The point of encrypting something that gets decrypted midway by an organization is that there are worse actors than the organization out there. I’m not really scared of Steam abusing my credit card info, but I am afraid of random internet strangers.

Also remember that https doesn’t just protect your data, it also verifies that you’re actually on the website you think you are. The internet is basically unusable without this guarantee, especially on a network you share with others.

So no vetting at all presumably since you didn’t mention it? So how do you know that Dashlane is safer than a password scheme that might be guessed by someone after they’ve already compromised a couple of your passwords?

For someone to work it out, they would have to be targeting you specifically. I would imagine that is not as common as, eg, using a database of leaked passwords to automatically try as many username-password combinations as possible. I don’t think it’s a great pattern either, but it’s probably better than what most people would do to get easy-to-remember passwords. If you string it with other patterns that are easy for you to memorize you could get a password that is decently safe in total.

Don’t complicate it. Use a password manager. I know none of my passwords and that’s how it should be.

A password manager isn’t really any less complicated. You’ve just out-sourced the complexity to someone else. How have you actually vetted your password manager and what’s your backup plan for when they fuck up?

Go to protondb.com and search for the games you’re interested in. If your profile is public, I think you can import your entire library and browse through it instead of manually searching for each individual game. Ideally you want “platinum” compatibility but I’ve personally never had problems with “gold” games either.

Actually a lot of people don’t drive most of the time. If that’s news to you then you probably live in a shitty place that’s never going to be viable no matter what type of vehicle you use.

Right, air pollution is terrible. So let’s do the thing that minimizes it, which is not driving all the time.

EVs can be better than ICEs and still a terrible industry though. You phrase it as if it’s one or the other.

Regardless of abuse allegations, EVs are just not the big improvement we need to fight climate change and save the millions of people that will die because of it. We need fundamental changes like lives built around public transport, biking, and walking, not slightly better vehicles in an enormously wasteful model.

Both su and sudo originally meant “superuser” because that was their only use. They have retroactively been changed to “switch user” because this functionality was added later.

It’s not just Batman. This is a common trope in the superhero genre. Pop Culture Detective has a great video on the subject: https://youtu.be/LpitmEnaYeU

No, the intent and the consequences of an action are generally taken into consideration in discussions of ethins and in legislation. Additionally, this is not just a matter of ToS. What OpenAI does is create and distribute illegitimate derivative works. They are relying on the argument that what they do is transformative use, which is not really congruent with what “transformative use” has meant historically. We will see in time what the courts have to say about this. But in any case, it will not be judged the same way as a person using a tool just to skip ads. And Revanced is different to both the above because it is a non-commercial service.

It’s definitely not “draconian” to make enshittification illegal. But you don’t regulate the turning-to-shit part. You regulate the part where they offer a service for free or too cheap so that they kill the competition. This is called anti-competitive and we supposedly address it already. You also regulate what an EULA can enforce and the ability of companies to change the EULA after a user has agreed to it. Again, these concepts already exist in law.

We’ve essentially already identified these problems and we have decided that we need to address them, but we been ineffective in doing so for various reasons.

According to The Guardian he got $60M in stock and pension for being fired. Also it seems that stock price didn’t fall much after the crashes and the grounding. It is only after COVID hit that Boeing’s price plummeted. So it might be only by pure luck that he lost anything of value at all.

Humans are not generally allowed to do what AI is doing! You talk about copying someone else’s “style” because you know that “style” is not protected by copyright, but that is a false equivalence. An AI is not copying “style”, but rather every discernible pattern of its input. It is just as likely to copy Walt Disney’s drawing style as it is to copy the design of Mickey Mouse. We’ve seen countless examples of AI’s copying characters, verbatim passages of texts and snippets of code. Imagine if a person copied Mickey Mouse’s character design and they got sued for copyright infringement. Then they go to court and their defense was that they downloaded copies of the original works without permission and studied them for the sole purpose of imitating them. They would be admitting that every perceived similarity is intentional. Do you think they would not be found guilty of copyright infringement? And AI is this example taken to the extreme. It’s not just creating something similar, it is by design trying to maximize the similarity of its output to its training data. It is being the least creative that is mathematically possible. The AI’s only trick is that it threw so many stuff into its mixer of training data that you can’t generally trace the output to a specific input. But the math is clear. And while its obvious that no sane person will use a copy of Mickey Mouse just because an AI produced it, the same cannot be said for characters of lesser known works, passages from obscure books, and code snippets from small free software projects.

