abhibeckert

@abhibeckert@lemmy.world

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abhibeckert ,

In less than two years, the rechargeable lithium-ion battery found in your AirPods is due to die an untimely death.

Bullshit. I got four years out of each of my pairs and I used them several hours a day. Also replacing the battery when it does wear out is is something like 50 bucks. Sure, you can't do it yourself but Apple will give you a refurbished pair, and they will recycle your old battery.

And they provide free recycling for all their products — you're basically paying for it to be recycled when you buy AirPods and any that go into landfill that's entirely the customer's fault.

No wired headphones I've ever owned lasted even close to that long - the cable eventually fails with several hours per day of swinging around and being packed tightly into your pocket.

That said, I've switched to bone conduction headphones now, and will probably never own another pair of airpods unless they go down the same path.

Great Barrier Reef suffering ‘most severe’ coral bleaching on record as footage shows damage 18 metres down ( www.theguardian.com )

Ward said the impact of bleaching had been extensive across 16 sites that she visited in the reef’s southern section, affecting coral species that had usually been resistant to bleaching. Some coral had started to die, a process that usually takes weeks or months after bleaching occurs....

abhibeckert ,

As do I Dr. Ward, with ever election result reinforcing the deveststation of the orthodoxy and the disregard my fellow citizens have for a livable biosphere.

This is a fight we will win, eventually, and we should never give up or back down because that would delay our eventual victory. The primary enemy is idiots who don't even believe climate change is real but as the world crumbles around them they'll eventually acknowledge that mistake (it will be easier, by the way, for them to acknowledge their mistake if we try to be welcoming rather than ostracising those people).

We also don't need everyone on our side. Just half of the population, and we're pretty close to that number.

Can we win every battle? No. There will be losses and the reef could be one of them. But we have to win the war. There's no other option.

Never Give Up

abhibeckert ,

This. The lack of vetting sucks and it goes both ways. Sometimes the algorithm incorrectly flags perfectly legitimate content as fraudulent with no way to recover from that.

abhibeckert ,

RSS sucks. Activity Streams are a better in every way (other than compatibility established software, obviously).

If you're building anything new that uses RSS today, I encourage you to do both RSS and Activity Streams. Or just do what I do, and only do AS.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Click the link and watch? It's very good. Looks like Veritasium spent a huge amount of time researching for this video and you're not just trusting his research - he interviews experts on historical (failed) air ships as well as modern engineers working on multi-billion dollar projects trying to fix the mistakes that were made in the past as well as discussing new problems that weren't encountered last time but would have if they hadn't given up almost immediately.

Still - it finishes on a positive note, those engineers do think the problems can be solved. We could have cheap cargo transport to anywhere in the world instead of exclusively to coastal cities with a sheltered bay and a harbour that takes hundreds of years to build. An air ship could deliver a shipping container, cheaply, to anywhere a helicopter can land. That's a problem worth trying to solve.

It will likely start with niche use cases, such as delivering massive wind turbine blades to the top of a mountain ridge... without having to first build a mountain road up to the construction site - and a road suitable for trucks that can carry an 800 foot long turbine blade:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fba6dcaf-d9d4-4a2a-a135-68023e741a4a.png

Once air ships are solved for those use cases, it will inevitably be used for other things too.

abhibeckert ,

I don’t want profitable software

What? You want all the software companies you depend on to go bankrupt?

I want fairly priced software

Canva is free for basic features and reasonably priced if you want features that cost them money such as 24/7 phone support, access to their stock artwork library, storing up to a terabyte of documents on their servers, etc.

I get the hesitation - we don't know what they're going to do with the affinity suite, but I wouldn't immediately assume it will be ruined.

abhibeckert ,

The title of the video is pretty clear "TikTok is a Cyberweapon".

Reasonable people can disagree over wether or not that's actually true... but it's worth noting China has banned TikTok within their own country. Clearly they think it's harmful.

