Okay, seriously, can we just get one, just ONE document/image spec that doesn't let you embed scripts or remote content? What is with this constant need to put the same exactly vulnerability into EVERYTHING?! Just let me have a spec for completely static documents, jfc!
The continual conflation of speech that harms society as "speech I dislike" is absurd. And yes, it's not American-style freedom of speech... we've never had that nor should we. Just look at what American-style freedom of speech has done to America.
For me at least (different person), the term "speech offences" has been so captured by the far-right who think publicly advocating for the burning down of buildings populated with minorities is totally fine, but calling someone racist is beyond the pale. Whereas, at least from my own experience, progressives tend to use phrases related to expression, eg, protests.
And so when I hear "speech offences", my immediate thought is to question the premise: Are we talking about people publicly advocating for mass violence? Are we talking about bullying or harassment? Are we talking about a private conversation? Are we talking about a group chat? Are we talking about hate speech? Are we talking about defamation? Are we talking about "fighting words"? Etc. Context matters.
For all the talk I see online advocating for social media to be considered a public space, I've yet to see anyone really grasp the consequences of that: have any of them tried yelling out in a public space that they should burn down a populated building? That won't go down well, and rightly so. It has never been okay to do that.
People facing consequences for broadcasting their depraved bloodlust online doesn't concern me. What concerns me is the extent to which protests against genocide are being suppressed, with police looking for any minor infraction to pounce upon, but we have video of people saying to police "I support the genocide" to make a point, which the police don't bat an eye at. That scares me.
For you the issue is a left right issue and if the opinion matches yours it is acceptable and seen in a positive light but if it's the other side you have no tolerance.
You will never have free speech just controlled speech with alternating people in power. Which I think is a worse outcome because the people in power will never allow controlled speech against them.
> For you the issue is a left right issue and if the opinion matches yours it is acceptable and seen in a positive light but if it's the other side you have no tolerance.
When you remove all content and context from what is actually being said and done, then yes, this is fairly accurate, but it's also an entirely meaningless framing. But you have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right. But what you're doing here is (to use a hyperbolic comparison) accusing me of hypocrisy because I'm okay with interpretive dance but not murder, even though they're both just actions. It reminds me of 2016 Reddit where slurs were "just soundwaves, bro".
We don't have American-style freedom of speech, nor should we. We have freedom of expression instead because we have very personal experience within our very recent history what unfettered hatred does to a continent. Attempting to import American-style freedom of speech will genuinely destroy this country, we are already seeing it happen.
Many people share your viewpoint on the left and right. It's natural to support free speech for what you agree and censor what you don't. It's part of living in a left or right ghetto of thought.
Take a step back. The right is in power you are not allowed to speak your ideas. The left is in power you can say anything that supports their agenda.
What you can never do is speak against the government right or left
Why would you want that? Seems like the worst of all worlds.
Isn't the history you are trying to not repeat a history of controlled speech where the wrong party got elected or got in power? Why won't this happen again and again?
> It's natural to support free speech for what you agree and censor what you don't.
Y'all really don't make a convincing case for freedom of speech when you cannot even read. Let me repeat: "You have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right."
Someday we need to kill this myth, the wave of fascisms that appeared in Europe (Italy, Germany, Spain, Romania) are more of a cultural and economic reaction to the destruction of the Great War and not due to "unlimited free speech".
Free speech does not amplify or cultivate hate, it lets it fester in dark areas until it explodes when a crisis happens (which is what is happening currently).
Free speech and open discourse serves as a pressure valve release and self-correcting mechanism where by impopular or "untolerable" but common opinions have to be dealt with i.e the migration backlash in Europe
Again, you are stripping all context and content. You are pretending that protest organising and calling for the burning down of a building populated with asylum seekers are the same thing. I vehemently reject this facetious framing.
You're conflating legitimate criticism with incitement. The police record suggest the opposite.
Take the example *Bernadette Spofforth, 55*, she shared false information that the attacker was an asylum seeker, adding "If this is true, all hell will break loose." (not false btw) Deleted it, apologized. She still got arrested, held 36 hours, and then *released without charge because of insufficient evidence*.
