> This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower:
That example is not analogous to the topic at hand.
But furthermore, it also is specific to French/European copyright law. In the US, the US Copyright Act would not permit restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces.
I don't know the details of that specific case so I can't speak to it, but the text of the AWCPA is very clear:
> The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.
This codifies an already-established principle in US law. French law does not have that same principle.
> Meta still tracks analytics which isn't good for privacy, but I'm not aware of any news of them or 3rd parties reading messages without consent of one of the 1st parties? Signal is probably much better though
Correct. WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol, and there is zero evidence of them reading message contents except with the consent of one of the users involved (such as a user reporting a message for moderation purposes).
(And before anyone takes issue with that last qualifier, consent from at least one party is the bar for secure communications on any platform, Signal included. If you don't trust the person you are communicating with, no amount of encryption will protect you).
Discovering a backdoor in WhatsApp for Facebook/Meta to read messages would be a career-defining finding for a security researcher, so it's not like this is some topic nobody has ever thought to investigate.
> So “I’m right but can’t afford the lawyer time” is a very real scenario.
For most cases like the ones we're talking about (NYC unlawful eviction and/or tenant harassment), if you have a good case, you don't have to pay up-front. A lawyer will take it on contingency and get paid by the defendant if you win.
In addition, there are also plenty of free legal resources dedicated to this exact topic as well.
True, but it is only an incredibly narrow subset of legal cases where contingency based lawyers exist. As for non LLM legal resources, they are just fine if you have all day to read them and all of another day to draft the required filings, but most people have jobs.
> As for non LLM legal resources, they are just fine if you have all day to read them and all of another day to draft the required filings, but most people have jobs.
You misunderstand. If you are facing tenant harassment in New York City, there are other avenues for you to resolve it that don't involve engaging a lawyer at all.
> True, but it is only an incredibly narrow subset of legal cases where contingency based lawyers exist.
Not really? If anything, there's a pretty narrow subset of cases where it's not possible to get someone on contingency but it is possible to use an LLM to meaningfully push your case forward without one.
> Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that companies should make support calls less necessary by providing better products and services, but "just write bug-free software" is not a solution.
This isn't a case where you need bug free software. This is a case where the frequency of fatal bugs is directly proportional to the support cost. Fix the common bugs, then write off the support for rare ones as a cost of doing business.
The effect of cheap robo support is not reducing the cost of support. It is reducing the cost of development by enabling a more buggy product while maintaining the previous support costs.
Giving the device enough RAM to survive memory leaks during heavy usage would also be a valid option, as is automatic rebooting to get the device back into a clean state before the user experiences a persistent loss of connectivity. There are a wealth of available workarounds when you control everything about the device's hardware and software and almost everything about the network environments it'll be operating in. Fixing all the tricky, subtle software bugs is not necessary.
For a community full of engineers, I'm always surprised that people always take absolutionist views on minor technical decisions, rather than thinking of the tradeoffs made that got there.
The obvious trade off here is engineering effort vs. development cost, and when the tech support solution is "have you tried turning it off, then on again?" We know which path was chosen
You can't just throw RAM at embedded devices that you make millions of and have extremely thin margins on. Have you bothered to look at the price of RAM today? At high numbers and low margins you can barely afford to throw capacitors at them, let alone precious rare expensive RAM.
No, XFinity are the ones who decided their routers “““need””” to have unwanted RAM-hungry extra functionality beyond just serving their residential customers' needs. Their routers participate in an entire access-sharing system so they can greedily double-dip by reselling access to your own connection that you already pay them for:
We're talking about devices where the retail price is approximately one month of revenue from one customer, and that's if there isn't an extra fee specifically for the equipment rental. Yes, consumer electronics tend to have very thin margins, but residential ISPs are playing a very different game.
> hopped on a plane for SKO in LAX. United delayed the plane departure by 2 hours (of course) and diverted the flight to Honolulu.
I'm assuming there's a typo here, because I can't imagine a flight from LAX to SKO at all, let alone one that goes anywhere close to Honolulu. But I can't figure out what this was supposed to be.
> Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
This is a common misconception, but it's actually not true. The reality is even more bizarre.
Most of Heroku's successful years came after the acquisition, not before. Heroku was acquired extremely early in its lifecycle, and Salesforce does actually bear responsibility for investing in it and making it the powerhouse it became. Most of what people remember as the glory days of Heroku came long after the acquisition. And in fact, at the time of acquisiton, Heroku was nowhere near as competitive as a product as it later became.
It was only much later on that Salesforce began to pull the supports out from underneath it, leaving it to fall behind and become what it is today.
The narrative of "BigCo™ acquires startup, then leaves it to wither and die" is a trope because it is very commonly true, but it's actually not what happened in this particular case.
> In the unlikely, for San Francisco, event that the day is too hot, less-urgent tasks can be delayed, or some of the racks can have their clock rate reduced, disks put into sleep mode, or even be powered down. Redundancy means that the data will be available elsewhere.
So it sounds like they have data in other locations as well, hopefully.
There's a mention on Wikipedia [1] that the Internet Archive maintains international mirror sites in Egypt and the Netherlands, in addition to several domestic sites within North America.
During the recent power outages in San Francisco, the site repeatedly went down. When a troubled individual set the power pole on fire outside their building, the site went down. Happy to give them the benefit of the doubt on data redundancy, but they publicly celebrate that Brewster himself has to bike down and flip switches to get the site back online. They don't even have employee redundancy.
> The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history,
Quite the opposite. The modern concept of "border sovereignty" as intertwined with the nation-state is a Westphalian construction. (Students of world history will recognize why this timing is not a coincidence). And even then, they didn't exactly catch on immediately.
Sovereign nation-states are a tiny piece of human history. They're not even the majority of recorded human history.
> And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
I can't stand keyboards that do this - especially those that don't let you turn it off. If you write in another language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, you end up with nonsense suggestions - common English words like "the" or "and" will get replaced with obscure words in another language that just happen to sound vaguely phonetically similar. I almost never switch languages mid-sentence when typing, and yet the keyboard can't seem to grasp that.
That example is not analogous to the topic at hand.
But furthermore, it also is specific to French/European copyright law. In the US, the US Copyright Act would not permit restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces.
reply