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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • Sam Altman is a grifter, but on this topic he is right.

    The reality is, that IP laws in their current form hamper innovation and technological development. Stephan Kinsella has written on this topic for the past 25 years or so and has argued to reform the system.

    Here in the Netherlands, we know that it’s true. Philips became a great company because they could produce lightbulbs here, which were patented in the UK. We also had a booming margarine business, because we weren’t respecting British and French patents and that business laid the foundation for what became Unilever.

    And now China is using those exact same tactics to build up their industry. And it gives them a huge competitive advantage.

    A good reform would be to revert back to the way copyright and patent law were originally developed, with much shorter terms and requiring a significant fee for a one time extension.

    The current terms, lobbied by Disney, are way too restrictive.







  • I agree. It also works the other way in terms of censorship.

    My original account was on an instance that once censored one of my comments. I don’t remember if they deleted my comment or banned me from the community.

    On reddit, I had come to just accept that as a fact of life and every few years I would delete my old account and register a new one.

    On Lemmy, I just switched to a different instance which is much more tolerant of free speech and I haven’t had issues since.

    The irony is, my comments on the old instance can still be deleted, but only for users from that instance.

    I don’t know the full details, but Lemmy definitely has the more 2000-2010 type of culture that allows people to speak their mind freely.




  • The next step, in my opinion, is strong privacy and decentralized organization that fully leverages constitutional rights.

    I.e. a privacy preserving social media where labour unions, political parties and religious groups can federate with each other. Servers hosted on their premises and members register through an on-premise process.

    A church in a foreign country could generate a thousand aliases and distribute them to their federated sister organizations in a privacy preserving way. Only the church knows which organizations got which aliases and they protect this information.

    Your local labour union chapter picks up 20 of those aliases and distributes them to members. They are the only one who knows the person behind the alias.

    An observer in this private fediverse trying to obtain the identity would first need to approach the church. The church can stall them and warn downstream through a canary.

    The labour union chapter observes the canary and immediately wipes all information.

    And if that fails, then full I2P and Tor, with nodes hosted on-premise of churches, political parties and labour unions.


  • Extra funds are only useful if they can provide a competitive advantage.

    Otherwise those investments will not have a positive ROI.

    The case until now was built on the premise that US tech was years ahead and that AI had a strong moat due to high computer requirements for AI.

    We now know that that isn’t true.

    If high compute enables a significant improvement in AI, then that old case could become true again. But the prospects of such a reality happening and staying just got a big hit.

    I think we are in for a dot-com type bubble burst, but it will take a few weeks to see if that’s gonna happen or not.