No call for violence, "misinformation", which she retracted when corrected. Yet she still was arrested during the crackdown. The state used riot prosecutions to sweep up misinformation, political speech and "hatred" on one swoop not just incitement. Spofforth's arrest (and quiet release) shows they criminalized *any speech near the riots*, then kinda sorted legality later.
You're using the retarded Lucy Connolly to justify arresting people like Spofforth (which has opinion closer to the average). That's the poisoning-the-well: conflate extremists with moderates sharing concerns, arrest both, then claim all arrested speech was violent incitement.
You also seem to not take into account that *the UK has built the legal apparatus to enable this overreach:*
- *Public Order Act 1986*: Criminalizes speech where "hatred" is "likely" to be stirred up. You're criminal based on how others react.
- *Online Safety Act 2023*: Forces platforms to remove "harmful" content or face £18 million fines.
- *Non-Crime Hate Incidents*: Since
2014, police record speech "perceived" as hateful, even when no crime occurred. 133,000+ recorded. No evidence, no appeals, appears on background checks. Court ruled this unlawful for "chilling effect" in 2021 yet police continue anyway.
In total it ends up with 12,000+ annual arrests for speech (30/day), fourfold increase since 2016. 666,000 police hours on non-crimes. Broad laws + complaint-driven policing = arrest first, determine legality never.
Free speech protects conditional statements about policy during crises or when the people has something to say to its elites. The 36-hour detention without charges proves the suppression.
FWIW - Bernadette Spofforth invented a fictitious Muslim asylum seeker that had arrived by small boat as the perpetrator of an awful act of violence towards small children. She ended her post with "I'm done with the mental 'health excuse'. You should be as well!" Shortly afterwords, mosques and migrant hotels were attacked in the worst race riots the UK has seen in years - fuelled, at least in part, by her disinformation.
It wasn't a retweet and it was only deleted - some 10 hours later - when the media started asking her about the source of the name she had created.
The idea that she was simply expressing legitimate concern is ludicrous.
> You're conflating legitimate criticism with incitement.
You should tell the right wingers that. Here's some of the right-wing sources I found when searching Ground News for some articles about Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocating for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers:
You may notice a theme amongst these articles about how "it was just a tweet" and "she's a political prisoner" and "calculated move to suppress conservative viewpoints on immigration". This is what the right does. I'm not conflating legitimate criticism with incitement, they are, and they're using their massive media empires to spread this conflation.
This is just going to fix itself with more speech, right?
I actually do too, the issue is that in today’s wacko world the defense of Free Speech which in the early 2000s was a domain of the left/center-left, now has been abandonded due to the notion of “hate-speech” and opportunistically taken by the right (even tho many like MAGA will drop it the moment it stops being politically convenient i.e expulsion of students being critical of Israel actions).
A lot of those are propaganda peddlers who would drop the charade the moment someone on their political opposite side finds themselves in the same position (they keep crying about statements of Palestine and anti-semitism). I agree that they are stupid in their defense of Lucy Connely who literally and unrepentably pushed to “burn the asylum centers”, and that they are willfully conflating the issue to further their agenda.
The issue is both you and the retarded conservatives uses the situation to push their agendas, and as a counterpoint while they have media empires the left-wing political side also has media conglomerates pushing their ideas (BBC having a center-left slant).
No, the issue is going to fix itself with free speech, when no side is persecuted and better quality and rational discourse can arise and not be censored or overtaken by the extremes. Currently the only sane takes on many issues like immigration, economy or free speech exist only in the internet ghettos hidden from the larger public.
> which in the early 2000s was a domain of the left/center-left
Could you elaborate on that? I'm aware of the Lib Dems championing changes to the law to remove restrictions on "insulting" speech, but even so, they're not left/centre left. There's a joke that they're just yellow tories.
> now has been abandonded due to the notion of “hate-speech”
That's untrue. Stirring up or inciting racial hatred was made an offence by the Public Order Act 1986. And while it's true that stirring up religious hatred and homophobic hatred were added to that in 2006 and 2008 respectively, this did not invent the notion of hate speech. Lord Sumption, who was on our Supreme Court, said that the traditional line in English law was between words that merely outrage and words that would cause a breach of the peace amongst reasonable people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=END98dJwpCg&t=1306s). Stirring up racial, religious, or homophobic hatred would seem to conform to that.
