It's really cool what can be done today with just an MCU that has sufficiently flexible IO. What's the performance like?

I'm not too concerned about my place of residence, since the state already publishes my full address online. But OSM edit history also shows the various places you visit, with timestamps too. I still haven't decided if I want to do something about that or not. It's certainly something new contributors should be aware of.

If you're making a commercial SaaS, that's probably the way to go. For individual users like me, with a coding harness and some extra BYOK tools, OpenRouter is convenient and the few extra percent don't hurt much. I appreciate being able to try out any new model with just an ID swap, same with inference providers when they prices change. I know I wouldn't enjoy managing 5+ accounts, each with their own balance, in 3+ tools, so this is one thing I'm happy to outsource.

I have multiple commercial products using multiple LLM APIs. My concern is adding an extra 3rd party dependency and markup on top of the API usage. It just freaks me out to build entire apps on 3rd party single-point dependency.

> You're free to buy or not buy any creative work.

You also don't have to rent/buy a place to live, but I wouldn't want to live a life without a roof over my head or access to creative works of my culture. When you accept that access to media is a necessity (and people today do treat it as such, just try finding someone who doesn't listen to music, watch videos, read books...), you clearly see that having copyright is a decision made by the state that results in wealth transfer from every citizen to authors and publishers.

Those authors/publishers do provide value, so it's not necessarily a bad thing, but as with every market intervention, the specifics need to be carefully considered.

You could establish contracts with publishers outside of copyright, which is how NDAs work today. It's probably a reasonable thing to do anyway, otherwise there's nothing stopping a publisher from telling everyone the plot summary of your newest novel.

By the same argument, wouldn't all the things you don't like about copyright - like restrictions with what you can do with the thing you have bought - just be put directly into the purchase agreement.

Isn't the way to focus on creating consumer protection rights, rather than just leaving it to people with the best legal department and deepest pockets to control the rules?

From my understanding what's keeping us from this kind of dystopia are restrictions on shrinkwrap agreements, general restrictions on one-sided contracts, and the fact that breach of contract "only" creates civil and not criminal (like copyright) liability.

Good point.

As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular, yet people still buy books. We could assume that it's not because they fear breaking the law, but because they want to support the author and have an "authentic" copy.

There are also other models than creating a work without any income, then recouping that cost by a state-granted monopoly. You can release preview chapters and then solicit donations from interested readers. You can build on your reputation and then promise to finish the book later for some up-front payment. These might not work for everyone, but they are in wide use today. One could argue that removing options for those authors that depend on copyright today is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.

> As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular,

That's an argument for no laws at all.

There are murders so why make it illegal.....

The point is that having laws is sufficient to create the space for a workable business model by limiting piracy.

I take your point there are other models - such as subscription - however not everyone is Charles Dickens and can turn out chapter by chapter on demand, and it those don't work for every genre.

> is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.

Is is? Does it really matter I can't copy Disney films or books? Are we so lacking in creativity that it's not possible to create novel stories or characters?

I think too often IP and copyright are confused. If somebody had the rights to the wheel in perpetuity that's bad for innovation, but somebody having the rights to a cartoon mouse in perpetuity isn't actually holding society back is it?

> There are murders so why make it illegal.....

The downsides of murder clearly outweigh the upsides. The fact that we're debating here shows that's not the case for copyright.

> ...somebody having the rights to a cartoon mouse in perpetuity isn't actually holding society back is it?

People want to adapt that mouse into their own works, as they have done with stories since stories started being told. They do so even if they know they're breaking the law. That alone should be reason to reconsider copyright.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and reusing facets of modern stories isn't somehow less creative than reusing old stories or reusing lived experiences. You can take the general story beats of a popular work, strip out all copyrightable elements, and end up with something wholly derivative. You can also build on a known work and end up with something that's fresh, creative, maybe something that engages readers/watchers/listeners of the base work in a way that nothing fully original could. Take Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; it clearly reuses another work's characters and setting, but it would be worse off without it.

Your Harry Potter case is a good illustration.

The world Harry Potter universe clearly borrows heavily on past literature - whether that be tales of goblins and wizards or tales of boarding school.

So much so ( and the fact that she is very rich ) she has been sued multiple times for plagiarism - all of them failed.

Is it really beyond the wit of man to come up with something similarly new?

In terms of fan fiction - is it ok to do one, and promote it on the internet, that has incest themes or paedophilia? These potentially reflect back on the original - and surely the creator should have control here.

There is always the option of coming to an agreement with the original author - that's how films get made - but frankly there is an almost infinite creative space - I don't see why people's lack of creativity needs to be promoted above the rights of an existing creator.`

Note in the example you quote - JK Rowling has allowed the non-commercial publishing of that and other fan fiction - just blocked independent commercial exploitation. So in the case you made the existence of copyright didn't stop Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Most of that art is being created irrespective of copyright, though. Much of it uses exceptions to copyright and some is straight up in violation (most "fan art"/fanfiction). It's either not monetised or monetised through things like Patreon.

I wouldn't say we have more "traditional" art that an author spends time creating with the vision of selling copies for years to come, than we did when copyright terms were shorter.

I doubt that's true.

Is there a lot of fan art, yes, there's also massive amounts of original works as well. There is no lack of either.

I don't have any numbers on fan art vs original works floating around the web, but even those original works aren't being monetised via copyright. They would be created even if copyright was abolished or significantly weakened.

I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars here in the Czech Republic, so "blood free" actually seems like a good characterisation. Sometimes the system just works.

See also the Velvet Revolution for a pretty large shift away from totalitarianism without any deaths.

I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars inside my house either, but they're respected here. That's strange isn't it?

