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180659830
comment
byquantaman
2026 @11:23AM
(#65950134)
Attached to: Saudi Arabia To Scale Back Neom Megaproject
The Line was always a deeply silly idea. Cities work due to density and having easy access to many things, while getting a lot of use of the same infrastructure. A city's efficiency and degree of flexible access scales at a better than linear rate with population because of the geometry. If I'm in a given location then if I can access any location within radius R of me, that means the number of locations available goes up as roughly R^2. If one has a giant line, it only goes up like R. The entire idea of The Line read like the sort of thing that a 10 year old had and thought was really cool, and then somehow got to do it. Which given how absolutely spoiled the Saudi princes are, it wouldn't surprise me if it was the case that Mohammed bin Salman had this idea when he was a kid, and no one since then has pushed back on it because they are afraid of being Khashoggied.
Except "R" really depends on your ability to travel. Which means what really matters is your proximity to transit and major roads.
I think the Line is probably a bad idea, but I don't think that's the reason why. I think the bigger issue is that cities are ultimately organic creations, shops, industry, and residences show up where they're needed. I'm not sure a planned city will be economically successful.
180659804
comment
byquantaman
2026 @11:17AM
(#65950114)
Attached to: Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong?
Nah, it's not the realisation about the cost at all. I couldn't give a flying fuck about the cost.
It's about convenience. If $15 a month saves me hours searching for and downloading pirated films, it's money well spent.
The convenience is because piracy is illegal.
If it was legal then you could easily combine everything in a single easy to search service that would be cheaper and more convenient than any individual service.
180659782
comment
byquantaman
2026 @11:13AM
(#65950094)
Attached to: Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong?
Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a criminal offense [cornell.edu] vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.
I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be fully legal [freepubliclibrary.org], just as rms is saying.
Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.
Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.
Copyright law was created to ensure that someone could actually make a living creating new works. In the past you could achieve that objective by focusing on commercial publication because distribution was so difficult (your legalization of noncommerical infringement would have ruined that).
Libraries are an edge case that were allowed to exist because whatever you think of the law they worked out for everyone.
But now with the internet publication is trivial, so laws need to adapt. I don't think end-users should be subject to criminal penalties, but the people in the business of infringement? For sure that can be criminal if that's what it takes.
That's why file sharing should be legal, and business models should adapt to the decades-old reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable. Some businesses have adapted rather well. While it's unfortunate that DRM is widespread, things like streaming services aren't that bad an adaptation. They just need a bit more adapting to truly embrace the 21st century.
People like Kim Dotcom made a LOT of money file sharing. The only reason that streaming services are viable is that filesharing is still illegal. If your ideas were adopted then "noncommerical" protocols and services would just rip off every Netflix and Disney+ show out there and offer it all under one service for a small fraction of the price.
Great for consumers... until those companies go out of business.
Also, as a fun aside, one thing that baffles me is if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions? The courts are currently twisting themselves into pretzels to try to invent some kind of fair use exception for them out of whole cloth because it feels wrong to charge them all with criminal behavior. But the truth is the law is not being interpreted in good faith, in part because the law itself is horrifyingly outdated and needs to be updated and modernized.
Because the AI companies are actually doing something quite different. It's not entirely clear how the laws apply to what the AI companies are doing, it's also not entirely clear how they should apply to what they're doing. Remember, the point of copyright law isn't copyright law, it's creating a fair and functionality economy surrounding creative works.
180603882
comment
byquantaman
2026 @10:05PM
(#65930638)
Attached to: AI Has Made Salesforce Engineers More Productive, So the Company Has Stopped Hiring Them, CEO Says
Due to advancements in frameworks and development tools programmer productivity has been increasing for decades.
And employment and compensation have increased with it, because a more productive programmer means more tasks become viable.
What's happening now is that LLMs have caused a sudden productivity increase across the board, so for the moment there's more programmers than work available.
But the same fundamental economics are in play, software creation being cheaper means more software tasks will become feasible, and employment should recover and possibly increase.
180603876
comment
byquantaman
2026 @09:59PM
(#65930636)
Attached to: Canada Reverses Tariff On Chinese EVs
Carney said China has become a more predictable partner to deal with than the U.S, the country's neighbor and longtime ally.
I don't know what to say... more winning?
The long-term damage Trump and his puppetmasters are doing to America is incalculable.
As a Canadian I've got a certain innate anti-American streak.
But I have to admit that for the majority of the time since the end of WWII they've been a net good to the world (with the occasional epic disaster like the Iraq War).
As much as I don't like the US it's unfortunate that Trump is bringing about the end of the US's golden age. I don't think the EU is cohesive enough to take the US's place, and I don't think the international system will do better under Chinese dominance.
180424289
comment
byquantaman
2025 @01:21PM
(#65869489)
Attached to: 'How Lina Khan Killed iRobot'
The first sentence of this article pretty much tells you why the company went bankrupt. They offered their manufacturing contract to a chinese company, which turned around and use that technology to make competing products, selling it for a much cheaper price. That chinese company still makes a profit because they didn't invest into R&D. iRobot gave them everything they needed. If you go on Amazon and search "automatic vacuum robot" you'll see an ocean of look alike robots made by and shipped from china.
The deal was killed in 2024, highly capable Chinese vacuum robots have been around for far longer than that.