It's also worth noting that congress was acting on an intelligence report which has not been published. I've heard there are rumours they might declassify the report and release it. Personally I'm inclined to reserve judgement until we actually know what evidence they have but the fact China has banned it themselves is a huge red flag.

abhibeckert , (edited )

He was one of the largest shareholders. One third of the company in fact... but he sold most of those way back when they were worth almost nothing (as in hundreds of dollars). And as far as we know virtually all the rest of his shares since then have been gifted to charities. Mostly schools.

"I do not invest. I don't do that stuff. I didn't want to be near money because it could corrupt your values." -- Steve Wozniak, five years ago

He makes a good living doing speeches at universities/etc - that's his primary wealth, not his shares in Apple. If he had kept even a tenth of the shares he once owned, he'd be richer than Elon Musk. As it is, the house he lives in is likely more than half of his total worth (it's a nice house, with six bedrooms, in a nice location... more than most people can afford but hardly extravagant, 6 bedrooms is enough to host a large family holiday party, which I think is quite reasonable).

Redditors Vent and Complain When People Mock Their "AI Art" ( futurism.com )

Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on...

abhibeckert ,

Um, good luck trying to get that law passed.

abhibeckert ,

So ban harvesting and exploiting. Don’t ban superapps.

By your logic we should ban kitchen knives because they can be used to murder someone.

abhibeckert ,

To be fair, it’s the most interesting story the verge has covered in about, well, as long as the verge has existed.

This is a big deal - it’s going to shape the entire tech industry for the foreseeable future. And it’s going to drag on in court and probably also congress for years and years.

Apple is the target of the lawsuit but the DoJ is also telling every other tech company what rules they need to operate under. The last decade of “just do whatever you want” is over.

abhibeckert ,

That wasn't what-aboutism, I was just using an analogy to make a point.

abhibeckert ,

I don’t think it’s an oversight at all. The rule is Google can’t do anything on the platform that the competition is blocked from doing.

If there is no store, then google has no advantage.

As for removing features from a product - that’s a different issue entirely and I expect compensation will be in order. Refunds for anyone who bought a Fitbit for example.

abhibeckert , (edited )

What technical limitations?

I'd guess it was the small battery in the watch. A lot of features on Apple's smartwatch cause serious battery life problems unless they can be offloaded to your phone at least most of the day.

For example if you have the weather conditions on your watch face... the watch can lookup the weather but it generally will ask your phone to do that. Stuff like that is a lot easier if you control the phone operating system and aren't just running an app.

... for example if you never launch the weather app on your phone, both Android and iOS will reduce it's ability to drain the phone's battery by running in the background. Apple makes an exception to that rule for weather apps where the user has a widget an Apple Watch face. How could the Android battery management systems know what widgets are on your Apple Watch?

abhibeckert , (edited )

I want solid data to back up your bull

Anecdotal, but my brother does tree maintenance. His minimum callout fee for a day's work is $2,000. And he often earns more than double that for one day's work. He does have relatively high costs, but his income is way better than what I earn writing code.

We're both at the stage in our career where it's time to stop being an employee and start running our own company and believe me, his company is more successful than mine. Early days still but my money's on him earning seven figures per year very soon.

He's so much more successful than that if my business fails, there's a good chance I will end up working for him. I'd be on minimum wage for several years while I learn the trade but I think it might be worth it long term and I can eventually pull my connections (the boss being my brother) and get promoted to being a manager with a cushy job driving a company car between job sites.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Tradies may make more by opening their own company

That's where glassdoor is misleading. The best tradies are not employees - they do contract work and you might, for example, charge a thousand bucks to fix a shop's broken window. And it might only be one hour of work.

abhibeckert ,

They literally have done that. For example iPhone 15 Pro Max is 12.5mm thick. The iPhone 6 (thinnest iPhone ever made) was 7mm.

There are several iPhones with different batteries but the largest one is 17Wh. The iPhone 6 had a 7Wh battery.

abhibeckert ,

Um, you know you can use any bluetooth earbuds right?

abhibeckert ,

You're making perfect the enemy of good.