> BBC having a center-left slant
That's also untrue. The BBC participated in the pillorying of Corbyn; the BBC gave JK Rowling a Russel Prize for her anti-trans manifesto (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55350905); the whole debacle with the "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" article (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4buJMMiwcg); the BBC downplaying Gaza (eg: killed vs died, not allowing the term "genocide", demanding anyone critical of Israel to ritualistically condemn Hamas, etc); the BBC preventing pro-Palestinian audience members for Question Time (https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/10/03/bb...). And speaking of Question Time, how many times has Farage (or other Reformer) been a panellist now? And this is just the stuff I've personally witnessed and noted down. The BBC is establishment media through and through: the BBC is not suddenly centre left because there's gay people in Eastenders.
> the BBC gave JK Rowling a Russel Prize for her anti-trans manifesto
It wasn't an "anti-trans manifesto", but a thoughtful explanation of her reasons for speaking out on the sex and gender issue, where she discusses her concerns for women's rights and safety, the well-being of vulnerable children, and how important it is to be allowed to speak freely on this topic. Plenty of people on the left (and centre-left) agree with her too.
As with all her work, it was very well written, which the article you linked rightly acknowledges.
Oh hello, welcome to this 18-comment deep thread. This is the second time now that I've mentioned JK Rowling's transphobia and had a randomer show up and comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37058027). You, like them, also only speak about JKR on your profile. How curious.
It's shows that JKR, a billionaire, has an army of sleeper accounts willing to jump at any mention of her nakedly virulent transphobia. Second-wave feminists would deplore her bio-essentialism. She is an anti-feminist.
Have you never encountered a generalisation in your entire life?
EDIT: Fun tidbits:
- Sheila Jeffreys thinks that "any woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations stronger".
- Janice Raymond thinks that "all transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves".
- Germaine Greer published a book of some 200 pictures of young boys "to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure".
Truly the height of second-wave feminism right here.
Point is that second-wave feminism, and radical feminism in particular, centred on recognising sex as the basis of women's oppression under patriarchy. This led to advocacy for women-only spaces to protect against male violence and predation. Which is what JKR's position is: a continuation of second-wave radical feminism.
Partially correct but you are conflating the movement fighting for biological rights (eg: reproductive rights) as it being bio-essentialist. And there certainly was infighting about trans people within second-wave feminism (eg: feminist sex wars), but then there's also intersex people. Second-wave feminists more generally did not have the kind of one-drop rule towards womanhood as you do, where someone could have lived their entire life as a woman, be perceived as a woman, experienced misogyny as a woman, experience patriarchy as a woman, suffered domestic abuse as a woman, have breasts and a vulva, etc, but once some test determines them to be intersex, you disqualify them from womanhood entirely and cast them as male. Second-wave feminists would not have done this. In fact, I believe even Greer deplored surgeries being performed on infants to make them comply with society's perception of the binary.
Second-wave feminism explicitly challenged and rejected biological essentialism, which is the misogynistic belief that women are biologically suited to roles like housework, taking care of a husband, raising children and so on, and should do that instead of making any other choices in life. If you are familiar with JKR's feminist views you should know that she isn't bio-essentialist. Very much the opposite.
Also, you're responding to an argument I didn't make. I said nothing about intersex people or any "one-drop rule". My point was that second-wave radical feminism centred sex as the basis of women's oppression under patriarchy, leading to advocacy for women-only spaces. Which is exactly what JKR is defending.
That is the continuity I'm highlighting. It was in response to your earlier comment:
> Second-wave feminists would deplore her bio-essentialism. She is an anti-feminist.
When I noticed you gave up on our argument, I thought I'd see what else you were up to. It seems your only goal on this site is to defend JKR. Unfortunately, JKR's views don't actually make sense, which explains why none of your arguments in defense of her make sense either.
> Second-wave feminism explicitly challenged and rejected biological essentialism
Exactly, hence why JKR's depraved dogma is anti-feminist: the idea that women can be disqualified from their womanhood for not being biologically pure enough is aggressively bio-essentialist. See JKR's disgusting reaction to Imane Khelif where mere rumour was enough for JKR to disqualify her womanhood entirely and call her a "a man beating a women in public for entertainment". And as konmok as said in their comment: you were all too willing to do the same in another comment thread. This is exceedingly cruel, hateful, anti-feminist, and not worthy of respect within a civil and democratic society. I will no longer be responding to this level of inhumanity.