It is strange. I certainly wouldn't think your house, having been isolated from western society over decades by a communist regime and heavily-patrolled borders, would respond to social activism in foreign countries. But maybe there's just some secret house mycelium for sharing progressive ideas that I don't know about.

It's very clear you do not have a grasp of Marxism or Communism. You'd know that the worker class is only one.

Theoretical aphorisms can't override the facts of recorded history. If the harsh border control and cultural isolation of the East Bloc ran counter to Marxist principles, then you can complain to the dead leaders of the USSR, but that's about it.

Check the history of the different communist movements. Maybe an entrypoint would be this: today there is the Fourth International. The USSR was born out of the Third International with Lenin, and the Fourth International opposed/opposes the USSR's practices and because of that the USSR hunted them down using their agents whom eventually killed Trotski.

Not always. Consider an SPA that connects via WebSockets and streams in data, adding points to a chart. The JS-less alternative would be refreshing an SVG or even the whole page once a second. The SPA is clearly more efficient here (unless someone screws it up badly).

I wouldn't consider that an SPA at all, it's just a page with an interactive element. An SPA is something that renders everything client-side and uses a generic client API to talk to the backend. A telltale sign of an SPA is that the first thing you see when you open it is some sort of loading indicator instead of the actual page you're visiting.

No, the telltale sign of a SPA is that it’s an app that’s a single fucking page, lol

Please stop changing the definitions of explicit words and phrases - to anyone reading this!

Right but the implication of a SPA is that it’s an application which has many logical pages, but only one real page. The logical pages are constructed by dynamically updating the DOM using JavaScript. As opposed to navigating to a new, server-provided page.

For example, a search function. For a MPA, each search query would be a new page. For a SPA, each query is a new logical page, served on the same real page.

Technically yes, a SPA may have minimal client side rendering. But then it’s not doing much of anything at all - it’s just a site. When people say SPA, they typically mean an application with client side rendering.

> it’s just a site

sigh

…does someone else want to finish this up?

This reply means basically nothing to me or anyone.

To expand on what I mean, if the implication isn’t obvious: a SPA with no client side rendering is just a single HTML page. It’s a document, not an application.

So SPA naturally implies client side rendering.

The difference between a SPA and MPA isn’t the amount of pages, they both have about the same amount of logic pages. It’s about where those pages are rendered. Dynamically on the front end, or on the back end.

EDIT: okay okay to expand, my website has a contact form. With JS enabled, the form submit displays a little box that says “thank you for submitting”. With JS disabled, it navigates you to a “thank you for submitting” page.

Both are the same logic page, they have the same function. One page is just rendered client side, and one server side. Most websites or applications are hybrids. There’s very few true single page applications, and very few true multi page applications. Most SPAs have multiple real pages for different things. Most MPAs combine multiple logic pages into one real page.

Single HTML files / pages can be fully-featured, full-purpose-fulfilling applications.

> Most websites or applications are hybrids.

and some are emphatically not.

But…where were you going with that?

The features of HTML are still greatly limited. You can’t really create applications with just one HTML page and no client-side rendering. You can play a video, sure, but that’s not an application. You can also do magic with CSS but that’s an experimental fun thing, not a thing people actually do.

As soon as you, say, use JS to update the DOM or a canvas, I consider that client-side rendering. That you can do, and that would be a SPA.

But I’m curious, what are some examples, even hypothetical, of applications consisting of one HTML page? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.

You can inline the following in one HTML page:

CSS (.css) JavaScript (.js) Plain Text (.txt) HTML (.html) SVG (.svg) Raster Images (.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .webp, .bmp) Audio (.mp3, .wav, .ogg) Video (.mp4, .webm) JSON (.json) PDF (.pdf)

plus bring in other source resources as needed.

To answer your question:

The installer for GrapheneOS / Google Pixel phones is an “SPA” (or “webapp”).

I’ve seen bespoke fitness trackers of all kinds,

appliance control apps,

budget and pace-tracking stuff,

basically all of what computer programs used to do - before we started dynamically loading a ton of extra stuff onto the screen that nobody needed to do the task they came to do.

Right, but if you’re dynamically changing the HTML from JS, like the graphemeos website does, then that’s client-side rendering, which is my whole argument. Embedding the JS in HTML makes zero difference, it’s the same thing.

So, they are truly inseparable IMO. You can’t have a SPA without some amount of client side rendering, your example demonstrates that. So, what makes a SPA a SPA is the rendering. A SPA is “single page”, but only in literal meaning. Logically, every SPA is many pages, you just render them purely client-side.

Almost every major website you interact with daily relies heavily on client-side execution to some degree.

and none of this seems to have anything to do with the frontend being a single page.

By that definition, Smithereen, my fediverse server software, is also an SPA, since it does what I call "ajax navigation" on desktop, so that the notifications websocket doesn't get disconnected and reconnected every time you click a link. It's technically a single page that gets most of its content replaced at runtime when you click a link, after all, right?

Yes.

Could you point out where you think the gotcha is? I can taste the tone.

Just because a bunch of engineers applied implicit meaning that didn’t exist to a very literal phrase for a few years doesn’t make it correct.

Doesn’t make webapps inherently bad.

Doesn’t make SPAs bad.

Sadly complexity is unavoidable for most real-world usecases. Just see how so many people interested in de-Googled phones balk at the prospect of losing access to banking apps. Telling them to go use an OS that doesn't support Bluetooth isn't going to work, but hopefully you wouldn't say that means they should give up all hope of security.

Abstraction has served us well in managing complexity before. I wouldn't abandon it out of misplaced idealism.