I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.

I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(

I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently

Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621

Is our entire information “ecosystem” so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they’ve already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!

OK, that’s about the elaboration I was looking for…

Somehow I don’t think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn’t explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.

Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.

In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.

What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?

I agree with that of course.

and it seems to be not true at all that “California just killed” anything, so far the bill has only been introduced, not passed as the title implies

current GPL licenses doesn’t protect them from A.I. scrapping their work

The legal status of AI scraping is not dependent on a specific license.

It’s dependent on whether copyright law requires permission from a copyright holder to train AI on their work. This is, as far as I know, not (mostly) a legally settled question yet.

All a license can do is permit things that would otherwise not be permitted. If copyright law doesn’t require that kind of permission, then it doesn’t matter what the author wrote in the license, they won’t be able to successfully sue for copyright infringement.

Meanwhile, if copyright law does require permission from copyright holders for training AI on their works, then the GPL already does what you want to achieve, because then anything generated from such an AI is already a derivative work.

sad John Perry Barlow noises

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Similar thoughts here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/

Particularly interesting is this comment:

One really interesting addition to me is that the early internet was a very, VERY free speech place. It loved Gish Gallops of enormous numbers of arguments from all sides and the idea that you would tell anyone, even the most foolish, that they should be banned was verboten.

In fact, early atheists loved creationists posting! It gave them content because these people were so obviously wrong. And creationists the same, because it allowed them to fight back too.

The modern deplatforming support on both sides is another sign that that era is gone.

EA, not FIFA. The games are nowadays not even called FIFA anymore.

Check out this: https://exiftool.org/#filename

That can move photos into directories according to their EXIF date, which should already help you a lot.

As an Esperantist I like the fact that so many FOSS projects have Esperanto-derived names. 👍

Something something https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be

apparently we are now supposed to think that that is a good thing, huh

This is probably supposed to be a link to this: https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-secure-access-to-millions-of-pirated-books/

There are a few communities where that link was posted correctly: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/53133358

such organizations already exist, e.g. Software in the Public Interest (most well known for hosting Debian)

both lemmy.world and lemmy.ca are working for me right now? Maybe they’ve come back up.

I don’t think I understand the question.

The Internet isn’t supposed to have a “center”, at all. If it ever does, something has gone wrong.

Federation, like what we’re doing here, can make it so that everyone’s personal “center” can be whatever platform they choose to use most of the time. Someone trying to communicate may be using an entirely different one, it will still get federated to whatever you prefer.