EDIT: Sidenote, you claiming to have been rate-limited despite having a pretty sparse profile is very funny and implies that you're either running multiple accounts (probably to defend JKR and her cronies) or because you're thrumming the API like nobody's business trying to find any criticism of JKR. Or both. It could be both.
Figured I'd add that the BBC has had to apologise recently for Question Time posing a question to the panellists about a stat of 1 in 3 children in Glasgow having English as a second language, but the text prompt they showed on screen lied, saying that 1 in 3 children in Glasgow are not fluent in English. That's a pretty substantial change.
It's not very centre-left of the BBC to aid Farage in his racism, and of course there's a Reform politician there to have the first and last words about it. Keep in mind that this is a Scottish episode, with the leader of the Scottish National Party at Westminster, the leader of Scottish Labour, the leader of Scottish Conservatives, a Scottish journalist (there's usually one or two non-politicians on the panel) who did a lot of indyref coverage. And despite Reform not winning a single seat for Scotland in the 2024 General Election, or in the last Scottish Parliament election in 2021, they apparently always need to give Reform a voice on everything so they shoehorned him onto this panel.
I think it's because unwrap() seems to unassuming at a glance. If it were or_panic() instead I think people would intuit it more as extremely dangerous. I understand that we're not dealing with newbies here, but everyone is still human and everything we do to reduce mistakes is a good thing.
I'm sure lots of bystanders are surprised to learn what .unwrap() does. But reading the post, I didn't get the impression that anyone at cloudflare was confused by unwrap's behaviour.
If you read the postmortem, they talk in depth about what the issue really was - which from memory is that their software statically allocated room for 20 rules or something. And their database query unexpected returned more than 20 items. Oops!
I can see the argument for renaming unwrap to unwrap_or_panic. But no alternate spelling of .unwrap() would have saved cloudflare from their buggy database code.
Looking at that unwrap as a Result<T> handler, the arguable issue with the code was the lack of informative explanation in the unexpected case. Panicking from the ill-defined state was desired behaviour, but explicit is always better.
The argument to the contrary is that reading the error out-load showed “the config initializer failing to return a valid configuration”. A panic trace saying “config init failed” is a minor improvement.
If we’re gonna guess and point fingers, I think the configuration init should be doing its own panicking and logging when it blows up.
First, again, that’s not the issue. The bug was in their database code. Could this codebase be improved with error messages? Yes for sure. But that wouldn’t have prevented the outage.
Almost every codebase I’ve ever worked in, in every programming language, could use better human readable error messages. But they’re notoriously hard to figure out ahead of time. You can only write good error messages for error cases you’ve thought through. And most error cases only become apparent when you stub your toe on them for real. Then you wonder how you missed it in the first place.
In any case, this sort of thing has nothing to do with rust.
It's not unassuming. Rust is superior to many other languages for making this risky behaviour visually present in the code base.
You can go ahead and grep your codebase for this today, instead of waiting for an incident.
I'm a fairly new migrant from Java to C#, and when I do some kind of collection lookup, I still need to check whether the method will return a null, throw an exception, expect an out+variable, or worst of all, make up some kind of default. C#'s equivalent to unwrap seems to be '!' (or maybe .Val() or something?)
Whether the value is null (and under which conditions) is encoded into the nullability of return value. Unless you work with a project which went out of its way to disable NRTs (which I've sadly seen happen).
> I think it's because unwrap() seems to unassuming at a glance. If it were or_panic() instead I think people would intuit it more as extremely dangerous.
Anyone who has learned how to program Rust knows that unwrap() will panic if the thing you are unwrapping is Err/None. It's not unassuming at all. When the only person who could be tripped up by a method name is a complete newbie to the language, I don't think it's actually a problem.
Similarly, assert() isn't immediately obvious to a beginner that it will cause a panic. Heck, the term "panic" itself is non obvious to a beginner as something that will crash the program. Yet I don't hear anyone arguing that the panic! macro needs to be changed to crash_this_program. The fact of the matter is that a certain amount of jargon is inevitable in programming (and in my view this is a good thing, because it enables more concise communication amongst practitioners). Unwrap is no different than those other bits of jargon - perhaps non obvious when you are new, but completely obvious once you have learned it.
