2006: user generated content is a revolution! We are now exchanging information and ideas directly with each other without needing information gatekeepers like traditional media or paid advertisers or anything like that! The future is gonna be a utopia where the powerful will be challenged at every turn!

2026: a significant percentage of “user generated content” is generated either by AI or people who are being paid to do so for commercial or political reasons… I suppose those are “users” too…

why, humanity, why??? ;____;

How does this compare to salaries for comparable positions at comparable for-profit companies?

It’s kinda the point of donations that they can afford to hire people whose labor costs that much.

I’m not sure if that law will pass/has passed,

It has already passed the legislature and been signed into law, but not become operative yet, won’t until 2027-01-01.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

That’s not very similar to how AI typically writes, at all.

because civil liberties don’t fit neatly into a left-right spectrum, despite being a lot more important than the economic policies that the left-right spectrum aims to describe, which is why I think the left-right spectrum is mostly useless

Yes, and it also says LIBE, which is the committee, not plenary, where this was recently voted on. It’s clearly not enough members for a plenary vote, this post is misinformation as titled.

at least https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22780466/why-cant-my-program-compile-under-windows-7-in-french was actually funny

not really, every Lemmy instance has an owner…

What federation is is that every Lemmy instance gets some of its data not just from its users, but also from other Lemmy instances. You can think of each Lemmy instance as one mini-reddit, in principle there is no difference between reddit and one single Lemmy instance. Federation means that Lemmy instances copy their data from/to each other so that you can talk to users who use other ones too.

I miss the days when making money from posting things on the Internet wasn’t really a (widespread) thing. In the earliest days of YouTube there was no partner program, everyone who uploaded anything there did so out of enthusiasm; if we still had that, maybe we’d have fewer videos overall, but no one would have a reason to post AI slop or other low-quality videos just for profit.

It used to be that similar (and equally bad) ideas were getting traction because of copyright law, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act

Now other excuses for the same thing have been invented. I wonder which will be next.

Yes. Try jobs where you just develop internal software for big companies. Not guaranteed, but not unheard of either.

This debate is about as old as the existence of free licenses. I doubt anyone will have anything new to say in this thread.

One aspect that isn’t raised very much is that for a company to maintain software (including their own fork of any software however licensed) costs developer time (= money). It may be cheaper to contribute back anyway, no matter the license, just in order to outsource that effort. If we are talking about software where this is true, companies have an incentive to work with the existing maintainers even if they aren’t legally obliged to.

The thing about PDF is that the whole point of PDF is that it shouldn’t be easy to edit. So you’re asking for hacks around something that isn’t supposed to be easily possible.

It’s possible to import PDFs into Inkscape. But my experience is that the result is usually not very easily editable (probably depends on the PDF) because it puts everything into very complex groups and other structures.

What if I’m running an email client in the terminal? ;)

I myself prefer dark mode for everything. But if somebody prefers a bright background, why would they not in the terminal too?

It makes sense to use the same setting for this, at least by default, as for dark and light mode in general. Why would you want your terminal dark but your email client bright?

It’s harder to delete things here than on non-federated services because everything you do here gets copied to lots of other servers, which are supposed to delete things when you do, but it’s impossible to guarantee that they always will (on purpose or by mistake).

I once deleted a comment here almost immediately after saving it, but then still got multiple upvotes for it. I found out that this was because one big instance hadn’t deleted it for whatever reason and its users had no idea that I’d meant to delete it.

???

Would cats care about red dots that aren’t moving? My impression is cats just have a hunting instinct that is triggered by everything moving that is small enough to be prey, including red dots, but only if they are moving…

Yes, it’s working.

When I read about people worrying about that, I always wonder how many people don’t turn their oven off immediately before or after taking out the food they prepared in it?! Assuming that it’s been a while since the last time you used it, why would it ever be on?

Now forgetting to properly turn the oven on (turning only one of the two knobs necessary to turn it on) when preparing food, that has definitely happened to me too a few times. :(