barsoap

barsoap, 6 days ago

Dogs are way more intelligent than that. LLM tech is basically a way to quickly breed fruit flies to fly right or left when they see a particular pattern.

barsoap, 6 days ago

Because allow/blocklist are just as old if not even older and are way clearer terminology.

“white” and “black” there are metaphors, the “master” in git branches and SCSI isn’t.

See at some point you have to ask yourself the question whether you’d be opposed to the change if blue-haired college students really into performative politics weren’t a thing. Imagine the idea coming from your slightly computer-illiterate 60yold shop floor boss saying “I don’t want to think about the terms here, I want to do CAD/CAM. Speak English, whippersnapper”.

barsoap, 6 days ago

The false positive problem actually works in favour of the dogs, here: Their noses are excellent they know exactly whether there’s drugs there or not. They also know that the humans can’t tell so it’s easy to get a treat regardless. And they also know to not overdo it.

Even more complicated are cats, figures that they are by and large uninterested in being studied or proving anything to you.

barsoap, 6 days ago

With a physical good you’re transferring ownership of that “thing”,

A use-right is also a thing that can be sold and for which stuff like the first sale doctrine applies. Possession and property of the use right is all yours, even if it does not include the right to make additional copies, that is, to sublicense.

At least that’s how it works over here, always has. You can get perfectly valid Windows Pro keys here on the cheap, there’s a small cottage industry buying up volume licenses at bankruptcy proceedings and the like and unbundling them. If Microsoft can’t stop that then Valve won’t, either.

barsoap, 6 days ago

They’ll be forced to accept it, at least in the EU, they will also need to enable you to resell your games. EU law on this is clear, rulings in other cases are clear, all we’re waiting for is for Valve to stop appealing or lose before the ECJ, whatever is first.

The tl;dr is if they want to argue that they’re simply renting out licenses then they shouldn’t be taking one-time but regular payments, or only give out time-limited licenses for one-time payments, or some such. They should also avoid terms such as “buy” and “summer sale” like the plague.

barsoap, 6 days ago

In the US not all licenses are transferable, and that includes things like “accounts”.

That’s maybe a service that you can’t transfer but it’s still holding property of the account holder. More like escrow.

As to lawyers, well, they aren’t hiring lawyers to follow the intent of the law but to write terms that they think they might get away with, at least for a while, and if not, not be nailed for fraud or such. Corporate lawyers are just as slimy in the EU as they are elsewhere.

barsoap, 4 days ago

Instead of moving along the digits from highest to lowest, as in “Four hundreds and two tens and nine”, we do “Four hundred and nine and two tens”.

English is less consistent, going from nine-teen to twenty-one. German stays consistent with its lower two digits.

barsoap, 4 days ago

The second operation, carried out by the internet access providers at Hadopi’s request, consists, inter alia, of matching the IP address with the civil identity data of its holder.

Which just opens more questions: How long are ISPs allowed/required to store customer IPs, and then what happens if I have an open wifi: Can they just assume that I did it or declare me responsible anyway, that is, is it possible for a private individual to enjoy ISP privileges?

barsoap, 2 months ago

The general rule of the Warner siblings is that they’re whatever they need to be for the joke to work and if you disagree you don’t get it.

barsoap, 2 months ago

The problem isn’t GMO, the problem is the type of changes big agritech is making.

Take, e.g. Clearfield Rapeseed: It’s a herbicide-resistant strain, non-GMO, bred by BASF, and resistant against Clearfield, another BASF product. Thing is: Rapeseed is a brassicaceae, and they really like to exchange genes cross-species. There’s tons of wild plants (“weeds”) that are brassicaceae, in fact if you don’t happen to be growing it rapeseed itself is a rather nasty weed. Which means that once that resistance is out there that stuff can’t be killed by stuff that doesn’t kill literally everything. Brassicaecae seeds can also stay dormant in the soil for years, making it even more nasty.

My state’s agricultural ministry got wind of the stuff, quickly decided “that’s insane we need to outlaw it”, then quickly hit their head against the EU legislation which doesn’t distinguish by impact on nature or environment or economy, but by GMO status. Instead they then flooded farmers with brochures telling them just in how much shit they would be should that stuff escape from their fields and other farmers demand compensation for loss of income etc.

The thing is: That stuff doesn’t even make sense for BASF. “Sell resistant strain and a herbicide along with it” makes a lot of sense for chemical companies (and all big agritech are chemical companies), “spread that resistance throughout the whole environment” doesn’t because who’s going to buy their herbicide when it becomes ineffective. They really dropped the ball on that one, failed ecology 101.

Speaking of “we’ve got a hammer, where are the nails”: Golden rice. The problem isn’t that rice doesn’t contain carotene, the problem is that there’s people so piss-poor they can’t afford half a carrot, onion, some garlic, and a spoon of beans with their bowl of rice. If you want a solution that is the problem to fix.

This is the kind of stuff actually modern agritech comes up with, problem being: It’s not a thing you can earn money with as a company as there’s no products to sell, definitely none you have a monopoly on, so those companies have literally zero incentive to research that kind of thing. Farmers don’t have the funds (even in the west, they’re getting squeezed by supermarkets and Nestle etc), but you know what, states already have universities. Give them a couple of fields to mess around with and you’ll be surprised by what they come up with.