I don't think you can know what unwrap does and assume it is safe. Plus warnings about unwrap are very common in the Rust community, I even remember articles saying to never use it.
I have always been critical of the Rust hype but unwrap is completely fine. Is an escape hatch has legitimate uses. Some code is fine to just fail.
It is easy to spot during code review. I have never programmed Rust professional and even I would have asked about the unwrap in the cloudfare code if I had reviewed that. You can even enforce to not use unwrap at all through automatic tooling.
Probably for the same reason that most new language these days cannot bring themselves to just use "function" and instead have "fn", "fun", "func", etc. It's a headlong pursuit of conciseness for the sake of conciseness.
Not OP but while I don't seek "punishment", I do seek accountability. I know that might seem like a flowery synonym at best, or an amorphous piece of jargon at worst, but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past. Until we stop letting the perfect get in the way of the good enough, we will continue to let bad actors dictate the public understanding of technological issues, and of issues more generally (eg: antivax).
The trump administration in the US also frames its crackdown on civil society in terms of "accountability for lies". But I guess its fine when your side does it.
I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration. For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to. The CIA is still probably pretty bad. Yes, there are a lot of Republicans who are neo-authoritarians who need to be shut down before they ruin open and free society for a pipe dream. It's like you can't win no matter which party is running things because there are always the freaky lunatics who want to limit your freedoms, expand government, and cover for their own horrible misdeeds.
> I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration.
It's been a hallmark of his Administration, so you not seeing it is...interesting.
> For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to.
In the sense of it not being a mystery because it is more naked in both the direction and the specific approach to partisan political abuse, I guess I could see that, but in terms of not being concerned, the only explanation for that is GP’s “But I guess its fine when your side does it.”
Most claims of 'the other side' is lying are themselves lies. It's mostly people just spinning things to suit their own personal biases (without necessarily even realizing that's what they're doing). For instance the vaccine topic is one I did a deep dive on not too long ago when deciding which vaccines to approve for my children. This [1] is essentially the bible of vaccines - it's a massive study across a large sampling of evidence for all major vaccines, carried out by the National Academies of Science. I'll quote them:
----
The vast majority of causality conclusions in the report are that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship. Some might interpret that to mean either of the following statements:
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does cause the adverse event, the vaccine is safe.
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does not cause the adverse event, the vaccine is unsafe.
Neither of these interpretations is correct. “Inadequate to accept or reject” means just that—inadequate. If there is evidence in either direction that is suggestive but not sufficiently strong about the causal relationship, it will be reflected in the weight-of-evidence assessments of the epidemiologic or the mechanistic data. However suggestive those assessments might be, in the end the committee concluded that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal association.
----
The overwhelming majority of the rhetoric around vaccines, including from governmental figures, is doing exactly what they warn against. There's simply a lot of nuance on most of every issue worth discussing, that people often don't want to acknowledge.
If you want to talk about Covid “Two weeks to slow the spread” was the foundational lie that they told that did more damage than almost any lie I can remember. That is solid truth right there.
> but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past.
In order to "move past" that, you have to find a way to address official lies and cases where the majority is wrong.
.
For example the official denial of the fact that the Wuhan lab was researching things similar to covid-19. (Doesn't matter whether it actually came from there.)
Or the official lies about mask effectiveness. (Regardless of whether they're effective or not, the government told people things that it believed at the time were false.)
Or the lies about the world's best anti-parasite medication (that just isn't an antiviral) being dangerous horse-paste.
Or the lies about Hunter Biden's laptop being Russian disinformation.
Or that still-ongoing culture war topic where both sides claim the other is lying.
Isn't that not necessarily out of the ordinary though? What if there's a cosmic ray that change's the value to something not expected by the exhaustive switch? Or more likely, what if an update to a dynamic library adds another value to that enum (or whatever)? What some languages do is add an implicit default case. It's what Java does, at least: https://openjdk.org/jeps/361
This is how all static type checking works. What programming language do you have in mind that does static type checking and then also does the same type checking at runtime? And what would you expect this programming language to do at runtime if it finds an unexpected type?
