thenonsequitur's comments

thenonsequitur | 2 years ago | on: GPTBot – OpenAI’s Web Crawler

Now you're shifting the goal posts. Please re-read the comments/replies up to this point and you'll see no mention of laws anywhere. That's not what the discussion is about. It's about whether AI consumers of publicly accessible content should be required to pay for that content when human consumers should not.

thenonsequitur | 2 years ago | on: GPTBot – OpenAI’s Web Crawler

If you don't want to engage in the argument, that's on you. I don't think ChatGPT not being a human makes any difference and I think the onus is on you to explain why it should.

thenonsequitur | 2 years ago | on: GPTBot – OpenAI’s Web Crawler

Well if you are blocking access to their crawler, I'd imagine they'd have no need to use an incognito crawler to check for malicious content. Why would they care if that content is not ending up in their index anyway?

Presumably, the incognito crawlers are only used on sites that have already granted the regular crawler access. That's content that ends up in their index which they want to vet.

thenonsequitur | 12 years ago | on: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

What's preventing them? If they did that, they'd have to give up a fraction of their sales. Also, it's not easy to set or agree on a commission percent when Tesla and the dealerships have such opposing interests to begin with.

In other words, they are not trying this simply because selling direct is a better choice.

thenonsequitur | 12 years ago | on: Atom

Not impossible, no. But we absolutely have enough control over software to make it highly improbable for someone to accidentally delete something important and make it unrecoverable.

thenonsequitur | 12 years ago | on: Introducing Rubinius X

First, let me start by saying I'm a day-to-day Ruby developer and I absolutely love the language. That said, there are things besides the speed that prevent the acceptance of Ruby among people:

* No static type checking, potentially resulting in more bugs * Ease of monkey-patching, potentially resulting in insecurities * Rampant use of hash-as-arguments, resulting in method definitions that don't actually define their arguments (though Ruby 2.0 fixes this with named parameters, it's still a common pattern) * Heavy use of symbols, which some people see as the moral equivalent of magic strings

I personally think all of these arguments are bunk except for the over-use of hash-as-arguments even in Ruby 2.0. But some people give them credence.

thenonsequitur | 12 years ago | on: Introducing Rubinius X

Interestingly, Ruby is also approaching its 20-year anniversary. Of course, PHP has been popular much longer than Ruby.

thenonsequitur | 12 years ago | on: Introducing Rubinius X

I think he's taking as axiomatic that there only a few people using ruby, thus claiming this demonstrates the general rule people don't use ruby. Thus he is, in fact, using the phrase correctly.

But by taking it as axiomatic that few people use ruby, he is begging the question.

thenonsequitur | 12 years ago | on: Steam Controller

Yeah, I agree with you. I should have qualified what I said. I meant to say, "I'd only be using it with my computer anyway, and I don't think this will ever beat a keyboard/mouse in terms of practicality and ease of use with a computer". Agree that for a tv in the living room, or any environment where a large flat surface in front of you is impractical, that a keyboard/mouse is not so good.

thenonsequitur | 12 years ago | on: Steam Controller

I think it's great that Valve is innovating on controllers.

Personally, I won't buy one -- I don't intend on getting a steam machine so I'd only be using it with my computer anyway, and I don't think this will ever beat a keyboard/mouse in terms of practicality and ease of use.

But that aside, I'm glad they are at least trying to make a next-generation controller -- gives me hope there might one day be a controller I actually like. Though I'm not particularly hyped about the controller-specific features via API. For a game system that usually ranks accessibility very highly, the idea of device-tied game features strikes me as a somewhat regressive move, even if the features themselves are progressive.

thenonsequitur | 12 years ago | on: Steam Controller

Not sure where that argument comes from -- it's certainly not one I've ever made. I personally really prefer the nub over touch pad, but it has nothing to do with not having to move my fingers away from the keyboard.

I mean, given the option of a physical mouse, I will always prefer that over both nub and track pad -- and the physical mouse requires the most movement away from the keyboard (of course, to avoid all three mouse input methods I use keyboard shortcuts when possible).

Anyway, my reasons for preferring the nub are:

* Less movement required on the actual input device. Just a slight tilt of the finger can move the mouse cursor from anywhere to anywhere else.

* Higher accuracy. This one may be subjective, only personal applicable, and/or biased, but I think the nub just makes it so much easier to navigate compared to the touch pad.

thenonsequitur | 12 years ago | on: Forgotten Employee (2002)

I remember reading Rendezvous with Rama when I was a kid, and the whole time in my head I was pronouncing rendezvous in completely phonetic English, which also happened to make my mom laugh hysterically when I first said it out loud.

thenonsequitur | 13 years ago | on: DRM in HTML5 is a victory for the open Web, not a defeat

1. "Even if W3C decided to drop EME, there are enough important companies working on the spec--including Netflix, Google, and Microsoft--that a common platform will be built. The only difference is whether it happens under the W3C umbrella..."

This is probably true, but that doesn't make EME a good thing. Okay, so some powerful media companies are colluding to develop a shitty content delivery platform. How does that at all entail the idea that HTML should throw support behind it? Just because it's going to happen doesn't mean you have to officially endorse it.

2. "Deprived of the ability to use browser plugins, protected content distributors are not, in general, switching to unprotected media. Instead, they're switching away from the Web entirely."

I really don't see this as a problem. The web simply doesn't need these DRM-enamored content distributors. It will do fine without them. In fact, if the web loses them, the web wins.

3. "Opposition to EME will produce" a situation where software and services are "locked away in a series of proprietary, platform-specific apps".

This is just a stupid thing to say. DRM requires a series of proprietary, platform-specific apps, regardless of how they're implemented. The proposed CDMs (content decryption modules) that EME requires are also proprietary and platform-specific. They are quite simply no better than traditional HTML plug-ins like Flash or newer delivery platforms like native mobile apps. "A rose by any other name". Except that DRM doesn't smell sweet at all.

4. "A case could be made that EME will make it easier for content distributors to experiment with--and perhaps eventually switch to--DRM-free distribution."

While it's technically true that EME might make it slightly easier for such experimentation, that's really besides the point. Ease of implementation is absolutely not what's stopping these content distributors from such experiments. Business politics is what's stopping them. If a business decides that it wants to try a DRM-free model, it will try it. The implementation details hardly affect the decision.

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