Readit NewsAt this point I'm inclined to ask-- what would a cypherpunk not do? I.e., let's remove crypto and magically-dev'ing-ourselves-out-of-holes from the equation.
There must be policy wonks here on HN who know the ins and outs of local/state/federal government, copyright law/fair use, etc. (I'm assuming the U.S. IP lobby is the 400 pound gorilla in the room.)
What are some good starting points to look for a more robust way out of the problem-- how do we sustainably grow a crowd-sourcable archive for copyrighted digital artifacts? What's an approach that could eventually be on a referenda or party platform? Does archive.org have any idea? Any other orgs have an idea?
There should be a sustainable solution to bootstrapping civic databases to archive and make available/discoverable all the shits citizens care about without waiting 70+ years for it to enter the public domain.
It's absurd as it is now. We've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it.
What's the reasonable legislation to say, "As long as the project does X and avoids Y, the project may archive Z" for all digital artifacts Z in some domain?
Edit: clarifications
I thought free speech was me saying what I want, not a free pass to mislead people to believe I said something I didn't.
And permitting lying or misleading speech is a pretty core part of free speech, it might be socially frowned upon or disincentivised by terms of service/moderation/other methods, but it's certainly not illegal
The government effectively established monopolies in phone service. Telephone numbering was not even close to seamless and painless. When dialing was introduced there was pushback and plenty of need for education of consumers, not to mention concerns about the loss of jobs for telephone operators. Establishing international numbering and the ITU has been a costly and slow diplomatic process.
The result is a system which is now almost useless because of the lack of spam prevention that facilitates elder abuse at a large scale.
If it wasn’t a legacy technology, I certainly wouldn’t recommend the telephone to my mother as a product.
The reason we have alternatives now is that there was no regulation preventing us from developing VoIP and other communications services via the internet.
Frankly it’s weird that we would even consider the telephone as a model for current regulation. It’s an antiquated legacy stepping stone from the time before computers.
The internet did grow out of telephony so perhaps it's not surprising that it shares many of the same qualities, however I think these government vs private debates often ignore that the failures and shortcomings of these systems are usually a result of both bad government intervention and bad private actors, not solely one or the other
> I think it all stems from Apple’s desire to simplify things for themselves
This is the only logical explanation for a lot of Apple’s decisions lately. It’s funny how the release notes for Ventura say:
> System Preferences becomes System Settings and features a new design that's optimized for efficient navigation on Mac, and delivers a more consistent experience across iPhone and iPad.
I wonder how long it took their marketing people to come up with that. The truth is this design is not at all optimized for efficient navigation on a Mac. In some cases it actually requires more clicks than System Preferences. Also a consistent experience from iOS to MacOS is not as important as Apple makes it out to be. No one expects a computer to work exactly the same way as a phone or tablet.
The only real justification here is that it probably makes lives easier for Apple developers since they can now manage a single codebase for settings vs. separate ones.
It’s funny cause the one App that I think could actually benefit from this kind of change is the Music app which is a complete abomination on the Mac, but actually works quite well on the iPhone and iPad.
It’s a shame when companies put ease of use for their engineers above ease of use for their users, but this kind of thing seems to be more and more common in the software industry these days.
> Breaking all the work down to the smallest details to arrive at a better estimate means you will deliver the project later than if you hadn’t done that.
I think some of those comments signal that they misunderstand the point. There are two reasons to decompose a system before starting to build it:
- To quickly eliminate solutions that are almost guaranteed not to work, and
- To find consistency boundaries allowing you to structure work efficiently.
These two things speed up development, they don't slow it down. What they have in common is that you don't need a very detailed decomposition to leverage the benefits. Usually decomposing into at most 5 components or fewer will get you there.
What the point in the article talks about is decomposing into the smallest details trying to produce a detailed design containing finely grained subcomponents ahead of time. That, indeed, will take more time and may not even generate a better result, as the article says.