Aaron

It’s a three ton steel knife that does zero to sixty in three seconds, it’s literally designed to shred human bodies.

Chant it with me, friends!

Stop 👏 using 👏 Chrome 👏!!

Bram obviously gave so much to the global community, and directly to Uganda through his persistent charity efforts, and no more need be said about what a devoted and generous person he was. We’d all truly be worse off without his contributions and I say that as a devout Emacs user.

Still, it always rubbed me wrong that his stated plan for the project was immortality.

How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future?

Keep me alive.

Bram was notoriously possessive of the Vim project and consistently avoided bringing in other lead maintainers or adding widely demanded features (like async processing). Maybe that changed while I wasn’t paying attention, but it had a lot to do with the very successful neovim fork. Bram eventually added an async feature but not before neovim exploded in popularity.

It’s tragic to hear of Bram’s passing, and at such a young age. I will be interested to see what happens to the Vim project now, in his absence.

Also conserve helium, which would be huge.

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I don’t know if that statistic included used car sales, so it may only reflect those able to buy a new vehicle. It still reflects a pretty substantial shift in preference though, in my view. The list was 9 cars out of 10 just a few decades ago.

Also, used car stock reflects prior new car purchase decisions, so over time we just starve ourselves of reasonably sized vehicles to choose from.

It feels like realizing that WhatsApp is a terrible Meta privacy nightmare, but you can’t wake up because you can’t convince your whole family to use Signal.

Developers all have their pet frameworks they want to use. Why contribute to a Kotlin app when I can finally learn Dart and Flutter??

I support Pocket Casts because it’s made by Automattic, the makers of WordPress, Tumblr, and WooCommerce. Their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, is someone who seems to really care about the freedom and diversity of the internet. As far as players go, it’s got all the features you’d want for an Android app.

I seldom listen on my PC, but if I want to I can usually find the stream on whatever service the podcast has chosen (their own site, or whichever embedded player they elect to use).

I see no plans anywhere here, only some software that presumably controls it, and a list of parts. That’s hardly enough information from which to build a functioning system.

Here in the States the Toyota Camry is the only car that made the top ten most sold vehicle list for 2022. Everything else is either a crossover/SUV (Honda CR-V, Tesla Model Y), or a truck (#1 is the Chevy Silverado, #2 is the Ford F-series).

We’re already deeply screwed.

Thunder is hot! It is making me want to actually try developing in Flutter, which seems to be the “new hotness.”

I wonder if these battles will shake loose the circuit split on de minimis exceptions to music samples (see https://lawreview.richmond.edu/2022/06/10/a-music-industry-circuit-split-the-de-minimis-exception-in-digital-sampling/).

Currently, it is absolutely not “cut and dried” whether the use of any given sample should be permitted. Most musicians are erring on the side of “clear everything,” but does an AI-generated “simulacrum” qualify as “sampling”?

What’s on trial here is basically “what characteristic(s) of an artist’s work do they own?” If you write a song, you can “own” whatever is written down (melody, lyrics, etc.) If you perform a song, you can own the performance (recordings thereof, etc.) Things start to get pretty vague when we start talking about “I own the sound of my voice.”

I think it’s accepted that it’s legal for an impersonator to make a living doing TikToks pretending to be Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise can’t really sue them saying “he sounds like me.” But is it different if a computer does it? It may very well be.

It’s going to be a pretty rough few years in copyright litigation. Buckle up.

Throughout history, people have always been driven to create, and others have always sought out creative works. For that reason, I don’t think we’ll necessarily “stagnate culturally” in a broad sense.

However, at least in the US, we’re already standing at the precipice of making creative work practically impossible. Our extremely weak (by peer nation standards) labor protection laws and social support systems tends to strip life of everything but the obligation to work.

Our last bastion of hope for structural protection for creativity is the possibility that anyone could both create, and profit from it. Copyright law was, originally, intended to amplify that potential.

I usually point to stock photography as an area where people used to be able to make at least modest money, but nowadays you’d be lucky to make poverty wages. The market was flooded by cheap, high-quality cameras, and thus cheap, high-quality images. AI will do the same thing for many other mediums.

What has me really concerned is that the majority of really cool makers and creators I watch on YouTube are Canadian. I’ve convinced myself that this is because someone living in Canada can take the very real risk of sinking their life’s energy into starting a YouTube channel because at least they know that if they get cancer, they have somewhere to go.

Not so here in America. If you aren’t working for an established employer, or sitting on quite a bit of cash for independent health insurance, you’re taking substantial risk in being unemployed for any length of time (assuming you have the choice). Even if you do “make it,” the costs of self-insurance for sole proprietors is no joke!

So the only people taking their life in their own hands to create works of real cultural value are 1) the few percent who manage to get paid for it, 2) the independently wealthy and/or retired, and 3) the poor and desperate who would be just as precarious in either case.

It’s not our finest hour here, if I do say so. I hope the rise of AI helps amplify this conversation. I am truly concerned about it.