It’s more a matter of crazy than stupid, I think.

Will it actually allow ordinary users to browse normally, though? Their other stuff breaks in minority browsers. Have they tested this well enough so that it won’t? (I’d bet not.)

There’s a large swathe of people who want comfort food entertainment—unchallenging and similar to what they’ve enjoyed watching/reading/listening to before—at least some of the time. It makes sense that LLMs would be good at filling that need, since they can pretty much only generate more of the same.

The peripherals were mostly dead before it reach the end of support in windows.

Not my experience at all—I have stuff 20+ years old that’s still in working order. Maybe you’re particularly hard on your peripherals.

On the gripping hand, if you’re trying to connect an older external device, you’re more likely to get it working eventually under Linux (which usually keeps device drivers until they bit-rot out of the kernel tree) than Windows (whose drivers are version-specific and only get ported forward if the manufacturer thinks there’s money in it). Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other, as far as I’m concerned, and device setup is a thing you should only have to do rarely anyway.

Or, y’know, simply make collecting data on anyone for the purpose of ad personalization, and the delivery of such ads, illegal, full stop. Penalize anyone found to be advertising on such a network, too.

(Hey, I can dream, right?)

I imagine that would save lots of people.

Lots and lots and lots. All the issues with scarcity of donor hearts and tissue compatibility would just go away, and the main constraint on heart transplants would become the availability of a cardiac surgeon. Far fewer people would die while they were on a waiting list, and there would be much less incentive to drop anyone healthy enough to survive the surgery off the list entirely.

As long as they keep the same protocol (and therefore third-party clients continue to work), I don’t care if they replace the current first-party client with a new dumpster fire.

It’s the letter of the law: media shifting is legal in some places where downloading a copy from an unofficial site is not. Also, there are people out there who would not have the first idea where to look for an existing rip.

We’re not at the point where we want to burn every bridge with our southern neighbours . . . yet.

I expect the usual game of whack-a-mole will now ensue, with the main repository moving to a new host or changing its name (or both). People sometimes forget that github isn’t the only game in town. Eventually either Nintendo will get tired or the code will end up on a Russian or obscure-nationality server that ignores DMCA notices.

The white is like staring into the Sun.

Sad to say that, because of the capitalization, the first thing that came to mind was “Toronto Sun or Vancouver Sun?” I think they both still have paper editions, so they’d be at least white-adjacent . . .

My car is 25 years old and never ran anything over.

That’s in part because your car is 25 years old. Designs have changed over time to increase the sizes of blind spots (as an unintended consequence of things like strengthening the support pillars for the roof to increase rollover survivability).

Not really. HTML has a formal standard and definition that covers how to properly handle most corner cases that can arise when displaying it. Markdown has no overarching formal standard and exists in multiple dialects which are not always compatible with each other.

On the gripping hand, HTML involves more keystrokes (and technically speaking you need to include a bit of boilerplate in the file for it to be proper HTML). So it depends on whether you’re willing to do a bit more typing to make sure that no one can possibly confuse your italics with boldface.

Handwritten HTML with limited tags works just as well for many purposes (just forbid div, span, and a few others and the complexity you see in most webpages evaporates). The important part is using a text-based format from which information can be extracted even if the fancier display protocols become obsolete.

Maybe you should post a new article about copyright reform if that’s the topic you want to discuss, rather than trying to drag it into a discussion on a different topic. This one’s about false advertising of digital leases as purchases, which they are not even by the definition applied to physical copies.

There are two different types of ownership here, and you’re conflating them.

One is the ownership of a digital copy on the same terms as a physical copy. That allows you to resell your copy, lend it to a friend, move it to a different device, retain the use of it even if the seller no longer exists . . . stuff that falls under the first-sale doctrine and other actions that are generally accepted as “okay” and reasonable. That’s what’s being called out here as not existing for most digital copies.

The other is the ownership of the copyright and permissions to reproduce additional copies. However, that isn’t what most people expect to get when they’re purchasing a copy of a media work, regardless of whether it’s digital or physical. How IP in general and copyright in particular is handled does really need an overhaul, but that isn’t a problem specific to the digital world—it’s equally applicable to print books, oil paintings, and vinyl records.

And to be honest, I’d prefer to see “lease” lose its meaning than “buy” go the same way, because apparently we can’t have both.

For some things, you can get non-DRM downloadable files, and those you do own. They’re very much the minority, though, and mostly limited to smaller, less-popular shops where they do exist.

I would very much like a law that says that streaming services and DRM’d downloads are required to use words like “rent” or “lease”, never “buy” or any synonym thereof.

So essentially the same business plan as 95% of all tech startups of the past quarter-century.

I want to move to a timeline where this is part of a bad movie plot, not part of the news.