Yes, re-usable cups are better than a commercially compostable cup. Use re-usable cups if at all possible. But like it or not some people just aren't going to do that, and commercially compostable cups are a hell of a lot better than plastic. Even if they don't get composted, and you send them to regular landfill, they are still a million times better than plastic.

abhibeckert , (edited )

AFAIK under elevated temperatures, it degrades nicely. At typical soil temperatures it slowly degrades into methane which is a greenhouse gas - not great for the environment... but it's still a hell of a lot better than plastic.

As bad as methane is, at least it has a relatively short life before it becomes Co2 and ultimately is absorbed by trees/etc and re-enters the cycle of life. Plastic on the other hand is really nasty toxin that often ends up in the ocean and causes long term damage.

The TLDR is methane needs to be managed, we have to make sure we don't produce too much. While plastic should just be illegal. We should never produce any plastic, at all, for any reason. It's going to take a long time but that's where we have to go.

Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed ( mastodon.social )

For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807

Thread showing meta hid a comment that mentioned Pixelfed
ALT
abhibeckert , (edited )

I'm sorry but the fediverse is full of instances that block other instances. Blocking an instance is not bad behaviour on the fediverse.

If you don't like Threads, don't use it (I'm not using it), and if you want to use an instance that blocks Threads... you're welcome to do that.

But what I don't get is the idea that threads is somehow trying to kill the fediverse. All of the evidence is to the contrary. Meta wants to exist in a federated world. That doesn't mean they will allow access to all content on their corner of the fediverse, nobody wants that. All instances block some other instances and threads has every right to make their own choice about who to block.

abhibeckert ,

No no no, you got all wrong. Think of the children! They are ruining the future of our children!

abhibeckert , (edited )

While I agree - the part you're missing is the vast majority of TikTok users are outside the United States.

TikTok doesn't want to sell. They want some sort of "independent" subsidiary where ByteDance still profits from (and controls) TikTok and the subsidiary worries about compliance with US law. But the thing is, that's already the current structure.

I wouldn't be surprised if they refuse to sell and wind up being banned. ByteDance doesn't want to lose all their US customers, but they'd likely prefer that to selling.

abhibeckert , (edited )

If I ask an LLM something like “is there a git project that does <something I’d describe in natural language but not keywords>” or is there a Windows program that does X, it may make up the answers

Obviously it depends on the LLM, but ChatGPT Plus doesn't hallucinate with your example. What it does is provide a list of git projects / windows programs, each with a short summary and a link to the official website.

And the summary doesn't come from the website — the summary is a short description of how it matches your requirements list.

I've also noticed Bing has started showing LLM summaries for search results. For example I've typed a question into Duck Duck Go (which uses Bing internally) and seen links to reddit where the answer is "a user answered your question stating X, and another user disagreed saying Y".

I'm encountering hallucinations far less often now than I used to - at least with OpenAI based products.

abhibeckert , (edited )

I wonder if a tablet or laptop might be more appropriate for your wife? When I think "web" I want a keyboard or touch screen and a TV typically has neither. But in any case, I think you're making a mistake trying to have one device that can fit every use case. Your TV will have multiple inputs (and it will also probably be a smart TV).

Plug some sort of Mini PC into the TV for your wife, and let your kids use the TV's built in smart features to watch TV or buy a set top box such as an Apple TV/Nvidia Shield/etc.

PS: I would 100% use a projector, not a TV. Just project onto the wall (assuming you don't have wallpaper/etc).

abhibeckert , (edited )

Apple said EVERYBODY MAKE ARM APPS NOW

Uh, no. What they did is make sure x86 software still works perfectly. And not just Mac software - you can run x86 Linux server software on a Mac with Docker, and you can run DirectX x86 PC games on a Mac with WINE. Those third party projects didn't do it on their own, Apple made extensive contributions to those projects.