In addition to the above, we allow humans to engage in potentially harmful behavior for various reasons that do not apply to AIs.

• “Innocent until proven guilty” is fundamental to our justice systems. The same does not apply to inanimate objects. Eg a firearm is restricted because of the danger it poses even if it has not been used to shoot someone. A person is only liable for the damage they have caused, never their potential to cause it.
• We care about peoples’ well-being. We would not ban people from enjoying art just because they might copy it because that would be sacrificing too much. However, no harm is done to an AI when it is prevented from being trained, because an AI is not a person with feelings.
• Human behavior is complex and hard to control. A person might unintentionally copy protected elements of works when being influenced by them, but that’s hard to tell in most cases. An AI has the sole purpose of copying patterns with no other input.

For all of the above reasons, we choose to err on the side of caution when restricting human behavior, but we have no reason to do the same for AIs, or anything inanimate.

In summary, we do not allow humans to do what AIs are doing now and even if we did, that would not be a good argument against AI regulation.

If anything, my take home message is that the reach of copyright law is too long and needs to be taken down a peg.

Exactly! Copyright law is terrible. We need to hold AI companies to the same standard that everyone else is held. Then we might actually get big corporations lobbying to improve copyright law for once. Giving them a free pass right now would be a terrible waste of an opportunity in addition to being an injustice.

First time I’ve heard of Mojeek. Why should I trust it more than any other company? Is there anything particular about its economic model or governance that makes it less likely to decide to be unethical?

AI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That’s what they’re trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they’ll get away with it.

The general public doesn’t have to understand anything about how it works as long as they get a clear “verified by …” statement in the UI.

lsblk is just lacking a lot of information and creating a false impression of what is happening. I did a bind mount to try it out.

sudo mount -o ro --bind /var/log /mnt

This mounts /var/log to /mnt without making any other changes. My root partition is still mounted at / and fully functional. However, all that lsblk shows under MOUNTPOINTS is /mnt. There is no indication that it’s just /var/log that is mounted and not the entire root partition. There is also no mention at all of /. findmnt shows this correctly. Omitting all irrelevant info, I get:

TARGET                                                SOURCE                 [...]
/                                                     /dev/dm-0              [...]
[...]
└─/mnt                                                /dev/dm-0[/var/log]    [...]

Here you can see that the same device is used for both mountpoints and that it’s just /var/log that is mounted at /mnt.

Snap is probably doing something similar. It is mounting a specific directory into the directory of the firefox snap. It is not using your entire root partition and it’s not doing something that would break the / mountpoint. This by itself should cause no issues at all. You can see in the issue you linked as well that the fix to their boot issue was something completely irrelevant.

Essentially ULWGL will allow you to run your non-steam games using Proton, Proton-GE, or other Proton forks using the same pressure vessel containerization and runtime that Valve use to run games with Proton

This is the crucial piece of information. In less technical terms: Proton is designed to run in a very specific environment and it might be incompatible with your system. Steam runs Proton inside a bubble so that it interacts less with your system and so the incompatibilities don’t become a problem. ULWGL aims to create the same bubble so it’s the correct way to run proton.

If this isn’t violating the DMA then the DMA is stupid. Legislation should limit the company’s control, not force it into a specific action while allowing it to maintain as much control as possible.

In other words the DMA should effectively say “you don’t get to choose how your platform is used”, not “you get to make the rules, but just don’t be the only one who can develop for your platform”.