I think the point is that other languages make guarantees that ensure you don't have to do any runtime checking. In TypeScript, it's far too easy (and sometimes inevitable) to override the type checker, so some poor function further down into the codebase might get a string when it expects an object, even though there are no type errors.
This is a bit of a what-if, but I had a Pebble watch back then and was considering trying to make an app for it. The idea that, if I had succeeded and published the app, that Rebble would be claiming ownership over my binary and threatening legal action against the original Pebble creator, to be really quite ridiculous and affronting.
I’m just curious, where has Rebble actually claimed ownership of your app binaries? I’d love to know if it’s something more concrete than “Eric said so.”
I stumbled across your watchface recently and absolutely love it. It's remarkable how much information density you've achieved while still maintaining "at a glance" clarity. Thank you for the work you put into it!
> Rebble does not claim to "own" your app, they only claim to have done a lot of work saving and patching abandoned apps and recreated a whole service for managing and distributing them, wrote new apps, published new apps along with the old, to support watch owners that Pebble abandoned.
Because they never had the right to redistribute it.
This is like YouTube shutting down and me offering a bunch of videos I download for free, claiming that setting up a portal was a lot of work so I get rights.
I’d get sued to high heaven and the only reason Rebble is getting away with it is that the watch face developers aren’t big outfits with lawyers.
Core doesn not have any rights to it. Pebble did, and Pebble threw it away.
Rebble honors copyright by taking anything down that a rightsholder says to.
That's all copyright grants, and they are doing it. If you own an app and don't want Rebble to redistribute it, they won't.
Core has no claim to anything.
This is CoreTube coming along years later "Hey I used to work for Youtube. Give me your copy of all those videos other people actaully made and own, that Youtube threw away years ago. Also give me your whole NewTube back end site you wrote from scratch because I want to make CoreTube now and I don't have my old Youtube stuff any more because I sold it."
You keep repeating that Core has no rights to that data, which is true, but it's a refutation to an argument no-one in this thread has made. What we're saying is that Rebble has no rights to that data either.
Rebble's theft of that data was 'allowed' in the same way that Nickelback allow those "look at this graph" memes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7aqZyRuP1Q): it's copyright infringement but they don't care so they don't enforce their rights. It's not like trademarks with its use-it-or-lose-it clause. What I'm claiming here is that people who made apps and watch faces for Pebble didn't care (assuming they knew at all) because it was for preservation purposes.
But now that Rebble is hoarding it to themselves, to the exclusion of Core, a revived Pebble company, those copyright holders may become less willing to tolerate the copyright infringement. And let's be clear: their rights do not begin and end with just getting it taken down.
> And let's be clear: their rights do not begin and end with just getting it taken down.
Unless you want to claim lost profit on a free watch face, or try to make the argument that the watch face you didn’t even remember existed until now being hosted on their service caused you some form of emotional distress, maybe they do.
What? The original article and practically everyone in this thread has tried to make the argument that Core should have what they are asking for, which is the apps that they did not husband and everything else that they did not build.
If Core were just building their own new app store from scratch there would be no discussion. The only reason there is even any discussion at all is because they are not doing that, they are trying to take over Rebbles app store.
Rebble doesn't claim to own the apps. Rebble will even remove an app if you as the owner of an app tell them to. That means obviously they recognize who owns the apps, which is neither Rebble nor Core. Pebble might have had some claim once upon a time depending on how the terms for developers were written.
Rebble didn't steal anything. So, what theft are you talking about? The apps were broadcast on a public server for anyone to download so the download wasn't a theft.
They are redistributing those apps which they don't have any copyright to. But they are not selling the apps and they are respecting any authors directive to take an app down. They don't claim to have copyright except to their own new stuff.
Pebble aren't "hoarding" anything "to exclusion" except things that are actually theirs. And yes that includes their downloads of old apps. They don't own the IP of the app, they own the copy they downloaded. If someone else wants a copy, they can ask nicely and accept no for an answer. If you actually own an app you can tell Rebble to desist, and they will. What Core wants is just outside of any of those scopes.
Pebble voluntarily SOLD themselves. A former principle of Pebble has no tiniest right to anything at this point. They had rights, and they sold them for money. Now they have the money, not the apps, and for damned sure not the wholly new recreated services. They no longer have any claim to anything.
