I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.

I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(

I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently

Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621

Is our entire information “ecosystem” so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they’ve already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!

OK, that’s about the elaboration I was looking for…

Somehow I don’t think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn’t explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.

Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.

In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.

What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?

That’s not very similar to how AI typically writes, at all.

because civil liberties don’t fit neatly into a left-right spectrum, despite being a lot more important than the economic policies that the left-right spectrum aims to describe, which is why I think the left-right spectrum is mostly useless

Yes, and it also says LIBE, which is the committee, not plenary, where this was recently voted on. It’s clearly not enough members for a plenary vote, this post is misinformation as titled.

“Fediverse content” is absolutely indexed by Google, like everything else on the public web. Why would Google choose to ignore it just because it is from the fediverse?

But it usually doesn’t show up very prominently, and which instances’ copies do show up can be completely unpredictable. Probably the search built into fediverse software is more useful if you want to specifically search here.

not really, every Lemmy instance has an owner…

What federation is is that every Lemmy instance gets some of its data not just from its users, but also from other Lemmy instances. You can think of each Lemmy instance as one mini-reddit, in principle there is no difference between reddit and one single Lemmy instance. Federation means that Lemmy instances copy their data from/to each other so that you can talk to users who use other ones too.

It used to be that similar (and equally bad) ideas were getting traction because of copyright law, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act

Now other excuses for the same thing have been invented. I wonder which will be next.

You can name them with a string that helps you identify them while you’re editing, then only when you’re finished run search and replace to replace those names with numbers.

Or I guess you could write it in MediaWiki which does exactly this automatically with its references feature. 😁

This debate is about as old as the existence of free licenses. I doubt anyone will have anything new to say in this thread.

One aspect that isn’t raised very much is that for a company to maintain software (including their own fork of any software however licensed) costs developer time (= money). It may be cheaper to contribute back anyway, no matter the license, just in order to outsource that effort. If we are talking about software where this is true, companies have an incentive to work with the existing maintainers even if they aren’t legally obliged to.

The thing about PDF is that the whole point of PDF is that it shouldn’t be easy to edit. So you’re asking for hacks around something that isn’t supposed to be easily possible.

It’s possible to import PDFs into Inkscape. But my experience is that the result is usually not very easily editable (probably depends on the PDF) because it puts everything into very complex groups and other structures.

What if I’m running an email client in the terminal? ;)

I myself prefer dark mode for everything. But if somebody prefers a bright background, why would they not in the terminal too?

It makes sense to use the same setting for this, at least by default, as for dark and light mode in general. Why would you want your terminal dark but your email client bright?

It’s harder to delete things here than on non-federated services because everything you do here gets copied to lots of other servers, which are supposed to delete things when you do, but it’s impossible to guarantee that they always will (on purpose or by mistake).

I once deleted a comment here almost immediately after saving it, but then still got multiple upvotes for it. I found out that this was because one big instance hadn’t deleted it for whatever reason and its users had no idea that I’d meant to delete it.

Technically the truth.

Yes, it’s working.