HF is meant to be a single point of control. AI models and Linux distros aren't usually for normies, so distribution via torrents would make sense, especially to save the provider some bandwidth. Ubuntu has been offering torrent downloads for ages. No mention of torrents on HF. I believe most downloads will soon be account/EULA-walled.
The open internet isn't safe for adults, either. There is some serious misinformation out there, and it's high time we restrict the internet to only high-IQ people. (/sarc)
Is YouTube or Twitch really better? I don't think people are going to go "Oh well, TikTok is gone now, guess I'll finally go read through my backlog of academic papers on quantum theory"
YouTube is has a lot of great educational content. Maybe TikTok is too, I don't use it, but I find most short-form content to be of questionable value.
[edited to change "full" to "has a lot of" because Youtube has plenty of brain-rot too]
And every content creator on tiktok isn't going to move over to YouTube and start posting shorts, and every tiktok user isn't going to move over to Youtube and start viewing them?
I guess there IS a theory that the tiktok algorithm is UNIQUELY evil in some way. It's hard to argue against this theory, so if tiktok were temporarily banned, it would be a nice test. I think the theory would be flat-out proven wrong, personally.
Longform youtube is just as slop ridden. Arguably the shorts are more potent because they won't pad with even more slop into these long multi ad break videos of saying nothing ultimately.
This doesn't even have to be sarcastic. I mean the bulk of the internet is for sure just propaganda and misinformation meant to either part you of your vote or your dollar or both and we are just dumping it into the mindshare of the population and hoping things go well in the next few generations.
Mainstream distro users/contributors were too busy arguing that Debian is better than Slackware, Arch is better than Debian, Ubuntu is for noobs and now NixOS (whatever that is) reigns supreme. All that reduced the UX of these distros to the lowest common denominator, with varying degrees of skill requirements to get the thing working.
What if everything people wanted was a riced Arch/Ubuntu distro that was trivial to install on pretty much anything and not a lecture on how non-free drivers/software can't be included, leaving your machine unable to connect to the internet?
All this effort spent on making lists which dubiously include some of the world's biggest corporations, the creators of JavaScript, GNU and the opensource movement... instead of making something better? Not "ethical", just make something better.
You might argue that there are better distros out there, but has any other distro gained so much traction so fast since Ubuntu? And this even before a single cent was spent from all the 'fascist' donations.
I've come to hate Windows, to increasingly dislike macOS and to love Linux because I no longer have to spend my days ricing, recompiling wifi drivers for older machines and stuff like that. I don't have the time. Omarchy is worth it for me because someone else worked on this, passed it on for free and it just worked. Perhaps those big donators see value in that as well, and not just in some supposed power-grab?
> Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute.
I found it interesting before the mass-exodus from Twitter/X. Now it's mostly politics and negativity. Not much different in that regard from X, just at the other end of the political spectrum. X still has, for me at least, most of the relevant accounts.
Bluesky has gotten considerably more tolerable by... adding an algorithmic feed ("For You"). It's developed by just some guy with the server running in his living room or something. I know people in this thread are down on algorithms, but a non-attention hacking algorithm is super, super nice because it helps cut out crap and show content in the niches I care about.
The reason that algorithmic feeds were introduced was essentially that Zynga and various heavy posters were killing Facebook (but mostly Zynga).
Back near the dawn of time, FB's feed was chronological, and that meant that Every.Single.Farmville.Notification showed up in your feed (and there were a lot of Farmville notifications).
This was actually causing real problems for Facebook, and they introduced an algorithmic feed to fix it. Back then, it was actually relatively simple, and mostly just ranked posts based on how connected you were to the person on Facebook.
Obviously things have changed since then, and algorithmic feeds have had a host of weird impacts, but a ranked feed is not necessarily bad in and of itself.
Algorithmic feeds make large "pile of all posts everywhere" social networks like Twitter and BlueSky viable IMO.
The mentioned "For You" feed for BlueSky appears to be a variation of LinkLonk's algorithm (by the same author), so how it works is partially known: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288
I get a LOT of untagged NSFW and political posts in my For You. I'm guessing it's influenced by the likes of people I follow. I don't know WHO to unfollow... and I don't really want to unfollow anyone.
I kinda wish I could influence my For You with rules:
The problem with X is it forces you to hand over personal information to sign up, and even then many have said it leaves them in a "we're having difficulties" loop.
It might be a fair trade if this exchange of info helped them eliminate bots, but it sounds like bots on X are more rampant than ever, so no thanks to that.
> but it sounds like bots on X are more rampant than ever, so no thanks to that.
I used to get a lot of spambot followers, but that has ceased entirely in the past year. I would say the bot problem is no longer that relevant at the moment, but rather people posting AI replies are.
For some people it might be hard to tell or may even be non existent in their sphere of it.
But if it's blanket rejecting certain signups based on identity, that suggests the company is interested in censorship and echo chambers, which means who knows what other dark patterns and less-detectable bot nets it has behind the scenes.
Doesn't seem worth it imo, except maybe for people who want their opinion echoed back to them (as well as other momentum that takes time to dissipate).
Really this is the problem: the internet has enabled the global Hater community, who come together and find common cause in their hate, and that radiates outwards into everywhere else. Even if you're trying to define your place as "not that", it is influenced simply by trying to be negatively defined.
Not even specific to a type of Hate. Obviously it's the "big Hates" which are dangerous (and can get people killed), but even the "small Hates" such as "pop star gets cancelled for wearing the wrong outfit" or whatever nonsense is going on in kpop fandom are annoying.
