Yeah, I suppose I should clarify - that was in response to the objection to paying for pirated content; it’s different from the service provider’s point of view, but from the end user’s point of view, they’re paying for pirated content either way.

This doesn’t seem that different from paying for usenet. It’s not like they’re making DVDs of pirated movies and selling them on the street corner; they were basically just aggregating content and the service they were providing was making it easily searchable and accessible, not doing the actual pirating, from the sound of it, unless I’m misunderstanding the situation.

I wish I could show my country next to my username or something lol.

You could use a vanity username with a flag emoji in it, if you really wanted to.

They claimed that the FTC never alerted them to any wrongdoing before filing the lawsuit, so how could they have known they were violating the law?

“The police never informed me I was doing anything illegal before arresting me, so how could I possibly have known?”

Ignorance of the law isn’t a defense against breaking it in any other sector…

Assuming you’re making the change in your browser’s default search settings, and not editing the URL every time you do a search, it takes a minute or two once, and it’s done forever. No harder than adding an adblock rule and it also removes a lot of other bullshit, too (since it’s just defaulting you to a ‘web only’ search).

Documentaries often include recreations of events, such as historical events that weren’t filmed. It’s usually noted as being a recreation or re-enactment. If AI-created images are used instead and are noted as being such, I don’t really see the problem, assuming the images are curated to depict the scene accurately.

While that could be a worthy topic of discussion, these scenarios can be immediately addressed using a DMCA counter-notice. BPC’s creator can simply file one with GitLab and in less than two weeks’ time, the platform would have to restore it, if whoever sent the original notice didn’t sue the developer in the United States.

Who is the author of this piece suggesting pays for that potential lawsuit? Like, it’s great to say “Oh, they can totally fight this, and they’re probably in the right to do so”, but companies weaponizing the legal system is basically trivial for them to do, and unless they’re offering to help foot that bill, they’re putting all the risk on the developer which isn’t really fair.

Did you even read the article we’re discussing, or are you just reading the comments and getting mad?

1. No decision has been made. This is simply a judge denying the companies’ motion to have this thrown out before going to trial.
2. This is very much different than “the gun market” being indirectly responsible. This is the equivalent of “the gun market” constantly sending a person pamphlets, calling them, emailing them, whatever else, with propaganda until they ultimately decided to act on it. If that was happening, I think we’d be having the same conversation about that, and whether they should be held accountable.
3. Whether they’re actually responsible or not (or whether any group is) can be determined in court following all the usual methods. A company getting to say “That’s ridiculous, we’re above scrutiny” is dangerous, and that’s effectively what they were trying to do (which was denied by this judge.)

If we remove that it become: funnelling a market towards the further consumption of your product. I.e. marketing

And if a company’s marketing campaign is found to be indirectly responsible for a kid shooting up a grocery store, I’m sure we’ll be seeing a repeat of this with that company being the one with a court case being brought against them, what even is this argument?

Ohh u didnt report someone ur also guilty cant see any problems with this.

That’s… not what this is about, though?

“However, plaintiffs contend the defendants’ platforms are more than just message boards,” the court document says. “They allege they are sophisticated products designed to be addictive to young users and they specifically directed Gendron to further platforms or postings that indoctrinated him with ‘white replacement theory’,” the decision read.

This isn’t about mandated reporting, it’s about funneling impressionable people towards extremist content.

I wonder if this could also be applied to games owned in whole or part by Tencent…

Okay so I’m just going to open myself up to ridicule here; my understanding of comparing numbers using orders of magnitude might be wrong, and if it is, I would like to know that. So on that note, I don’t think that’s how OOM comparisons work, and I’d be very interested to be corrected if I’m wrong.

You could accurately say that 2.1B has 2 more orders of magnitude than 73M does (7 vs. 9), but I believe when you’re directly comparing two numbers and saying that one is “x orders of magnitude larger than y”, that doesn’t work. You wouldn’t say that 10 is an order of magnitude larger than 9… that would be very misleading; 90 is an order of magnitude larger than 9. In fact, that claim would be off by… approximately an order of magnitude.

1 order of magnitude larger than 73M is 730M; 2 orders of magnitude larger is 7.3B, as you note, but… wouldn’t you look upward to say a number is in the same order of magnitude, not lower? So since 2.1B is approximately 29x larger than 73M, it would be 1 OOM larger (and only becomes 2 OOM larger at 100x)?

To look at it another way:

73M x 10^1 is a lot closer to the correct value than 73M x 10^2, so even if the correct method is to round to the nearest OOM, it wouldn’t beecome 2 OOM larger until 73M x 50, or 3.650B.

Again, it’s quite possible that my understanding is incorrect because… this doesn’t come up in every day conversation much, so if I’m wrong, please correct me!

But it also refers to “a staggering 73 million daily active users”, which I wouldn’t really say is a staggering number in $current_year when other social networks have orders of magnitude more.

Well, there’s definitely no social network with “orders of magnitude more”… Even if that’s only 2 orders of magnitude, that’s almost the entire population of the world.

So this made me curious and best I can find there seem to be only a few social media platforms that even have 1 order of magnitude more:

• Facebook, with 2.1 billion DAU as of Q4 2023

• Youtube, which has 2.7 billion monthly active users (I’m speculating that it has at least 730 million DAU based on that number)

• WhatsApp (which wikipedia notes has 2 billion MAU and had 1 billion DAU when it had 1.3 billion MAU, so presumably it’s around 1.5 billion DAU now)

DAU is a pretty rare statistic to find reported on, so it’s hard to say if there are others.

There used to be a search engine called Dogpile that would aggregate results from a bunch of other search engines (so you’d see like, the top 5 or 10 results from each of the other engines), which was actually really rad for a long time. (It looks like they’re still around, but are just a shitty normal search engine, now.)

It’d be neat to have something like that again, especially if it excluded sponsored links and highlighted results that were shared in the “top” results from more of the other services (and let you specify which search engines it was aggregating from).