TFNA

16 ms·

331.
by TFNA 6mo ago
I don't code (well, I write scripts for my own personal use and use Emacs), but I follow with interest these reports from software developers. Why? Because my profession is similar screen- and keyboard-based intellectual work, and what
332.
by TFNA 6mo ago
> Taking months off to bum around the hippy trail in the 1960s spending almost half of the average person's salary would have put you in the upper middle class to say the least. Worth noting that a substantial amount of people doing
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by TFNA 6mo ago
French Revolution is largely regarded as a tragedy. It led first to the Terror, and after that a series of new monarchies over the following century. Revolutions in most countries have generally replaced one faction of the ruling class with
334.
by TFNA 6mo ago
> The Roman influence is limited mostly to place names. Otherwise Latin had basically disappeared from the island. Recent research, namely an article by Lars Nooij & Peter Schrijver [0], suggests that a population speaking Latin&#x2F
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by TFNA 6mo ago
> I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words This is how the Icelandic sagas were translated into English in the nineteenth century. Translators then almost always chose the Engl
336.
by TFNA 6mo ago
I’ve already posted in this thread about how even if OpenAI charges money for its LLM trained on the literature, that doesn’t change the fact that the literature remains available to everyone through the shadow libraries, and advances in AI
337.
by TFNA 6mo ago
I’m well aware of that societal change, but the OP asked about an “active filesharing app that’s still in use today”, and if there are Bittorrent communities with so many seeders that one can get almost any film in a matter of minutes, then
338.
by TFNA 6mo ago
As a researcher, the main worthwhile thing that I am doing is publishing research, but having all this prior scholarship at hand 24/7 definitely makes it easier to produce said publications. And if I have created a scan, why not help o
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by TFNA 6mo ago
Of course not, and many authors are already long dead. But if you knew anything about academic publishing, the authors almost invariably are happy to see their work out there freely available. It’s not as if they make any money from it, a
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by TFNA 6mo ago
Some people might have to pay a large amount of money to ask a commercial LLM, but advances in this space mean that if I have the data myself on my own computer, or can download it from a shadow library, I might eventually be able to ask ev
341.
by TFNA 6mo ago
The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around. I’m a cinephile who has a collection of nearly a thousand films in Blu-Ray image format, and 95% of that is off a tracker that is open even, not private. And Soulseek is still known as the
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by TFNA 6mo ago
I’m a researcher who for years has been scanning my library’s holdings on my particular discipline for my own use, but also uploading the books to the shadow libraries for everyone else’s benefit. The revelation that LLMs are training on th
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by TFNA 6mo ago
You could have downloaded the film from the high seas for free and saved the €1.
344.
by TFNA 6mo ago
> banning the installation of non-Google/Apple approved operating systems (ex: GrapheneOS) Do you have a link where I could read more about this? GrapheneOS is known for being the alternative Android where many bank apps in the EU s
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by TFNA 6mo ago
Banks can be state-owned as well as private. Moreover, some countries have a particular bank that serves all citizens, even if they would not be able to bank elsewhere.
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by TFNA 6mo ago
> I barely want my banks to know what I buy and to be responsible for my money. I really don't want them knowing everywhere I go online. Bank ID systems, at least the ones I’m familiar with, don't work like that. Your bank conf
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by TFNA 6mo ago
> Having to file taxes in my home country would be worth keeping my citizenship. OK, but what if each year you had to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars (that you maybe don’t even have) to an accountant, because complicated paperwork i
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by TFNA 6mo ago
I think that even if there were a wide array of forum websites, the discussion culture would be very different than the old days. The majority of people's default device now is their phone, and that discourages the kind of longform tex
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by TFNA 6mo ago
Your Dutch citizenship doesn’t come with an obligation to laboriously file taxes to your home country even if you live abroad, and you are in no risk of being denied a bank account in any EU country. This is something US passport holders un
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by TFNA 6mo ago
> anybody who does banking on their phone is taking a big and unnecessary risk It is not necessarily a matter of choice. Besides what the other commenter notes about 2FA, in some countries banks have been removing functionality from thei
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by TFNA 6mo ago
> I can’t imagine every bank in a country deciding to make that same move. Many countries have only three or four full banks (the kind that can give you a Visa or Mastercard bank card, let you send and receive transfers, etc.), and all o
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by TFNA 6mo ago
Even if Reddit is still accessible from the browser, the discussion culture is already wrecked since the vast majority of people are on the mobile app. That interface encourages one-line posts instead of substantial discussion, and it will
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by TFNA 6mo ago
A comparable FOSS app called Drip has been on F-Droid since forever.
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by TFNA 6mo ago
The Muslim world has plenty of alcohol drinking. On one hand you have countries that are majority Muslim but alcohol is legally sold and widely consumed, like the Balkans, Central Asia or parts of West Africa. On the other hand you have cou
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by TFNA 6mo ago
The author is the developer of the RSS reader Elfeed, which a lot of Emacs users use several times a day. Though the article talks about a vibe-coded wxWidgets-based GUI application called Elfeed2 that he wrote as a replacement, Emacs affic
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by TFNA 6mo ago
Only in the beginning, in the wake of the Greek Bronze Age dark age, was Homeric epic an improvised oral tradition that could be tailored to a listening audience’s preferences. By fifth-century Athens, writers depict the text as already def
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by TFNA 6mo ago
> So you're paying money for a good food experience, but you're getting the taste equivalent of instant ramen noodles. Restaurants, even nicer ones, cut corners. This especially flared up in the news a couple of years ago when
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by TFNA 6mo ago
Depends on the genre. It wasn't unusual for an acclaimed travelogue by a French or German author to be translated into multiple European languages, but never get an English version because UK and US publishers assume their market just
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by TFNA 6mo ago
China and Japan made whole rituals and philosophy around serving tea and there is a difference between novice and adept in that. People really nerding out on espresso are just repeating an old trend.
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by TFNA 6mo ago
"Buddhism is an atheist philosophy" Not in the way it is actually practiced by many Asian societies where believers turn their devotion to what are basically deities: Amitabha in the Pure Land, Avalokiteshvara/Kuanyin, etc. T

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