Beej Jorgensen @ beejjorgensen @lemmy.sdf.org

Instructor, author, developer. Creator of Beej's Guides.

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381

Joined

2 yr. ago

User base is the value.

It's Qatar.

"substantial similarity is a mandatory feature of all copyright-infringement claims"

Is that not a requirement? Time for me to start suing people!

Definitely. And your best self wants to buy these fantastic products.

I still go to Reddit subs when something interesting appears in my RSS feed.

As soon as they kill RSS (and honestly I'm pretty surprised they haven't yet), I'll never go there again.

I still have this poster!

https://beej.us/guide/

Use the right tool for the job, I say.

I made a decent chunk of change with capitalism. I have a modest house and am well positioned for a middle-class retirement.

Now I work for the government in a field for which I find the capitalist options wanting.

I give away my programming guides for free online with no ads, but sell paper copies of the books for profit.

Could I make more money by charging for the online versions? Sure. But some things are worth more than money.

The quest for money doesn't ruin everything, but it sure ruins a lot of things.

Bell Labs of yore would be my dream company to work for.

Not even the Constitution is immune to change or deletion, as you mentioned.

Democracy is hard. The natural state of government is dictatorship.

I hypothesize the failure of AI in this arena will be due to the fact that English is a shit programming language. It can take many times the amount of English to be precise compared to the equivalent computer code.

In addition to the summary, I'd add that in his book, he makes the argument that interoperability is the key factor in getting control back. The trick is getting it, of course.

Compensations are light years behind whatever's coming next. 🙂 And I don't think of them as "core". They're practically syntactic sugar. If you can write a comprehension but can't write a loop with a conditional in Python or FORTRAN, you're missing the core.

What's the backup login mechanism when you lose your biometric sensor? How do you pair with the new sensor?

Also remember that companies like Google are working hard to make it impossible to create anything outside of the walled garden.

The best idea I saw in his book in this regard was to have the government require open specs and interoperability for all government contracts.

I was taught obsolete things in college in the early 90s. But FORTRAN wasn't the useful part of the class--problem-solving and broader language exposure was.

People focus on random technologies that are being used in class as being obsolete, but that's not the point of college. You can learn technologies on your own, and if you have trouble with that, maybe practicing it in college is a good idea.

Basically we're going to drill on technology-agnostic fundamentals for 4 years, and use a wide variety of technologies and languages as vehicles for that so you get a good breadth of experience.

I'm happy with the illegal downloading being illegal. Where things get murky for me is what algorithms you're allowed to use on the data.

I get the impression that if they'd bought all the books legally that the lawsuit would still be happening.

As an author, I say cut the term waaay down. 12 years plus the option for a 12-year one-time renewal.

Some will get screwed, but the entire populace will gain.

I think this nails it. It's probably the attack authors will use against OpenAI.

But the copyright office clearly states otherwise, so we're in for a showdown.

Personally, I think the AI stuff seems more akin to writing a book in the style of another author, which is completely legal. And, to be clear, my option has no legal effect here whatsoever. 😅

Ray Bradbury's Marionettes, Inc. seems like an appropriate story to mention at this point.