So you hate women and don’t want them to have bodily autonomy? You see how that sounds? It’s the same logic as your argument.

If both of them support genocide, but one also supports banning abortion, the ethical choice is to vote for the one that won’t ban abortion.

If you’d rather wait until a candidate arrives that agrees with you on every issue, that’s fine, but you’ll probably never vote, and in the meantime, by not voting, supporting whichever candidate you like less.

While there’s no honor in the presidency, there is honor in doing what you can to reduce harm, and if you can’t reduce harm to the Palestinians, at least you can reduce harm to American women and girls.

You’re not wrong, but, like with critics of other “abolish such-n-such” statements, you’re missing a core part of it: replacing “such-n-such” with something better. Copyright has a few important purposes, and I don’t think anyone would want to eliminate it without covering those — and the need for creators to survive, and maybe even flourish, is chief among them.

(Same thing with “defund the police” — the intention was to redirect that funding to crime prevention and “alternative policing” (eg send therapists to mental health emergencies instead of cops). That was arguably the biggest PR fail of the century.)

Also, very very minor point, but as a librarian:

content libraries

I think “content collections” would be a better term, to preserve the free-to-share subtext of the word “library” — and “collection” has more of a hoarding context, which fits.

Most people say things like “fuck copyright” because it’s currently set up to benefit employers, large companies, and wealthy people; creators are an obstacle in copyright law. Current copyright law hinders creativity and centralizes wealth. Fuck copyright.

If copyright law was creator-centric, there would be a lot fewer people saying “fuck copyright”.

Personally I’d probably still be against copyright, but only if there was some other way to take care of artists, like a UBI or something.

If copyright protected the creatives then there would be a lot less antagonism against copyright. Most people are against it because it’s become a lever of control for big companies to use against both the creators and the public.

My journey was Windows-> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch.

(Infuriatingly i still use windows for gaming, but nothing else.)

Did i mention that i use arch?

More importantly:

fucked up all my data with no backup.

One time i messed up a script and accidentally copied 40,000 mp3s to the same filename. 20 years of music collecting, literally going back to Napster, all gone.

Well, not completely gone. I’ve got everything uploaded to iBroadcast, and I’m pretty sure i can download my library. But I’m not sure i deserve to.

HTML is pretty straightforward so just understanding the very basic stuff is probably all you need. CSS is where html gets any challenge it might have.

CSS is weird because it’s very “easy” so “real developers” kind of object to learning it, but the truth is, if you gave any of them a layout design, they probably couldn’t build it. There are tools like tailwind to help, but, IMO, tailwind just helps you avoid learning css’s vocabulary, but you just replace it with having to learn tailwind’s vocabulary.

JavaScript on the other hand is a “real” programming language, though decidedly quick-n-dirtier than other languages. It lets you be a lot more sloppy. (Tbh it’s a lot more forgiving than css!). As a result, it lacks the elegance and control that “real developers” like – and, as most people’s first language, it lets newcomers get into bad habits. For these reasons, JavaScript is a bit derided – but, unlike CSS, most developers can’t avoid it.

There are a few key ideas in JavaScript that, once you understand them, things make a lot more sense. (I won’t get into them now, since it doesn’t sound like you’re at the point where that kind of clarity would help, but, when you are, come on back here and make a post!)

TLDR: HTML is definitely something you can just pick up along the way. JavaScript is a real language that will take a little while to feel comfortable with, and it will take a career to master. CSS will never be easy, so don’t let it hold you back.

This isn’t true. AI can generate tan people if you show them the color tan and a pale person – or green people or purple people. That’s all ai does, whether it’s image or text generation – it can create things it hasn’t seen by smooshing together things it has seen.

And this is proven by reality: ai CAN generate csam, but it’s trained on that huge image database, which is constantly scanned for illegal content.