I'd like to go into more detail but as a third party developer (not for any of the projects I mentioned above) I signed an NDA with Apple relating to the transition process before you could even buy an ARM powered Mac. Suffice to say the fruit company helped developers far and wide with the transition.

And yes, they wanted developers to port software over to run natively, but that was step 2 of the transition. Step 1 was (and still is) making sure software doesn't actually need to be ported at all. Apple has done major architecture switches like this several times and are very good at them. This was by far the most difficult transition Apple has ever done but it was also the smoothest one.

It's 2024, and I still have software running on my Mac that hasn't been ported. If that software is slow, I can't tell. It's certainly not buggy.

abhibeckert , (edited )

An inverter will not let you run your fridge until the battery is "dead". It's going to have a low voltage cut off, likely somewhere around 11 Volts, specifically to avoid damaging batteries by fully discharging them.

How many hours you'll get from the battery mostly depends on your ambient air temperature and how often you open the fridge. They don't use that much power when they're idle - my fridge averages at about 90 watts (I'm not running off grid, but I do have rooftop solar and our system produces pretty charts showing consumption). A large car battery can sustain 90 watts for a quite long time - well over 2 hours. Probably closer to 10.

Running a fridge off a car battery long term is a bad idea. But in an emergency? Sure I'd totally do that - especially if your "emergency" is genuine such as needing to keep your medication cold. Just don't open the fridge unless you're taking your medication.

LifePo4 FTW!

Sure. Way better than lead acid. But that doesn't mean lead acid is useless. When I lived off grid, LifePo4 didn't exist and we got close ten years (of daily use) out of our lead acid batteries. They were bigger than car batteries and also deep cycle ones, but in an emergency a car battery would be a fine choice if it's the best one you have.

abhibeckert ,

Sure but in an emergency? They can handle being discharged as long as you don't go too far.

abhibeckert ,

I don't see how it's any different to using Google as the default search engine in Safari.

Also - phones don't have terabytes of RAM. The idea that a (good) LLM can run on a phone is ridiculous. Yes, you can run small AI models on there - but they're about as intelligent as an ant... ants can do a lot of useful work, but they're not on the same level as Gemini or ChatGPT.

abhibeckert ,

The article says they're talking to OpenAI as well. "Exploring" a partnership mean you're actually going to partner with them - it could just be "what's your roadmap?"

Apple also "explored" buying Bing and DuckDuckGo.

abhibeckert ,

Apple is working on models, but they seem to be focusing on ones that use tens of gigabytes of RAM, compared to tens of terabytes.

I wouldn't be surprised Apple ships an "iPhone Pro" with 32GB of RAM dedicated to AI models. You can do a lot of really useful stuff with a model like that... but it can't compete with GPT4 or Gemini today - and those are moving targets. OpenAI/Google will have even better models (likely using even more RAM) by the time Apple enters this space.

A split system, where some processing happens on device and some in the cloud, could work really well. For example analyse every email/message/call a user has ever sent/received with the local model, but if the user asks how many teeth a crocodile has... you send that one to the cloud.

abhibeckert ,

humans he can recognize their bias

Can they? I'm not convinced.

As far as i know chat GPT can’t do that.

You do it with math. Measure how many females you have with a C level position at the company and introduce deliberate bias into hiring process (human or AI) to steer the company towards a target of 50%.

It's not easy, but it can be done. And if you have smart people working on it you'll get it done.

abhibeckert ,

Every video ever created is copyrighted.

The question is — do they need a license? Time will tell. This is obviously going to court.

abhibeckert ,

You don't need to "have faith". Just test the code and find out if it works.

For example earlier today I asked ChatGPT to write some javascript to make a circle orbit around another circle, calculating the exact position it should be for a given radius/speed/time. Easy enough to verify that was working.

Then I asked it to draw a 2D image of the earth, to put on that circle. I know what our planet looks like, so that was easy. I did need to ask several times with different to get the style I was looking for... but it was a hell of a lot easier than drawing one myself.

