I respect that you work in the arts. However, I think too many people worried about copyright think that things would look similar to the way they are today, but the situation would be radically different without copyright. For example, Disney wouldn’t exist. You wouldn’t have large corporations taking and not giving back, because those large corporations wouldn’t exist like they do now in the first place.

Not the person you’re asking, but I’d say yes. Don’t bother charging for bits, except for something like the bandcamp model, i.e. “yes, i could pirate this but i want to support the creator and it’s really easy to do so”.

We have better funding models now that we’ve solved the problem of copying at zero cost. Patreon is a good and popular one, as well as kickstarters. You can’t pirate something that doesn’t get made, which is the perfect solution. Other art like music also makes money off of things like live performances that can’t be digitized.

Note that the one aspect of copyright that I like is attribution requirements. I think it’s perfectly fine to hand out information to anyone, as long as you say “here’s this cool thing, this is who created it, and this is how you can give them money”.

I’d be fine with copyright going away altogether. People sometimes object to this on the grounds of “But Disney will just steal your ideas and make money off of them”. If their works don’t have copyright though, you can do the same right back to them.

This is also one reason that I appreciate generative AI. Short-term, yes it will help Disney and the like. Slightly longer-term, why would anyone give Disney money if you can generate your own Marvel movie yourself?

The genie also isn’t going back in the bottle. Copyright is a dead man walking. If you dislike what large companies like Disney are doing/going to do with generative AI, push for anyone training a model to be forced to let anyone whose work went into that model for free.

The original duration in the U.S. was 14 years, plus the option of a renewal for another 14. IMO we should move back to something close to that. One idea I’ve seen is that there’s an initial cost of however much for 7 years, and then the price doubles for every 7 year extension beyond that. Not even Disney can beat exponential growth, and it would force them to pick what they actually care about.

I’d also prefer explicit registration. We’re losing too many works because nobody’s sure who owns the copyright, and nobody knows if it’s safe to archive them.

I’d say that the original Star Wars trilogy should be public domain by now, for a concrete example. Disney can make new stories and characters in the universe and make money off of them, but everyone else should be able to as well.

Also as an aside, here’s Richard Stallman on why the term “intellectual property” shouldn’t be used. It’s an umbrella term that doesn’t really make sense, and more explicit terms like copyright or patents or trademark should be used.

From here:

On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. “Factoid” was a term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn, “Factoids…that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” Of late, factoid has come to mean a small or trivial fact that makes it a contronym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as “cleve” (to cling or to split), “sanction” (to permit or to punish) or “citation” (commendation or a summons to appear in court). So factoid has become a victim of novelist C.S. Lewis’s term “verbicide,” the willful distortion or deprecation of a word’s original meaning.

I think !shortstories@literature.cafe would be a good place for it. The community sidebar says your own stories are welcome. You might want to add that you’re specifically looking for feedback

mapcomplete has integration with this site:

https://mangrove.reviews/

I’ve also seen this project:

https://lib.reviews/

Sorry, I should clarify I mean first chronologically, not in importance. As in, “here were the warning signs”. Also I’ll concede that this won’t be first chronologically either, it’ll be Guido stepping down as BDFL, and then the Tim Peters thing, then things like this.

To be fair, the comment had been moderated for like 4 days, and was only restored recently after people noticed. Hopefully somebody realized that it wasn’t a good look.

He’s not being run out of the project… yet. This is not a good direction, though. This comes across as the first link that’ll show up in a github gist of “What happened to Python?” in a few years. Hopefully not and it’s all just an automod mixup, but after the Tim Peters btfo, I know what I’d put my money on.

Thanks, yeah. There weren’t any immediately nearby, but I’ll try searching farther out.

Makes sense. I thought it was odd, because all of the clones I’ve seen use different names that clearly differentiate them, like Shattered Pixel Dungeon. I would say using the exact same title is confusing and maybe a little unethical, but if Watabou doesn’t care, then there’s probably not much that can/should be done.

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IMO it’s the weakest of the series. The next two books, The Player of Games or Use of Weapons are much better, at least to me. Use of Weapons is great, but has a somewhat challenging narrative structure of two intermixed timelines, so if that’s not your thing The Player of Games would probably be a good one to try.

Nice! It’s been a while since I’ve read any of his stuff. I should be done with my current book soon, what are a few of your favorites from him?

I’m pretty meh on the arguments there. It would be different, but we’d adapt. And we’d fix a lot bunch of problems.

The difference is that you’re not changing how time is kept. Countries can change their timezone offsets right now to screwy things like +12:45 and it changes how time is recorded and stored. If we switch to UTC, a country can just declare their official hours are shifting and nobody has to fundamentally change how clocks work.

IMO people would figure it out and life would go on. Yes, lots of people would have the calendar date advance in the middle of the day but that’s fine, we’d get used to it. People wouldn’t work 9-5 jobs, but we’d come up with different terminology.

I don’t really see the argument about people waking up at different times. Yeah, some people would wake up at 02:00 and some at 16:00, but when someone says they wake up at 02:00, there’s 0 confusion about when that is. You’d have to know when someone is awake to do an international call, but you have to do that anyways.

Have you read the other Culture books, or is this your first one? I just found out now that there’s !theculture@lemm.ee that could use some posts if you have anything you want to share about it. If you haven’t read it yet (or if anybody else is curious for a quick taste of the series), here’s the author writing a few notes on it:

http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

I thought this was also a good read, though it does have a few spoilers across the first few books:

https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2017/11/12/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/

At this point if I feel like getting fancy with Pandas, I’d reach for Polars first. My experience with it so far has been great

For a direct replacement, you might want to consider enums, for something like

enum Strategy {
    Foo,
    Bar,
}

That’s going to be a lot more ergonomic than shuffling trait objects around, you can do stuff like:

fn execute(strategy: Strategy) {
    match strategy {
        Strategy::Foo => { ... }
        Strategy::Bar => { ... }
}

If you have known set of strategy that isn’t extensible, enums are good. If you want the ability for third party code to add new strategies, the boxed trait object approach works. Consider also the simplest approach of just having functions like this:

fn execute_foo() { ... }
fn execute_bar() { ... }

Sometimes, Rust encourages not trying to be too clever, like having get vs get_mut and not trying to abstract over the mutability.