antonim

antonim, 9 months ago

Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?

Maybe I didn’t have my crystal ball nearby when I was creating my Lemmy account.

Maybe many users will have an account on the largest server, because by definition it’s the largest server, with the most users. 🙄

antonim, 9 months ago

Since I’m not a programmer - how do I get it running?

antonim, 9 months ago

Damn, I didn’t figure out you’re supposed to click on the releases. Thank you.

antonim, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

The process is not over yet. IA has been ruled against, but they announced they would appeal. Though I haven’t been following the case in the recent months, and according to the WP article the situation is unclear right now, the parties seem to be negotiating…

Either way, the outcome will definitely affect IA as a whole, and not selectively with regards to the user’s location. If the digitally lended books were distributed illegally in the USA, and IA is located in USA, they have to cease the illegal distribution in general. (It would be absurd if the plaintiffs would have to reassert their case in every country with internet access.)

If the outcome is negative for IA and the court fully accepts Hachette et al’s demands, IA will both have to recuperate the publishers’ supposed losses and legal expenses, and “destroy” all “unlawful copies” of the books under the publishers’ copyright. I paraphrase from the initial complaint by Hachette et al. (see here, first document, from 1st June 2020). This would mean that the books under copyright by publishers other than the four included in the process would not be directly affected. But the ruling may set a precedent, so other publishers might follow suit and demand the same - compensation, and removal of their books from the database.

I am not a legal expert, and not a native English speaker so I don’t know the terminology too well, I just followed the case for a while and this is what I’ve concluded.

Personally, I think IA was horribly stupid to play with fire with the “emergency library”, their legality was in a grey area even before that… And I don’t remember anyone asking for such a measure. But, as far as I’ve seen, the scans themselves will survive even if IA goes down.

Edit: I just saw lemmy.world/post/3077301, Jesus Christ…

antonim, 9 months ago

I live in a country with a relatively similar political climate as Poland (highly religious, post-communist, wannabe central Europe). And I used to use the same argument when I was surrounded by more conservative people. The argument is IMO frequently invoked not by people who are truly worried about children (which I’ll write about below), but by conservatives who need a civilised, “agnostic” argument for their homophobic stances. But ofc it’s better to assume good intentions, at least if you don’t know anything about the person using the argument (as e.g. here).

The biggest problem with the argument is that it’s purely reactive and, under the hood, disingenuous. Children bully each other horribly already for a million stupid reasons - their shoe brand, their phone brand, their behaviour, etc. or just so, for no detectable reason at all. They also bully their teachers and professors. What is done against all this? Absolutely nothing, as far as I see (and I’ve seen and heard plenty while I was growing up). It is never brought up as a problem in public discourse, nobody seems to care too much. Bullying somehow becomes a big problem and relevant for the lawmaking only when gay parents are a possibility.

In general, from what I’ve seen, bullies will find just about any reason to target a kid. Adding one more to the roster seems borderline trivial. E.g. a lot of existing bullying is class-based - my younger sister was mildly ostracised in the primary school for a while because she wore the clothes my mother sewed for her, without a brand or anything, suggesting we don’t have the money to buy “proper” clothes. Should we, then, try to separate poor kids from the rich kids, so the poor don’t get bullied? Or just forbid poor kids from going to school?

Thus, instead of doing anything against the actual problem – that is, bullying as such – the laws of the state, the fundamental right of a child to a family, etc. should all buckle down before some child bullying? A child should be denied growing up with a potentially good and loving family with LGBT parents, and instead be adopted by a potentially inferior heterosexual family (assuming the adoption centres have some sort of system to judge the adopters in advance), or stay without a family at all indefinitely, because someone could/will bully them based on their most intimate and safe space, that is their family? Just as it would be monstrous to forbid poor kids from going to school to “protect” them from bullying, it is monstrous to propose “to protect some kids from bullying, we’ll deny them from having a family”. The whole argument is actually (or should be) an argument for aggressively rethinking and reworking your educational system , parenting and culture in general.

because why should these children be victims of war that is not even theirs to fight

Under the current system they’re also victims and involved in this same war - a part of their potential adopters is denied by default, and they stay without a family for longer. Are they not victims here? (Not to get into the issue of measuring potential benefits of having a family against the potential negatives of bullying, it’s purely arbitrary and depends on the given culture too.)

On the other hand, I do think the whole discussion has been derailed by overly focusing on this as an LGBT issue rather than an issue of children without families. So there’s some merit at least in the general approach of the argument you present (the children are those whose well-being is most important here), but it leads to the wrong conclusion, usually because it’s invoked by people who really just want to get to that conclusion one way or another, rather than helping the kids.

antonim, 9 months ago

besides the elite class of your country controls what happens in your country (media included), you have no say in it.