Then the really tricky part... I asked it how to make a CSS inner shadow that is updated in real time as the earth rotates around the sun. That would've been really difficult for me to figure out on my own, since geometry ins't my strong point and neither is CSS.

Repeated that for every other planet and moon in our solar system, added some asteroid belts... I got a pretty sweet representation of our solar system, not to scale but roughly to scale and fully animated, in a couple hours. Would have taken a week if I had to use Stack Overflow.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f34cd984-cd5d-44b1-92bf-93acaf0ff3f8.png

abhibeckert ,

Start with a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X. It's a tiny little box that's easily hidden away and forgotten about, with five Ethernet ports (one for the internet, four for your home). The web interface is extensive and has every feature you could ever want and thousands of other features you can safely ignore.

It does not do wifi - and that's fine. Because for wifi to work well, the antenna has to be in a central location where you probably don't want half a dozen ethernet cables, power supplies, etc etc.

You can use it with almost any wifi access point (or even a full wifi router, configured to not do any routing), but I recommen done of these: https://ui.com/us/en/wifi/flagship

They have five current models on that page but there are more:

  • U6 Enterprise - designed to be used by several hundred people at the same time. Forget that one.
  • U7 Pro - the latest flagship Wifi 7 model (you said you don't even care about wifi 6, so probably forget that too)
  • U6 Pro - their previous Flaghsip, with Wifi 6. Probably overkill for you but worth considering
  • U6 Long Range - basically the same device but with a physically larger antenna to extend the range over 2,000 feet under ideal conditions
  • U6+ - a confusingly named cheaper variant that is also smaller. I would buy this one — not because it's cheaper, but because it's the smallest one.

They are all ceiling mounted. Ceiling mounts are the way to go. Put them in the middle of a large central room in your home. It will provide perfect 5Ghz coverage within your home and your devices will seamlessly switch to 2.4Ghz when you leave the home (it'll probably work on your entire back/front yard and maybe even a bit down the street... even if you don't buy the "Long Range" model.

If your house has walls (or floors) that make it a faraday cage, then you will need to buy more than one access point. Often only one is needed but they are designed to work with multiple if you require that (potentially thousands, these access points are used for football stadiums, music festivals, sky scrapers, etc).

If you can't drill a hole in your ceiling, then buy a thin (flat profile) white ethernet cable use 3M adhesive strips to attach it the cable and wifi access point to your ceiling, nobody will notice unless they look up. You might need to patch up the paint when you move out but ceiling paint is dirt cheap and very forgiving (because it's matte paint).

If you refuse to go with a ceiling mounted access point, Ubiquiti has wall mounted and bench top variants. But they're not as good - ceilings are usually made of thin flimsy material while walls are usually solid structures. That makes a big difference when it comes to real world wireless performance and reliability.

It's a bit more than your budget, but I'd argue it's money well spent. My EdgeRouter X and old Unifi access point are approaching 7 years old and they have never even been restarted except when we've had power failures or when I've moved house... totally worth the money. The only problem I ever had is about 5 years in I forgot the password and wanted to change a setting... I had to do a factory reset. No biggie.

But if that's too expensive, you should be able to find older models of the same hardware (especially predecessors to the U6+). Like I said, mine is 7 years old and working perfectly. I could see myself still using it in another 7 years - anything where I need really high performance is connected to the EdgeRouter X with an ethernet cable.

PS: one of the ethernet ports on your EdgeRouter X is a "PoE OUT" port. Plug your Unifi wifi access point into that port, and you can toss the power supply that came with the access point in a drawer or just the rubbish bin. The EdgeRouter X will provide power over the ethernet cable.

Note: some Ubiquiti hardware is garbage, and the company seems to be going downhill lately. But they still have excellent products

abhibeckert ,

A couple corrections:

  1. China also blocks TikTok (I shit you not)
  2. The US isn't "blocking" TikTok, they are forcing the parent company to sell it

If they refuse to sell, then sure the US will follow through with a block... but that's not the intention. I guess the question is how much does Bytedance care about their US market? The US is TikTok's largest market, but it's still only about 5% of TikTok users. There are almost as many Indonesian users, and Brazil isn't far behind. Plus Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, Phillipines...