That's because you have incorrectly inferred from our statements saying that Core should get the data, or rather that the data should be publicly archived, as us saying that Core has a right to the data. You are again constructing a strawman to argue against.
EDIT: Also, if Rebble scraping it from Pebble isn't theft, then neither would Core scraping it from Rebble. Problem solved.
> Rebble clearly honors copyright, ex: removing apps on request of the author. Thst's the only right any copyright holder ever has is to say you can't redistribute copies.
That is not at all how copyright works, like ... at all.
If it worked as you claim, I could host a copy of disney movies on my site till disney asks me to stop, and then i stop doing that and walk away free. Clearly this is not at all how that would go down. No matter who abandons what, how, or why, for at least 90(?) years after a work was created in USA, it cannot be distributed without permission. End of story.
If you were distributing my work, even if you stop when I ask, I can sue you and will win damages for every copy you distributed without permission. The damages would be multiplied by 3(?) if you were doing so knowingly (undeniable in this case)
Are you confusing the DMCA safe harbor process with first party distribution of copyrighted material? I'm not an IP maximalist or anything but what you're saying is straightforwardly not the process for distribution of copyrighted material.
It is not actually the case that I can legally distribute whatever I like so long as I stop when asked. These are US orgs so assuming US law here.
Since you ask for specifics, this part is wrong:
> Rebble clearly honors copyright, ex: removing apps on request of the author. Thst's the only right any copyright holder ever has is to say you can't redistribute copies.
No. A rights holder can request that you pay for the distribution you already did. You'd then force litigation and it would cost the rights holder a lot for very little gain. Showing harm here would be hard so they don't do it but what you're saying is so far from correct it's unclear why you are insisting on specifics. It's not nuanced.
It is not wrong. All I said was that Rebble has demonstrated that they respect copyright. Taking down an app on request means you acknowledge that the person making the request has the right to do so.
It's true that a rightsholder could go further and sue for damages, and maybe even win. So what?
The last time that happened, was Rebble actually found guilty of operating in bad faith? Were the damages significant or trivial? Did Rebble try to deny the authors rights?
Unknown because it has never happened so it's immaterial. These imaginary possibles are possible but cannot be used as proof of Rebble behaving badly unless and until it actually happens and Rebble behaves badly or is found by a court to have been.
What we DO have is that when an app author asserts their copyright, Rebble complies.
I am not saying, and never did say that it's explicity legal to redistribute these apps without having first aquired the copyright from the authors.
And if no copyright holder asserts their rights to Rebble, then you can't show any harm or bad faith operation by Rebble.
Put it this way, if handling the abandoned material is intrinsically wrong without a harmed party, then why can't you go accuse them of a crime right now and have the police deal with them like you could if you witnessed an act of violence or property damage?
Because it's not so cut and dried. A thing can be not explicitly legal and yet still not wrong or harmful. A thing can be undetermined until forced to be determined some how by some actual injured party with some actual right to claim that injury and the receipts to defend the claim.
So IF you are an app owner then you can assert your ownership and claim that Rebble infringed on you. Even if you can't prove that there was ever any monetary value, you might still be owed something just for punitive.
But Core is no such injured party.
And this blows my mind, after all this arguing, Core actually hass access to the apps free and clear all along. They are right there in a github free to clone.
All arguments based on the apps or access to a copy of the apps are right the fuck out the window. As they were all along anyway even if the apps were on a private server behind that no-scraping agreement.
Hmm okay. You have what I'd consider a fairly idiosyncratic meaning for what "respect copyright" means. All right, I suppose under that definition it is true.
> Your real middle class refuses to show any but the most bland books and magazines on its coffee tables: otherwise, expressions of opinion, awkward questions, or even ideas might result. -Paul Fussell, Class
The greyification of our lives, the loss of whimsy and kitsch and being too afraid to be a little cringe, I get the sense that a lot of people associate "growing up" as the loss of any and all expression: we wake up in our grey beds in our millennial grey house, drive to work in our grey car to work in our grey cubical, etc, etc. If you want a gauche laptop covered in stickers, do it, embrace the gauche. Everyone sneering at you is more miserable than you.