The fact is that Roomba's tech was advanced when they first made it, but that was years ago. By now robot vacuums are generic, and there's a limit to how much of a premium you can demand when doing a generic product.
180378795
comment
byquantaman
13, 2025 @02:04PM
(#65856161)
Attached to: The World's Electric Car Sales Have Spiked 21% So Far in 2025
I think some of this is just businesses catching up.
Last month my hotel had chargers in their underground parking so I thought about topping up my PHEV, until I looked at the rates and realized it would cost far more than gas.
As expected, I didn't see the chargers in use a single time over my 3 day stay.
Imagine instead the chargers were free. The cost would be on par with the complimentary coffee pods and toiletries, and I would have come away with a very positive experience.
Installing paid chargers was a bad business decision by the hotel, I expect more public free charging in the future.
180271527
comment
byquantaman
03, 2025 @12:10AM
(#65831581)
Attached to: Waymo Hits a Dog In San Francisco, Reigniting Safety Debate
The one conclusion we can draw from this is the folks drawing conclusions are exposing nothing but their own beliefs.
All we know is the dog was unleashed and the Waymo hit it.
We don't know if the dog shot out from under a parked car, so it was literally impossible to avoid. Or if it was sitting in the middle of the road and the Waymo ran straight over it.
All the folks trying to assign blame one way or another are doing so completely prematurely.
180262235
comment
byquantaman
2, 2025 @11:48AM
(#65830325)
Attached to: Trump Administration To Take Equity Stake In Former Intel CEO's Chip Startup
...while demanding the public ownership of the means of production. Can't write parody any more.
There's a narrative on the right that fascism was a left wing form of government.,
But the reality is that both fascism and communism were extreme right wing forms of government.
Fascism openly so, but also communism. Remember what fascism actually cares about, maintaining order, obedience to authority, sacrificing for the glory of the state.
Communism was supposed to be about equality and the people controlling everything in a bottom up manner. But the moment you implement it on a national scale you end up with a small inner circle, and they either go fascist like the USSR, or a technocratic dictatorship like China.
There's a reason that when the USSR fell the one narrative you heard was about how much the government lied (because they were far right masquerading as far left). And there's a reason why it was so easy for Russia to go far right under Putin, because they were under far right rule in the USSR.
So yeah, demanding public ownership is pretty on brand for fascists.
180236507
comment
byquantaman
2025 @11:43PM
(#65824085)
Attached to: Scientists Think They've Solved Why One of History's Most Advanced Civilizations Vanished
They've associated changes in the civilization with the changing climate conditions, it's likely not 100% certain, but it looks like a pretty likely cause.
It's easy to think that the world is "full" now. But the reality is that only a small percentage of the earth's surface has been "modified" by humans. https://www.weforum.org/storie... If we needed to move, there are still vast untouched tracts of land that could be tamed.
That is a very weird take. The bits we modified are the best land, temperate zones, river banks, grasslands. You really want to move to some of that "untamed land" in the Sahara, Siberia, or Greenland?
And honestly, that map looks like a massive underestimate. I'm seeing big black regions in what I know to be largely unbroken crop land.
180231775
comment
byquantaman
2025 @11:04AM
(#65823095)
Attached to: Canada Rolls Back Climate Rules To Boost Investments
in the old it's not physics or chemistry that will doom humanity but economics, aptly called the dismal science
If you don't want Alberta to pump oil then don't buy oil.
But if you are going to pump oil then build a pipeline because shipping it by truck or rail is a horrible solution.
I want the oil industry to die because we're moving onto other energy sources, not because we're shutting down the Albertan oil industry so other producers like the US and the Middle East can make more money.
180060300
comment
byquantaman
12, 2025 @11:12PM
(#65792264)
Attached to: Russia's AI Robot Falls Seconds After Being Unveiled
I thought Musk did a similar thing... Fake it, or maybe just had the robot remote controlled. In any case, Musks robots seemed to be a flop too.
So fake it until they give you a $1T pay package.
180060284
comment
byquantaman
12, 2025 @11:11PM
(#65792260)
Attached to: Russia's AI Robot Falls Seconds After Being Unveiled
The proper way to do this is 1) fake it and 2) when queried, lie about it. I mean, this has been the traditional approach in all things AI and at least the LLM pushers know how to do it. I would have thought that Russians, off all people, understand this approach in a more general way. Apparently not. Some people will probably get an extensive "vacation" sponsored by the state now.
They did fake it. The "robot" was a guy in a robot suit, unfortunately, the guy in the robot suit got completely shitfaced.
180001990
comment
byquantaman
2025 @11:38PM
(#65781826)
Attached to: Texas Sues Roblox For Allegedly Failing To Protect Children On Its Platform
Honestly the issue with the story is Ken Paxton, he literally has negative credibility. I know virtually nothing about Roblox or this case, but if Paxton is the first AG to pursue it my automatic assumption is he's prosecuting them because they either failed to give him a bribe or he thought they were helping Democrats register to vote or something.
179973152
comment
byquantaman
05, 2025 @10:42AM
(#65775004)
Attached to: Trump Re-Nominates Billionaire Jared Isaacman To Run NASA
you cant say that without "I believe you are a racist,"
just ask 60 minutes if ok to edit
And you can't post that if you understand nuance.
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