And some of those countries might not want a US company to control TikTok.

Zuckerberg has said he doesn't think it's possible for any social network to operate (with significant marketshare) in every country, which is why he's interested in the Fediverse. If there has to be a wide ecosystem of social networks, then users should be able to access content posted to other networks.

abhibeckert ,

Generally there are few privacy friendly/Foss browsers on IOS.

Um, Safari is so privacy friendly that Google regularly asks me if I'm human. For example it has "private relay" which is similar to TOR* so trackers don't even know your IP address — combine that with blocking third party cookies (and even some first party cookies) by default and providing false data to fight fingerprinting even if you don't block trackers entirely - and blocking them entirely is as simple as installing an extension. Private Relay also adds a layer of encryption on top of DNS queries and otherwise unencrypted http traffic.... so your ISP/Cellular provider/Work/School/abusive husband/etc can't track you

99.99% of the Safari's code is FOSS — dual licensed under LGPL and BSD.

It's not the browser I use - pretty lacking in the feature department, but it's definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I've never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.

(* if anything, it's better than TOR... with that service there's a risk your entry/exit nodes are tracking you. With Private Relay it's always one of Apple's servers for the entry node and a reputable cloud company like Akamai for the exit node. Both would have to be compromised in order to identify you... maybe a nation state can do that, but a big data tracking company definitely can't)

abhibeckert ,

It was banned with an exception for common rooms and the entry door/hallway. Now those are banned too.

abhibeckert ,

As fast as the web is now, I'm no-longer a fan of pressuring browser developers on performance. What we really need is to improve browser interoperability.

Rendering engines are constantly adding support for awesome new features... but those features can't really be used until all the other browsers decide to implement the same feature - which tends to be years later. I'm a huge fan of the "Interop" project, which maintains a list of web technologies everyone agrees should be cross platform and pressures rendering engines to implement those features. The list of features changes every year.

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024?stable

abhibeckert ,

No it really is a philosophy.

There's a vast difference in approach between software that uses documents and software that uses a database. A document based approach tends to result in work that lasts a long time. A database approach tends to have more features.

It's tempting to chase those features, but in my opinion it's a mistake.

abhibeckert ,

They're not worried about CSAM. They worried about TikTok users being influenced during an election campaign.

And yes, it is a moderation issue. Specifically, the US doesn't want the current moderation team to be in charge of moderation.

Disclosure: I don’t use Facebook, Intagram, Twitter, nor TikTok

To put it in perspective, about a quarter of the US population uses TikTok. And politics are a major discussion point with the political content you're exposed to selected by an algorithm that is opaque and constantly changing.

It absolutely can be used to change the result of an election. And China has meddled in elections in the past (not least of all their own elections... but also foreign ones:

"China has been interfering with every single presidential election in Taiwan since 1996, either through military exercises, economic coercion, or cognitive warfare, including disinformation or the spread of conspiracies"

-- https://www.afr.com/world/asia/taiwan-warns-of-disturbing-election-interference-by-china-20240102-p5eunf

abhibeckert ,

All of the news where I live is paywalled.

Why should Facebook pay for content that users cannot even access? Surely anyone who is actually paying for access isn't finding articles from Facebook - they are getting the news directly from the source.

The only content that isn't paywalled is from ABC, but their definition of "local" news is national news which happens to be a story about something that happened here. Usually reported on so poorly it's obvious the journalist lives a few thousand kilometres away and doesn't really understand the issue at all.

The state of journalism in Australia is really bad - but I don't think Facebook paying Murdoch did anything at all to fix things. If anything news is even worse now than it was few years ago when the deal was originally signed.