A good portion of these stickers are to do with things that are political or quasi political. What tends to happen is that a lot if times people have been burned in someway for supporting an idea or a cause. This is often because people have been fooled by charlatan, or it was later revealed that things were more complicated or different than they were led to believe.
Cringe and why people hate it is best explained by watching the very first episode of the UK office.
Most people want to go to work, turn up and do their time and go home. People that are often top enthusiastic are difficult to deal with day to day. People that adorn their personal possessions with slogans are seen as a warning sign.
I think it's more a very lame flex. Macbooks were expensive and if you were walking around the office with a Macbook it was because you were important enough to convince management to buy you one instead of some crappy Dell. Eventually enough people get Macbooks that you need another way to stand out so you slap a bunch of cheap stickers all over it to show everyone, "See, you coddle your trophies. I beat mine up because it's just a tool and I don't care. I'm too busy gettin' it done!"
My work devices don't have much on them, mostly corporate asset tags and the like. My own, though, I make my own. The stickers reflect things I like or find amusing; maybe they'll get a smirk or a chuckle from someone else, maybe not.
In the end, they're like the tattoos that someone else commented on. (I have those as well.) If you appreciate them, great! If you don't like them, that's fine too. Fundamentally, they're not for you.
I think you might be romanticizing this, a bit. When you convince the public that not talking about something is the best course of action, they become a lot easier to control. We learned this during WWII with the propaganda machine that was fully employed on all fronts, and arguably before that with the work of Edward Bernays and people like him. If public discourse and debate could be quashed, then it was much, much easier to simply tell everyone what their opinions of a thing should be.
I think that on its face the term "sacred knowledge" kind of communicates an intimacy that indicates that it's not something that's shared with people who don't have a privileged relationship with you.
I think the big difference now is that people have a megaphone in the form of social media and they forget just how wide the statements they shout through it can spread.
But why so many stickers? Why so many tattoos? Why not pick one you very much like and agree with? Less noise. More signal. Less is more.
I don't like many of the ones mentioned on this website but here are some minimalist examples [1] [2] [3] [4] and an exception I do like a bit because of the custom shape [5]. [1] is more like a skin.
My stickers will one day have layers as I stack them again and again. Anthropologists of the future will be able to trace my beliefs, humor, and tech stack from my laptop lid alone, adding to the corpus of knowlege for tech workers in the late american period.
I feel like this direction of thinking is also a bit reductionist: there are plenty of reasons not to want to put stickers on a laptop. For me, personally, I don't like stickers because a year or two later, they don't represent how I think anymore. It's not an expression I would make today, it's a ghost of my old expressions.
And I feel like this greyification is only true in theory from the perspective of the manufacturers. I still run into plenty of people that are not afraid to decorate their space, laptop, or whatever else.
Greyification actually makes sense precisely because everyone has a different way of expression. That's why canvases are still white; you just have to find a different primer.
I don't judge people who put stickers on their laptop, but for me I don't simply because it brings me no pleasure or joy. I have never really understood decorative things in general. It is probably part of my neurodivergence, but I just don't get value from decorative things.
Authenticity is in your heart. Putting stickers onto your laptop, which is the least authentic thing for a software developer to do, makes you just look ridiculous.
Authenticity is behaving in a way that is true to yourself. In this case, putting stickers on a laptop or otherwise decorating it is a form of art and self expression. It’s not complicated or controversial.
I do it because it can be creative and fun. It adds color to an otherwise gray and boring surface and provides a practical way of identifying my laptop from everyone else’s.
When I was in school, we used to cover out textbooks with brown paper bags and then drawn on them. How is this any different?
You seem to have you entire identity tied to the notion of what you think a software developer is and that everyone should conform to that idea. I’d rather have people be creative, embrace fun, and add color and self expression to the world. We could all use more color in our lives.
I'll be honest I think that dying on the hill of "putting stickers on your laptop [...] is the least authentic thing for a software developer to do" makes you look pretty ridiculous.
And yet here you are, signaling to others your uniqueness by saying how much you hate the way that they signal theirs. It's not that deep, man. This sounds like a really tough way to live and I genuinely wish you the best of luck with your vendetta against *checks notes* people expressing themselves with stickers on their laptops.
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