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joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'm not in favor of wishing death upon anyone. I find it all rather distasteful, but Bobby Vylans views seem in line with US death penalty practices, don't they? Death to those who commit the terriblest of crimes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

Nor should you, no one does. And you're not alone with this question, seeing the upvotes. So it presumably helped others.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Refugees are a group of people that's very heterogenous. They don't have one common way of treating Denmark. Except for the 'asking Denmark for asylum' of course.

Denmark does treat refugees a certain way, if by Denmark we mean their government, and not Danes in general. The government has certain policies which define their treatment. Basically they're trying to win the race to the bottom: 'treating them worse than other countries do', hoping refugees will go to other countries instead. It's a shortsighted tactic because now we here in the Netherlands as well as in other countries, are joining the race to the bottom. Which means collectively we are losing our humanity, while still largely getting equal amounts of refugees at our borders. Unless of course you're willing treat people so poorly, that even a warzone is more acceptable. But what in the world are we defending if we are willing to lose all human decency over it?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago

It also would still allow parodies and satire, so some of the standard doctrine of fair use would still apply.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court

I'm against the notion that ideas can be stolen. I mean, you can keep an idea to yourself, choose not to share it, but if you share your ideas in whatever shape or form, it's there for others to do with as they please. Or atleast, despite that not being the case, in my opinion, that's how it should be. You can of course disagree, but in my view the idea that the first one to come up with an idea, can plant a flag on it and then own this idea, is not helpful. Rather it is limiting, it is holding us back. I think humanity as a whole functions better if we can use eachothers ideas as we please. Humanity functions by copying eachothers behavior and ideas and occasionally improving on them. Like with FOSS, if an idea is improperly executed or can be improved upon, even if just according to some, it is helpful, that the idea can be forked.

Like I said, I prefer to focus on patent law first, rather than copyright law. But fundamentally I think there is no difference.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

Yes, Intellectual Property must go down. People often think positively of copyright, thinking that no one would support artists if they weren't forced to, and that artists couldn't possibly make a living if it weren't for copyright. I think we are rich enough that if we were to share it properly we could give everyone, not just the talented, time and resources to create art. And I think the talented would still gain advantages by being talented, people want to support artists that mean a lot to them. But to be fair, limiting or removing copyright is not only not that popular of an idea, it's also the least of our worries, cause it mostly concerns entertainment purposes.

Patent laws is where we need to act. To give a clear example: patent laws mean that excessive amounts of money goes to pharmaceutical companies, This is always defended by saying that they in turn will invest this money into research. The problem is

  • They spend far more money on marketing than on R&D, which effectively means that you're often not getting the best medicine, it means your getting the best marketed medicine.

  • When money does go to R&D, the research that's being done, is limited to that which benefits the pharmaceutical company. This is an unacceptable limitation. For example it is not in the interest of pharmaceutical companies to to cure disease, it's far more commercially attractive to make it a manageable chronic disease, where you rely on medication for the rest of your life.

  • Companies will not share their knowledge. For a company these are trade-secrets that could benefit their competition and if you have to compete obviously sharing knowledge is not in your best interest. But if you want to help humanity forward, obviously you should.

  • Drug prices are often excessively high, in part because of the previously mentioned marketing costs that you pay for.

Neither of these problems would exist if R&D was funded by governments and charity. And the pharmaceutical is just one industry that's taken as an example. The way that intellectual property is holding humanity back can not be overstated. Basically we need to go free and open source on IP,

[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I feel like there is momentum in Europe to switch to FOSS. Europe knows that the US cannot be trusted any longer. And this cannot be undone. Europe is striving for independence. Huge amounts of money are being spent on military sovereignty right now. All of us here on Lemmy know digital sovereignty is equally important. Recently an ICC prosecutor was cut off from his MS account because the US doesn't like the Netanyahu arrest-warrant. These things don't go unnoticed. It shows that technological dependance is not innocent, it can and will be used against us.

We need to use this momentum. Get involved, mail your representatives (municipal, provincial, national, federal), get petitions running, mail newspapers, go to political party conventions and get this on the agenda. It won't fix itself. This problem is somewhat abstract and the solutions are just slightly too complicated for the general public. Most people don't know what FOSS means. If we want this to change, those who see it and understand what needs to be done, need to get in to action.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

If we were to rank people on the basis of how far they are on the path towards enlightenment, without a doubt Jeff Bezos would have all the world in front of him.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

alright we're talking about boomers then. I looked beyond boomers as well.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Aside from the pricking scandal, what a fantastic idea.

