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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong.

    The publisher-plaintiffs did not prove the “obvious wrong” in this case, however US-based courts have a curious standard when it comes to the application of Fair Use doctrine. This case ultimately rested on the fourth, most significantly-weighted Fair Use standard in US-based courts: whether IA’s digital lending harmed publisher sales during the 3-month period of unlimited digital lending.

    Unfortunately, when it comes to this standard, the publisher-plaintiffs are not required to prove harm, rather only assert that harm has occurred. If they were required to prove harm they’d have to reveal sales figures for the 27 works under consideration–publishers will do anything to conceal this information and US-based courts defer to them. Therefore, IA was required to prove a negative claim–that digital lending did not hurt sales–without access to the empirical data (which in other legal contexts is shared during the discovery phase) required to prove this claim. IA offered the next best argument (see pp. 44-62 of the case document to check for yourself), but the data was deemed insufficient by the court.

    In other words, on the most important test of Fair Use doctrine, which this entire case ultimately pivoted upon, IA was expected to defend itself with one arm tied behind its back. That’s not ‘fair’ and the publishers did not prove ‘obvious’ harm, but the US-based courts are increasingly uninterested in these things.

    edited: page numbers on linked court document.







  • Hello friend,

    Most people see results after they establish and stick with a meditation routine. If you need help, Kurzgesagt has a useful video on establishing habits and routines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75d_29QWELk

    Here’s a simple meditation technique to start, which requires no special equipment, reading/training, etc. All you need is to sit or stand in a comfortable position that does not make you feel sleepy. The technique is counting breaths and it is the first step for many different meditation traditions.

    Your goal is to count your own breaths from 1-10 in your mind without losing count. This is a repetitive exercise like gym reps, but your goal is to NOT ZONE OUT. Your target is 10: breathe in and count ‘1’ in your mind, breathe out and count ‘2’… breathe in again and count ‘3’, breathe out and count ‘4’. If you lose track of your count, you just reset to ‘1’ and start again.

    At the beginning, you will lose track of your count a lot. Some people take a week or more to successfully complete the first set, much less multiple sets in a row. Our minds naturally wander. Sometimes you don’t even realize you lost count until you think, “Wait, what breath am I on?” That is okay… that is the point! If you keep practicing this technique you will begin to train your mind to focus and not wander, which is a major step to conquering procrastination. Once you develop this simple form of mental self-control you will be able to demonstrate other forms of self-control.

    Let me know if you want to chat more about it!


  • A big part of the frustration for me is them pretending like they are still doing the right thing by continuing to provide it.

    Agree completely! Reddit has never been in the business of ‘doing the right thing’ and these API fees are clearly designed to discourage third-party developers. Reddit leadership do not seem to understand what drives the value of their own product and have badly misread both their short- and long-term futures, so the experiment will likely end in failure.


  • My remark is probably too harsh. I meant that companies developing for-profit products based on another company’s product/infrastructure, which they do not own, will be subject to whatever changes the latter decides to make. Any company that develops such a product should understand and take that into consideration. That said, I think reddit made a mistake re: its pricing for API access because the site benefits from that collaboration more than is harmed. However, if reddit wants to cut off its nose to spite its face they’re entitled to do so, just as we’re entitled to leave.


    • Significant increase in non-human/bot accounts makes it difficult to know whether you’re actually talking to a real person anymore.

    • I was not personally affected by API changes and do not sympathize with for-profit 3rd party developers, however reddit’s withdrawal of support for communities like Transcribers of Reddit is mean-spirited and marginalizes our friends and neighbours who want to enjoy social media like everyone else.

    • Nothing good ever happens for an existing userbase when an organization/product joins the zombie death-march of publicly-traded assets. Capitalism will inevitably ruin everything it encounters, and reddit will not be spared from this outcome.


  • Hello friend. No experience with kilts, but if you’re looking for general suggestions, Thai fishermen pants are another alternative clothing to keep cool in the summer. Here in Toronto, nobody bats an eye when I wear them during hot days. They’re inexpensive and you can get them in v/a basic colors to match your wardrobe, but the sewing pattern is so simple you could also get someone to make them for you using whatever fabric you want. Here’s a example image:



  • What I mostly remember is the sense of hard work and discovery.

    In the mid-to-late 1990s, after the internet became a public phenomenon, but before it totally dominated our lives, spending time on the web felt very different than it does today. There was no publicly-accessible index of websites, search was in its infancy, and link aggregators as we know them today just didn’t exist. For the first time, you didn’t need to be a tech-savvy person to experience the WWW, but it was still pretty incomprehensible to most people, who didn’t understand what the internet was for.

    New “homesteaders” developed websites on free hosts like GeoCities/Tripod/Angelfire; the former host organized itself into “neighbourhoods” of sites because we still thought about the internet as a physical space. Web rings served as pilgrimage routes that connected websites together, irrespective of domain or host, into self-selected communities. They organized around subjects/themes, like Lemmy communities, subreddits, hashtags, etc. are today. They emerged around the same time as public bulletin boards which, for people who were not familiar with BBS, were also a transformative technology, and also the source of life-changing memories.

    I am so privileged to have been around to explore the early internet.