I guess my question is, why would anyone continue to “consume” – or create – real csam? If fake and real are both illegal, but one involves minimal risk and 0 children, the only reason to create real csam is for the cruelty – and while I’m sure there’s a market for that, it’s got to be a much smaller market. My guess is the vast majority of “consumers” of this content would opt for the fake stuff if it took some of the risk off the table.

I can’t imagine a world where we didn’t ban ai generated csam, like, imagine being a politician and explaining that policy to your constituents. It’s just not happening. And i get the core point of that kind of legislation – the whole concept of csam needs the aura of prosecution to keep it from being normalized – and normalization would embolden worse crimes. But imagine if ai made real csam too much trouble to produce.

AI generated csam could put real csam out of business. If possession of fake csam had a lesser penalty than the real thing, the real stuff would be much harder to share, much less monetize. I don’t think we have the data to confirm this but my guess is that most pedophiles aren’t sociopaths and recognize their desires are wrong, and if you gave them a way to deal with it that didn’t actually hurt chicken, that would be huge. And you could seriously throw the book at anyone still going after the real thing when ai content exists.

Obviously that was supposed to be children not chicken but my phone preferred chicken and I’m leaving it.

Follow up question – I’m not OP but I’m another not-really-new developer (5 years professional xp) that has 0 experience working with others:

I have trouble understanding where to go on the spectrum of “light touch” and “doing a really good job”. (Tldr) How should a contributor gauge whether to make big changes to “do it right” or to do it a little hacky just to get the job done?

For example, I wanted to make a dark mode for a site i use, so i pulled the sites’s repo down and got into it.

The CSS was a mess. I’ve done dark modes for a bunch of my own projects, and I basically just assign variables (–foreground-color, --background-color), and then swap their assignments by the presence or absence of a “.dark-mode” class in the body tag.

But the site had like 30 shades of every color, like, imperceptibly different shades of red or green. My guess was the person used a color picker and just eyeballed it.

If the site was mine, I would normalize them all but there was such a range – some being more than 10-15% different from each other – so i tried to strike a balance in my normalization. I felt unsure whether this was done by someone who just doesn’t give a crap about color/CSS or if it was carefully considered color selection.

My PR wasn’t accepted (though the devs had said in discord that i could/should submit a PR for it). I don’t mind that it wasn’t accepted, but i just don’t know why. I don’t want to accidentally step on toes or to violate dev culture norms.

Me: Oh, I get it, this “Lemmy” website – it’s like The Onion but for nerds?

My fellow lemmings: No, they’re serious. run0 is real.

Me: Hah. The Onion, but for nerds! I love it.

The enumeration on the losing side of that debate is probably correct. But as a person who was in my early 20s in 2000, I’d like to offer what I will characterize as The Historical Context and Definitive Conclusion to This Debate.

No one actually gave a shit about that debate. Sure, it came up, but it did not alter anyone’s party planning. We weren’t actually celebrating the changing of the millennium, we were celebrating because we had a permission slip to do so. Any attempt to withdraw that permission was unwelcome.

In Paris on December 31st, 1999, at around 11pm local time, someone threw themselves in front of a metro. The trains were free that night (because it was the 100 year anniversary of their opening iirc), but because of that suicide, at least one of the train lines was substantially delayed. The streets from the center of the city to the north side were crowded well toward dawn as everyone chose to walk home instead of wait indefinitely in a stinky train station.

That person, who chose to end their life on the tracks that night, holds the core truth of the debate within his death: it’s a ridiculous debate and those who would fight for it should just stay the hell home and let the rest of us drink a lot and dance.

Copy designs you like, and keep a couple of CSS files +/- web components that you can carry along with you from project to project. Tweak then as you go.

Like everything else, getting good at making designs that you like will take time and effort, so if you want you get good at it, do it! I find it fun, and my designs aren’t to everyone’s taste (I too like black tshirts), but whatever.

Plus, getting good at making designs that i like has made me better at making designs clients/projects will like, so, win/win.

Chicagoan here, chiming in: I saw this guy like 4 times on my way to work this morning.