The government needs to go back to the drawing board and re-think their approach. Personally i'd like to see something similar to our health system where we have a national journalism budget dedicated to funding private journalists the same way Medicare funds businesses in the medical industry.

And make sure there are strict rules around ethical journalism and also encourage original reporting - zero funding if you re-hash news broken by someone else.

abhibeckert ,

Is money a birthright now?

No but there are a lot of birthrights which are increasingly only available if you have money.

The system used to be to give those things away for free to people who can't afford them - but that's changing. Just giving money to poor people is far easier.

abhibeckert ,

socialism is a stupid inefficient system, so it’s a non starter.

Socialism is a very broad political movement that works extremely well in some nations.

Sure, there are also nations where it's a total disaster... but the same is true for capitalism. Socialism should be judged by the best implementations, not the shitty ones.

abhibeckert ,

You guys are really bad at understanding basic economy theory.

It works on supply and demand and assumes that everyone works rationally and with full knowledge.

Where that falls to shit is the assumption that "everyone works". Only 132 million people have full time jobs in the United States for example. That's just 40% of the population.

In reality is basic economic theory is only useful if you're explaining economics to a child. And you should only start there - you should try to make sure they have a far more comprehensive understanding of economics before they are old enough to vote.

Online vape seller has ‘no intention of stopping’ shipments to Australia, despite nationwide ban — ‘We have no intention of stopping just because of one twat in Canberra.’ ( www.vice.com )

Online vape seller has ‘no intention of stopping’ shipments to Australia, despite nationwide ban — ‘We have no intention of stopping just because of one twat in Canberra.’::The New Zealand-based seller issued a notice to its Australian customers that shipments will continue regardless of the government's vape reform.

abhibeckert ,

Those rules might apply to the sender… but the customer who places the order doesn’t get off so lightly. They can go to jail for five years for importing a drugs without a license.

That’s not even really a vape thing. Nicotine is a drug. Importing cigarettes is also illegal with the exception of travellers in person can bring a few packets with them.

It wouldn’t be hard to catch people - international shipping requires labels declaring the contents. And if the vape seller is lying on those declarations then they’re breaking NZ laws.

abhibeckert ,

Raises hand — my phone is primarily for communicating with other people. When I want a computer, I have my desktop for that, or if it's too big to take with me then I'll have my laptop.

The only other thing it's commonly used for is music/podcasts. And once a week or so I'll take a photo.

Sure, I don't make as many voice calls as I used to, but text communication counts if you ask me - cell phones have had that feature since 1992.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Also not a lawyer but maybe more familiar with IP law than you are?

When an AI scrapes the post you just wrote... how exactly were you, the author of the post, harmed by that action? You weren't harmed which is a powerful fair use defence. It's not enough on it's own, but it's a huge step in that direction and other factors such as transforming the original add to that making a compelling case.

Consider the most recent fair use case, which was Google had negotiations to pay license fees for Java, then refused to pay — instead Google created a copy of Java. It dragged on in court a long time and bounced back and forth on apeal, but in the end the ruling came down to "java is protected by copyright, but Sun was not sufficiently harmed, therefore it was fair use". Or at least that's where it was headed when Oracle (who bought Sun years after the infringement happened) decided to stop burning mountains of cash fighting a lawsuit that wasn't likely to end well for them.

I was somewhat surprised by that case - I felt the fact that Google had talks about paying, then decided not to pay, was pretty clear harm. But the judge didn't see that as real harm - Java's source code is not 'free as in freedom' but it is 'free as in dollars' to download and therefore not really properly protected by copyright. The fact the license added restrictions to what you can do with the copy you were given for free didn't hold up in court (which has pretty widespread ramifications for GPL... I wonder who will be brave enough to test that in court... the FSF isn't going to back down from a lawsuit like Oracle did).

Anyway, if Java is borderline, I think the fediverse is clear cut. Almost any copy of the fediverse would be fair use. Yes, it's technically copyrighted content, but there's a loophole so big it surrounds the entire universe.

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