When I put the two sides on the scale - the things being protested and the damage done by protesters - typically it's very easy for me to write off a couple burned cars or broken windows, even if I'm not a fan of broken windows or burned cars. Because typically these protests in the US are over things like reckless killings.
They were super peaceful per a reasonable judgement.
Unreasonably people were digesting meat from innocent animals, slaughtered previously, which was violent. And their shoes... They trodded upon insects, and plants. Violence! Again, unreasonably labeling as violent.
Reasonableness matters in judgement, in my and the legal system's view.
Drug patents are much more short-lived and there's arguably more money invested in drug discovery than in, say, writing a fiction novel. IMO copyright should be limited to 20-30 years. Not that LLM labs care anyway.
It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
However, the counterpoint can also be made that it should be extended, as the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions, with the short patent lifetime forcing pharma companies to command absurd prices just to recoup the R&D cost.
(IMHO: the system on how we research pharmaceuticals and how we fund it must be drastically reformed. The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free, it's already bad enough)
> The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free
centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.
the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.
China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is
> China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen.
So... the US and European tax- and insurance payers are supposed to pay the billions of dollars for R&D and amortization, just for China to copy everything?
It's bad enough if China does that for their internal market. But they don't stop there, their clones and fakes flood back into our markets as well, leading to regular warnings such as [1] from government authorities for consumer safety.
This is unsustainable on so many levels, it needs to stop.
US and European payers aren't paying for neither R&D nor amortization. They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system. The costs for the producers aren't really a factor.
> US and European payers aren't paying for neither R&D nor amortization.
Of course we do. A lot of the foundational research happens at universities, funded with taxpayer money in the form of research grants.
> They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system.
Only partially. The pharma companies roughly know how much it cost them to get the compound past all the trial stages and how many compounds failed along the path. The usual method is that the rich nations pay for R&D amortization and poor countries pay at-cost for manufacture.
Yeah, but usually, we pay for stuff with taxes and we benefit.
I wouldn't have much of a problem if China and India would just steal our stuff to benefit their own population - given the widespread poverty there, that's development aid.
But where I draw the line is when China and India undermine our own markets with copycats.
Issue of pharma development is not that you need a protection from copycats. You need to pass a mountain of regulations and bureaucracy. Most of the medications are easily copyable but would take years to be able to get to the market.
> It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
Chinese and Western models on IP are completely different. In our system, the inventor of a Thing gets a period of exclusive rights and everyone who wants to build off of that Thing has to pay license fees to cover the expenses of the original inventor.
In China, copying a Thing is seen completely different (well, at least as far as I know, so take it with a bit of a grain of salt) - an appreciation that the original inventor of the Thing did something good. Getting copied is a symbol of honor.
Both worldviews are completely valid, but it's obvious IMHO that these two views cannot coexist in one single global capitalist economy framework.
Sure. I think copyright is broken far beyond just the length of it, but let's focus on the length of copyright. There's a phenomenon called the Copyright Cliff, where works published from the early to mid 20th century are unavailable far more often than older books. The Atlantic wrote about Paul J. Heald's study of this back in 2013.
> There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.
> Heald has now finalized his research and the picture, though more detailed, is largely the same: "Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability," Heald writes. "Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners."
They drop insane money up front to do a trial, get approved, and then have low single-digit years to recoup all that investment before the new medication goes off patent a competitor markets a generic that blows up the market and likely isn't as well-tested.
And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
But I guess that AI will fix all these perverse incentives Real Soon Now.
> And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
Ahem
That was health insurance. Different beast.
Not excusing pharma, but that bit of extreme casting doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
Like most things in life, “It Depends” is probably applicable, here. Copyright, patents, and trademark exist for a reason.
Abuse of these structures, is the real issue.
Like people that argue for unfettered capitalism, or total legalization of all vice, we need to think about basic human nature, when discussing these things. That doesn’t happen, usually. It’s either all or nothing. We don’t consider that moderation, and benevolent structure, are possible (which they might not always be, considering human nature).
The hard part is imposing just enough structure to ensure that we get maximum effect.
About a month ago, there was a post about the “Pareto Front,” that point at which maximum desired effect is achieved, with optimal resource usage, and side effects. The zenith.
That can also apply to social infrastructure, but it’s really, really difficult, and lawyers and social scientists don’t think that way.
I honestly feel as if very few people take basic human nature into account, when designing pretty much anything.
So someone who has suffered incurable harm and damage at the hands of health insurers is a "hate monger" while the health insurance executive prioritising their company profits over human health is just a normal person doing their normal job?
If that's true then that value system is entirely messed up and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
The question is, are we doing this page for the sake of art or are we doing this for the sake of spreading and sharing information? These are two different domains with different requirements as to how the page works.
There is nothing wrong with art. It is a great thing, I hope to see more art in the world. However, if the goal is sharing information, which is supposedly the goal of a fairly large number of websites, art needs to be secondary to sharing that information. And then those things that add motion, whatever: you're adding art and harming the real purpose.
Allow me to put it more bluntly: if you are feeling like an artist, don't meddle with UX.
The comment above shows this type of people don't understand it. Yet they are the ones getting hired due to formal qualification. Those who do are at the intersection of design, engineering and computer science. The latter give you enough experience to understand the culture to recreate familiar _look and feel_.
On desktop, it's basically forced heavy smoothscrolling, with an attempt to replicate real motion by gradually slowing to a stop. Horribly laggy for those of us sensitive to such things.
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