Trump took a LOT of money in gifts from China while in office so I would guess they like him

Edit to add source. There are lots more articles, this is far from the only one

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/us/politics/trump-hotels-foreign-business-report.html

So like uh I’m not trying to out myself as a boomer but how do they use Tiktok nefariously? I used it for about 5 minutes once, the whole experience was just not for me. Do they just take people’s videos and put captions on them?

jQuery is a lot smaller and less nebulous than its competitors (looking at you,React literally every JavaScript framework).

Jquery was what was popular when i learned js. I’m kinda glad it was, honestly: jQuery is a little unique in that it doesn’t have magic to it the way js frameworks do. Everything you can do in jQuery, you can do in vanilla JavaScript pretty easily. With, say, React, how is a newcomer supposed to understand how a series of React components become HTML?

So jQuery kept it “real” for me. Fewer abstractions between me and the HTML meant it was easier for me to connect the dots as a self taught developer.

As for how it’s changed, it’s more any how vanilla JavaScript has changed. A lot of the things that made jQuery so much easier and cleaner than vanilla are now baked in, like document.querySelector(), element.classList, createElement(), addEventListener()… It had Ajax methods that, before jQuery, were a tremendous pain in the ass.

jQuery was great, but, you basically had to use it with something like PHP, because it had no back end. So when angular came out (and a few others that aren’t around anymore and I’ve forgotten), it allowed you to replace both PHP and jQuery, and developers rejoiced.

Why did they rejoice? I’m not actually sure there was reason to, objectively speaking. As developers, we like new tech, especially if that new tech requires us to think about code differently, even if, in retrospect, it’s a hard argument to make to say that, if we had just stuck with PHP and jQuery we would be somehow worse off than we are with React.

Of course, in tech, when a new system changes how we think, sometimes (not as often as we’d like) it helps us reconsider problems and find much more elegant solutions. So, would we have all the innovations we have today if all these js frameworks has never existed? Obviously we can’t really answer that – but it’s a toke of copium for when we get nostalgic for the PHP/jQuery days.

(Also, for you newer people reading this, you should probably be aware that the PHP/jQuery mini-stack is still very quietly used. You’ll definitely see it, especially in php-baaed COTS.)

arguably, that’s a good thing because it means project decisions are made uncorrupted by profit motive

Argue-er here, chiming in. This statement could be interpreted as considering only half of the central relationship of capitalism. (Capitalism isn’t just about deriving profit from the control of surplus, it’s about the relationship between surplus and scarcity. Surplus doesn’t mean shit if no one wants what you have.)

The decisions that volunteers make may not be motivated by the desire/ability to make profit, but they can be (and often are) motivated by the opposite; they have to account for the fact that their volunteer work is labor that isn’t contributing to their survival – aka, their day job. The demands placed on them by their other responsibilities will have to take precedence over the volunteer project.

In practice, this means they have to take shortcuts and/or do less than they would like to, because they don’t have time to devote to it. It’s not exactly the same end product as if it was profit-seeking, since that can tempt maintainers into using dark patterns etc, but they’re similar.

Ideally, they would have all the money they needed, didn’t have to have regular jobs, but also had families/friends/hobbies that would keep them from over-engineering ffmpeg.

To say this in a simpler/shorter way (TD;DR), their decisions can be motivated by the fact that they aren’t making money from it, don’t have enough time or resources to do everything they might want.

(Why is this so long?? I’m bored in the train, gotta kill the time somehow…why not say in 1000 words what I could have said in 100)

And I’m sure Microsoft would be happy to not have to do it anymore. And I personally would much prefer an actual typing system rather than a glorified linter.

Tho I wonder if it will end up being like jQuery, in the sense that, by the time core jQuery features got added to vanilla js, jQuery had developed new features that validated its continued existence. Maybe TS will go further than what gets absorbed into JS and keep it alive.

Imo they’ll add typing to vanilla js, which will kill ts.