On "Fête de la Musique" people are urged to play music outside.

Here my country is stuck with Christian holidays that noone remembers the meaning of.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The US & UK supported the 1953 coup d'état to secure their oil interest. "Economically, American firms gained considerable control over Iranian oil production, with US companies taking around 40 percent of the profits" The Islamic Revolution is a response to this. If the west wasn't as imperalist, who knows what could've become of Iran.

But to be honest, there's no way western forces will take over control in Iran. Though it's at a technological disadvantage, their military is huge, as well as their population of more than 90 million. Then there's Pakistan that has threatened to get involved if the US does. Then there's Irans proxies, though they're in a relatively weakened state for the moment. But Iran has allied millitias all across the region. Then there's China depending on the Iranian oil. I mean, if you want to force your way into World War 3 this seems like a brilliant idea.

 

The world should wake up from tech dependence. Let the EU massively invest in FOSS.

Edit: as raised by comments, my title was not incorrect but did omit that it's actually the US that imposed sanctions, to which MS chose to comply. Changed the title.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Just here to shed some light on BookWyrm, the Fediverse equivalent of Goodreads. I've been doing some more reading lately, and I like to keep track of what I read and also I like reading other's review, suggestions, etc. Now I boycot amazon and others big tech as much as possible, so for me Bookwyrm is the place to be. It's steadily growing I think, but I thought it deserved some more attention, therefor this post. Same goes for BookBrainz and to a lesser extend IA's Openlibrary. OpenLibrary is, among other things, a place where people catalogue book-metadata, and if a book is not on Bookwyrm yet, it can often be imported from OpenLibrary. Problem with OpenLibrary is that the data is often messy and there are a lot of duplicates. That's where BookBrainz comes in, the book-equivalent of MusicBrainz. They're not that big yet, but what they do very well is that they have got very clean data. I feel like BookBrainz has the potential to be the perfect source of data on books, for other apps to use as they please, similar to how MusicBrainz is already functioning. It just needs more contributors, but I'm sure it's steadily growing. I just started doing my part, adding the books I read on all three.

Would love to hear thoughts on these platforms, as well as other platform suggestion if you've got any.

Edit: changed Bookwyrm.social to BookWyrm, since people should pick an instance themselves.

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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Allow me to spread the word about ListenBrainz, the occasion being that ListenBrainz now stores over 1 billion entries of listening data from it's users. ListenBrainz is a FOSS project that aims to crowdsource listening data and release it under an open license. Basically it’s Last.fm but better.

Whatever you use to listen to music, you can probably link it up with ListenBrainz. For instance you can connect Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Last.fm. You can link it up with loads of music players. If you’ve kept track of your what music you’ve listened to up to this point, don’t worry, there are several ways to import them into ListenBrainz.

All ListenBrainz listening data is available for all to use. This means that we don't need to rely on big companies like Spotify for recommendation algorithms. We can use whatever algorithm suits us best. All sorts of other services could be build to make use of the ListenBrainz data set. The dataset can also help analyze other services' algorithms, for instance the Fair MusE project uses LB-data and LB-users to investigate the fairness of different music service algorithms.

Obviously ListenBrainz initially suffered from being a comparatively small service, For good recommendations you need loads of data. But it's growing every day and I feel like the 1 billion listens is an impressive milestone. And ListenBrainz has the advantage of having listening data from several services, Spotify could never recommend you music that's not on Spotify. ListenBrainz, because it's open, doesn't have such inherent blindspots.

I am not working for ListenBrainz in any way, I just really like this project as well as MusicBrainz, and I like to spread the word. I think the aims of the ListenBrainz probably align with some Fediverse-folks. If you don't care about the service itself, you could still link up to support FOSS music services, not only LB itself, but other services that are, can and will be built using LB's data. If you use another service to store your own listening data, for instance Last.fm, you could use ListenBrainz as a backup for you data in case the other sevice ever enshittifies. Note: you shouldn't sign up if you want your listening data to be private, that's not what LB is for. I care very much about privacy, but in the case of LB I consciously choose to share my music listening data with others for my own benefit.

Curious to hear peoples thought on all this.

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