that, but they didn’t think it was even a remotely funny joke, not that they didn’t understand what the implication was.

Flatpak is one extra step. If apt or rpm already has what you want, which is true for many new users, why would we push them towards scary click thru action?

Isn’t this why we’d expect new users to use a built-in package manager? Because it avoids this exact problem?

Pushing someone new to Linux to use Flatpak? Shame on you.

There’s only a reasonable expectation of privacy in private. As the courts have ruled many times, it’s something is visible from the street or from the air, it’s probably not private.

Right, but the whole process is the issue. If the vote counters lie, or use counting machines that are broken, voters still lose. Only fixing one part of the process is insufficient.

Also, a lack of voter turnout is a huge issue, especially in countries where voters work hourly jobs and polls have meh hours or bad locations. I mean, less wealthy voters, of course.

Never focus on one step at the expense of the rest. People with bad intentions certainly won’t.

All of those questions are entirely unreasonable, because they’re all manipulative.

Many years ago my old boss gave me an interview before I got a promotion and he asked me if I was still going to be working for the company in 20 years. And I lied and said that I thought I probably would. But why did he ask me? I believe he was trying to pressure me into saying that I would be there, knowing that I have integrity, knowing that if I said it then I might be less likely to quit.

Except that he didn’t have any integrity, and he had on other occasions promised employees that they would get promotions and then delivered them nothing, or even let them go when the contract ran out.

And that’s normal. Every medium to large sized company in the world has bosses like this.

Anyway, so if you’re in a situation where they make you lie, then you lie, and then you ask them to improve the quality of the workplace. You just said that you’re planning to stay there for many years into the future, so now you’re wondering what concrete steps the bosses are going to do keep your wonderful co-workers happy enough to stick around and build that bright future together with you, bearing in mind that the best way to retain employees is to pay them more.

To me that’s the minor issue. The real question is whether people can vote online. Clearly they should be able to, we ought to be able to devise stable systems where they can, and in some states voters already do to some degree.

I love the mixed levels of irony here. On the one hand, it’s been 4 years, so it looks like a failure. At the same time, $15 just isn’t enough. What a joke. Also at the same time, if he could actually push hard on raising the minimum wage now, he could probably drum up some votes in the election.

It’s cool that all of those facts are at play in this one little statement.

I don’t see how it could work in theory. Let’s assume you have a public and a private system and somehow the private system magically performs better than the public system. Then people cut support and funding for the public system and all you have is a private system. But now everyone is stuck with it, so at best you have to have a large body of regulators watching over private companies that are trying to flout the rules as much as possible because that’s their profit margin. And this must all unavoidably drive up the price, because of the profit margin and the extra people involved.

And that’s all assuming that you can properly regulate the system, which you clearly can’t, because the more money it has then the more power it has, and healthcare is a massive industry.

It’s not a “healthcare system”. It’s a “health insurance system”. And like all insurance systems, it’s designed to make money for the insurance companies. It functions quite well in that respect.

Many countries in the world actually have health care systems, but the US does not.

This post kind of ignores basics of grammar instruction that we’ve known for centuries. Some people try to teach grammar from a prescriptive fashion. They tell us what the rules are, they have us memorize them, and then we can speak perfectly.

The problem is, that’s not how language works in reality. Even if you had a perfect language to begin with, something with no exceptions of any kind, after 20 years people would have added their own changes. So then the original instruction that you gave, that wouldn’t prepare future language learners for reality.

This is why we have to teach grammar and spelling descriptively. We’re talking about what actually happens in the world when people actually speak and write in English. Of course it’s nice to point out common customs and conventions, but we don’t get to ignore all of the irregular things just because they’re irritating to memorize.

And this is true for all languages that are used by even a medium-sized population over time. You cannot avoid it, you’ll find it in every language, sorry.

Maybe you’re making an apples to oranges comparison. But anyway, nobody I know thinks Apple has good intentions with regard to their data.