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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Good point!

    If OP is hourly, those 3 hours should be billed as work - probably under a generic HR-related category if one is available.

    If OP is salaried exempt, then this would fall under “doing any work at all” (all that’s needed to be paid for the day) and if sick time is tracked by day and not by hour, then OP doesn’t need to use one. If it’s tracked hourly then OP should make sure to only use 5 sick hours (or less, depending on how long the work-related conversations took) and depending on employer policies may not need to use any sick time at all.

    This also cut into the time OP could have been using to rest. It would be very reasonable for OP to need an extra day to recover, as a result.



  • Generally, usage of the term “gentrification” refers to the improvement of neighborhoods - or other places where people live, like apartment complexes - and, due to increased cost of living, the displacement of the people who used to live there. Displacement of less wealthy current residents when gentrification occurs is so common that it’s implied. If it weren’t, people wouldn’t have such low opinions of gentrification.

    If a forest has been gentrified, therefore, then - if you interpret “gentrified” in the same way - it follows that people who have been living there have been displaced. And since those people were living in a forest - not in a cabin in a forest - they’re necessarily homeless. Since OP didn’t say that they were building houses or apartments in the forest, that would mean that the wealthier people who displaced them were also homeless.

    Since the context was another commenter calling “gentrified forest” a cursed phrase, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that.




  • Further, “Whether another user actually downloaded the content that Meta made available” through torrenting “is irrelevant,” the authors alleged. “Meta ‘reproduced’ the works as soon as it made them available to other peers.”

    Is there existing case law for what making something “available” means? If I say “Alright, I’ll send you this book if you want, just ask,” have I made it available? What if, when someone asks, I don’t actually send them anything?

    I’m thinking outside of contexts of piracy and torrenting, to be clear - like if a software license requires you to make any changed versions available to anyone who uses the software. Can you say it’s available if your distribution platform is configured to prevent downloads?

    If not, then why would it be any different when torrenting?

    Meta ‘reproduced’ the works as soon as it made them available to other peers.

    The argument that a copyrighted work has been reproduced when “made available,” when “made available” has such a low bar is also perplexing. If I post an ad on Craigslist for the sale of the Mona Lisa, have I reproduced it?

    What if it was for a car?

    I’m selling a brand new 2026 Alfa Romeo 4E, DM me your offers. I’ve now “reproduced” a car - come at me, MPAA.




  • Ah, I assumed there were some areas where Firefox had been found lacking relative to Chromium browsers.

    For me, the current version of any major browser or fork with consistently applied security updates and capability of running the full version of Ublock Origin is sufficiently secure for my threat model. Given that, and that they all offer the feature set I want, wouldn’t it be reasonable to avoid Chromium browsers because I don’t want to encourage the Chromium monopoly?

    That’s only a small fraction of why I use Firefox, to be fair, but suppose for argument’s sake that I don’t care about MV3 extensions, Firefox Containers, etc… Would be it be so wrong for not wanting there to be a Chromium monopoly to be why I chose Firefox or one of its forks?




  • Sure, but the license is limited to uses that “help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”

    Not sure how ads would help with that.

    AI? Sure, if an AI solution did those things. But it wouldn’t be them training on your data. This would be them using your data in AI-powered services, whether that be search (especially relevant if Google is mandated to stop paying them to default to Google); automatic categorization of your web browsing to make Containers more streamlined and effective; or even just having a completely opt-in AI assistant chatbot that can access data entered elsewhere in Firefox once you activate it.

    Worst case I suspect whatever they add will be things you can simply turn off in settings. Ideally it would be opt-in, of course, or at least prompted-opt-out and disabled until first use.

    And there are plenty of things that aren’t ad or AI-related that this could apply to. Heck, this could be part of a step to consolidate licenses for other products - VPN, Pocket, email anonymizers, etc. - and to enable deeper integration of those into Firefox.



  • From the feature comparison at https://github.com/meichthys/foss_note_apps only two FOSS apps support handwriting: Joplin (with a plugin) which gets a subjective 6/10 score, and TriliumNext, which gets a subjective 2/10 score. I personally dislike Joplin but many people love it, so I recommend giving it a shot. EDIT: I installed Joplin using the APK from the site and both the handwriting and Excalidraw plugins were “not available on mobile,” so I have to rescind my recommendation. On my iOS device, the plugins didn’t even show up in the search.

    I think TriliumNext is great, but the mobile experience is still lacking (though they are tracking several issues to improve here). There’s no dedicated mobile app but they at least have a PWA. It also needs to be self-hosted, but doing so is straightforward if you’re already using Docker. The handwriting is done via a built-in Excalidraw integration.

    Here are some options not captured in that list:

    Obsidian is not open source, but also has an Excalidraw plugin. I’ve not used it yet but I’ve seen multiple discussions saying that it’s very well done and has additional functionality on top of base Excalidraw. There’s also an open source (MIT) plugin for Obsidian that adds support for handwritten notes. I only use Obsidian on my work computer and haven’t used it either, though I plan to install the Excalidraw plugin Monday.

    StylusLabs Write is FOSS (AGPL 3.0), multiplatform, and has a free Android apk available. Note that the Google Play version has had updates suspended. I just learned about it and don’t know how it otherwise measures up. I’m planning to check it out, though.

    You can use any note app that has Excalidraw support, so long as you don’t need your handwritten text to be OCRed. That means that the following are all options:



  • A paid skillful engineer, who doesn’t think it’s important to make that sort of a change and who knows how the system works, will know that, if success is judged solely by “does it work?” then the effort is doomed for failure. Such an engineer will push to have the requirements written clearly and explicitly - “how does it function?” rather than “what are the results?” - which means that unless the person writing the requirements actually understands the solution, said solution will end up having its requirements written such that even if it’s defeated instantly, it will count as a success. It met the specifications, after all.