Is there any state, current or historical, that was not a dictatorship according to this metric?

Edit: ignore the question, I noticed the Stalin profile pic

antonim, 9 months ago

This is the first time in my life I’ve seen dislike of the userbase of an another site called ‘xenophobia’.

Especially weird since 90% of Lemmy is fresh off reddit themselves.

Personally I just don’t want the shitty aspects of the reddit community seeping over here. It’s a fact that reddit userbase has been facebookised, to the degree where I frequently see people who are outright stupid (repeatedly posting threads to wrong subreddits, ignoring mod messages, unable to comprehend basic English… stuff that I’d expect to see on Facebook and not reddit), or focused on memes and quips to the point where any discussion is flooded with such moronic content. There’s still (at least) tens of thousands of people on reddit who I’m sure would be great contributors on Lemmy too if they decide to switch, and I hope they will. But I don’t want all of reddit here. Is that really so bad, to not want to look at unfiltered normie crap? Reddit was good (if it ever was good) precisely because it was a bit elitist in its design and its culture.

We can’t argue about federation on the net, avoiding corporate control, or whatever while sticking our hand out and stopping people from joining.

Maybe people can join somewhere else too? Make a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook/Instagram or something. Lemmy is not all of Fediverse and doesn’t have to be for everyone.

Like half of your complaints are literally good things. Yes, people want to be heard and not practically hidden from 90% if they don’t get enough upvotes on their post/comment during the crucial early time frame, as on bigger reddit subs. Lemmy is not a social media platform anyway, its goal is not to facilitate socialisation among the users and it doesn’t need many millions of users to work well.

antonim, 9 months ago

That’s two twitter clones from two tech billionaires in just six months. Capitalism truly breeds innovation.

What’s the other Twitter clone (other than Threads)?

antonim, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Bookwyrm is open-source, works similarly to Lemmy (i.e. is a federated platform). Storygraph and LibraryThing are also popular alternatives, but IIRC they’re both closed source.

Personally I think just creating a spreadsheet file with your reading data is better. (In LibreOffice, of course.)

antonim, 9 months ago

These are the same types of people that caused the civil war.

I’m far from an expert on American history, but I’m 100% sure that no civil war was caused just by unorganised morons who like to wave their guns.

antonim, 9 months ago

The existence of Lemmy is a testament to this.

Lemmy has existed before the reddit shitshow.

antonim, 9 months ago

over the past 2-3 years Amazon has slashed its budget

The site is now run by a skeleton crew

TBH it felt that way ever since I registered there, much more than 2-3 years ago. It’s been largely stagnating for over a decade with regards to design and functionality. It’s impressive if they somehow managed to reduce their budget even more and employ even fewer people. Which makes the recent half-baked redesign and similar interventions even weirder, they clearly don’t have the capabilities to do them properly…

Goodreads never made money

Was it meant to, though? I assume Amazon planned it to work (dunno if it really did) as a platform to advertise the books sold on Amazon.

antonim, 9 months ago

U intervjuu ne spominju da ima audioknjiga, ili sam nešto krivo shvatio? 🤔

antonim, 9 months ago

It would be useful to list and analyse those few cases where writing was invented, i.e. were there any particular circumstances that were especially conductive to creating a writing system that weren’t present elsewhere.

My guess would be that trade and territorial spread of the given state are very useful for inventing it, since it’s needed to calculate and store data, to communicate across greater distances (sending messages to other towns that you trade or have some relationships with - not necessary in tightly-knit tribal communities)…

And once someone invents writing, which is a pretty difficult thing to do (especially to teach it to others and make it actually durable), it’s obviously much easier for anyone who comes into contact with that culture (which is likely to happen if the culture trades a lot or covers a large territory) to just imitate and adapt their writing system rather than invent everything from the ground up.

This is ofc just my theory based on what I know about the Near East (e.g. Phoenician alphabet > Greek > Latin & Cyrillic).

antonim, 9 months ago

Human language change happens first of all because the reality that the language is meant to represent changes. I.e. you create a new thing, you create a new name for it too.

ChatGPT does not intend to represent a reality when it uses a language. It does not even know of a reality outside of its language.

Human language also changes due to various rather vague “economic” reasons, e.g. simplified pronunciation, merging sounds, developing some new habits in grammar that spread within one community but do not spread elsewhere… For example, we have extremely obvious proof that Latin developed into Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc., so language change clearly isn’t some magical process. On the other hand, if you fed a ton of ancient Latin into ChatGPT, it wouldn’t even develop the pronunciation of medieval Latin used by priests, much less the totally different descendant languages that developed at the time.