I’ve had to deal with this on the data collection end, and it’s a PITA to build in the mechanisms to fully follow the law. If you’re an EU resident, and especially if the server is in the EU or has to follow EU agreements, then they’d risk some quite high penalties if they didn’t follow it.

Ownership comes with both rights and responsibilities.

Platforms want as many of the rights as possible, without the responsibilities… which is why they have a contract (TOS) where they explicitly renounce to ownership, leaving it for the user, and only license the rights.

If platforms took full ownership, like in a “work for hire” agreement, they would be responsible for any illegal content a user could upload, since it wouldn’t be the user’s content anymore. Obviously they don’t want that.

A side effect of wanting as much content as possible without owning it, is that… well, they don’t own it. 😎

Fediverse where there’s no owner/seller/buyer of your data or anything else you contributed.

Incorrect. You get ownership of anything that’s yours, then upload stuff under whatever TOS your instance has… what’s that? it has no TOS? Then they’re in for a rough awakening some day. 🤷

Whether there are sellers/buyers… is something we’ll learn in time. For now, user generated content on the Fediverse gets shared with little regard or protection of anyone’s rights, so anyone can make a compilation, bundle it up, slap a price tag on it, and try to sell it.

places an undue burden onto the user to determine and explain why data might be personal

The other way around: all data originating from a person, is by default “personal data”, and the burden of explaining which one is not, lies with whoever is keeping it.

you can’t look at any messages in any rooms you’ve been kicked out of

If they’re keeping them, then you can request a GDPR export of ALL your data. Doesn’t matter whether some interface or application allows you access to the data or not, or even if you’ve been banned from the whole platform; as long as they keep the data, they have an obligation to honor your rights of:

• Access
• Correction/Modification
• Removal

Even during obligatory data retention periods, when they can’t remove the data and only make it inaccessible, you still have the right to get a copy of your own personal data.

IIRC, one of the LLMs (was it OpenAI?) that crawled Reddit, had to manually remove subs like r/counting because they were messing with the training.

As long as the link between data and user is severed, they are compliant with GDPR. […] As long as it’s not personally identifiable, it’s OK.

Wrong.

In the US, data protection refers to “personally identifiable” data, so severing the link is enough. Under the GDPR, all “personal” data is protected, doesn’t matter if it has a link or not to identify the person.

The test under the GDPR, will be whether a comment has any personal data in it. If it’s a generic “LMAO”, then leaving it anonymous might be enough; if it is a “look at me [photo attached]” or an “AITA [personal story]”, then the person can ask for it to be removed, not just anonymized.

The difference is: Reddit doesn’t own the content, they can’t stop anyone else from selling it, or giving it for free; only the users could (the actual owners).

There are Reddit content dumps out there, which Reddit can’t stop anyone from using… so not sure what they are selling, but if it’s just that, then they’re scamming people.

From the TOS/EULA, the content belongs to each user, they just license it to Reddit to use as it pleases.

X/X11 is a client-server protocol from the age of 10Mbps networks, intended for a bunch of “dumb terminals” connected to a mainframe that runs the apps, with several “optimizations” that over time have become useless cruft.

Wayland is a local machine display system, intended for computers capable of running apps on the same machine as the display (aka: about everything for the past 30 years).

Nowadays, it makes more sense to have a Wayland system (with some RDP app if needed), than an X11 system with a bunch of hacks and cruft that only makes everything slower and harder to maintain. An X11 server app acting as a “dumb terminal”, can still be run on a Wayland system to display X11 client apps if needed.

ChatGPT:
Hello! How can I assist you today?

Some things they did get right…

face:b00c::1

When you try to dismantle capitalism… you get capitalism under a different name, with a dictator on top of it. Better hope the dictator wants to protect the environment, and that he knows how to! (see: Great Chinese Famine)

Header files are optional, they duplicate function declarations to share between multiple files, but otherwise you could write c/c++/c# without headers… the compiler might just run out of memory.

I do understand the “lazy”, I saw them around me when I was a kid too.

It’s really simple: everyone is born curious, that’s how we learn to walk and talk, or the difference between sucking a thumb and chewing on sweets. Then, some get encouraged to keep being curious, while others get forced into strict rules and punished for any displays of curiosity, until they stop trying.

I almost got pushed over the line, was labeled a “bad kid” more than once for not following the rules, and just by a lucky twist of destiny, they couldn’t push me more into a mold. That lead to later rebellion, family conflicts, further attempts that completely backfired, and I ended up being one of the few weird kids in class who kept being curious. I still kind of envy some of the others, who instead of getting stifled, got truly encouraged in their curiosity, they’ve ended up much better later in life.

My point being, these people are not lazy, or like to stagnate, or like being ignorant. I’m sorry for your brother, it sounds like his curiosity has been beaten out of him into oblivion. You say your mother has encouraged it, and at the same time that he keeps getting grounded; that’s how the process works. If any time one tries to get out of the mold they get punished, while getting encouraged to stay safely inside, it leads to just giving up, at least until they get to live on their own, which prevents one from achieving their full potential.

As for the answering “I don’t know” to every question, I’ve seen it as a defense mechanism in people who got criticized/punished for every answer in an arbitrary manner, so they’d rather automatically pretend not to know, than risk thinking and saying the wrong thing. Not sure how you could help them, nothing of what I tried did work in that case. Hope you have more luck.

XMPP did it to itself, it left stuff like file transfers, audio/video calls, custom emojis, all undefined in the standard and left for the clients to create their own extensions… which they made, incompatible between each other.