I’d like to see an economist explain the rationale behind the first-sale doctrine applying to IP on physical media but not if it’s not tied to physical media in the US (note that the EU currently does approximate applying it to non-physical media). I have a really hard time seeing a reason for that.

I can believe that the doctrine of first sale shouldn’t be a thing. And I can believe that it should be a thing, and should apply to all forms of media. But applying to one but not the other seems like a pretty hard sell to me.

Physical copies degrade over time, whereas digital information may not. Works in digital format can be reproduced without any flaws and can be disseminated worldwide without much difficulty. Thus, applying the first sale doctrine to digital copies affects the market for the original to a greater degree than transfers of physical copies.

Okay. But…so what? Why do we care whether the market for the original is affected? If that were a factor, wouldn’t we object to the legality of making backups? Wouldn’t we treat more-durable forms of media differently than less-durable forms of media, or take into account the decay in value of the IP itself that lives on the media?

Like, I could understand maybe an argument that permitting a vendor to restrict physical media transfers of IP is economically desirable but simply isn’t enforceable, ergo we’re better off without a lot of halfway attempts to restrain it. But I’ve never seen it explained with that as a rationale.

In most cases, I’d guess that factories don’t need cameras or AI image analysis to track output, because workers aren’t simply putting their output into a single pool with the output of other workers. The factory already has an easy way to know how much output the worker is producing, and, no doubt, has a record of that.

There might be fields of work where that’s not the case, where it’s hard to know what any one worker is actually producing. But I’m dubious that it’s gonna be people doing assembly work in a factory.

There might be more-valuable uses to record and analyze workers in a factory. I remember that in Cheaper by the Dozen, the father works as a motion efficiency consultant — was in the heyday of US doing assembly-line factory work, and he’d go in with a video camera, record workers working, and then break down how workers were working and see if there were different motions that workers could be trained to use to increase output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study

A time and motion study (or time–motion study) is a business efficiency technique combining the time study work of Frederick Winslow Taylor with the motion study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (the same couple as is best known through the biographical 1950 film and book Cheaper by the Dozen). It is a major part of scientific management (Taylorism). After its first introduction, time study developed in the direction of establishing standard times, while motion study evolved into a technique for improving work methods. The two techniques became integrated and refined into a widely accepted method applicable to the improvement and upgrading of work systems. This integrated approach to work system improvement is known as methods engineering[1] and it is applied today to industrial as well as service organizations, including banks, schools and hospitals.[2]

But I’m skeptical that trying to find workers who aren’t producing output in a factory using AI vision stuff is going to be all that useful.

Yeah — if you don’t like laws in a democracy, you have a solution — elect legislators that will create laws that you want. If they can’t get support for it, then you don’t have adequate support in society for rules that work the way you want.

The answer definitely isn’t a police force that acts as an independent arm of government that disregards the law and decides what laws it wants to enforce. You wind up in a situation like that and you definitely will have corruption…from that police force.

You can run it through a heat exchanger. I mean, if there was enough demand, you could do it. Probably are some aftermarket modifications out there to do it. People definitely have done it before.

I can give a handful of plausible reasons why you wouldn’t want to generally do it, though.

• While car engines do produce a lot of waste heat, they normally do so when a car is moving. Your trip length probably isn’t directly tied to the amount of heat you want to cook, or the times you want to cook. And cooking in a moving vehicle is going to either require you to work in sealed containers or deal with sploshing. Like, even in an RV, there’s more to this than just “run heat exchanger off the exhaust, route heat up to oven”.

• You can use a car idling to produce heat, but then you’re burning gasoline, not to mention adding some wear-and-tear to your car’s engine, just to get a portion of what you would by taking a container of white gas and cooking on a camp stove.

• Depending upon where this goes – and it’s probably gotta be pretty near the car – you’re liable to need to deal with grease spatters or whatever. Do you want to deal with bacon grease or whatever on the car?

I mean, if I were going to cook a little bit with energy coming from a car, my first choice would be something like an Instant Pot insulated pressure cooker running off a lithium ion power station charged off a car’s electrical circuits. That contains the food, is energy-efficient at the cooking stage (IIRC, only microwaves are more energy-efficient than an insulated pressure cooker), lets me move away from the car to cook if I’m camping, and lets you use other sources of power (like solar if you’re in some kind of vehicle off-grid or charge via A/C if you’re at the grid, which is cheaper than gasoline). Most of the time you’re gonna be cooking near a car, I suspect you’d also like to have a source of electricity, so your power station serves multiple duties. If you have an electric car that can provide power while it’s off, then you don’t even need the power station, since you’re already hauling one around.

If I wanted to specifically grill, then there are propane (if you’re in Europe, I understand that this is often commercially available as “LPG”) grills.

I think that most “serious” in-vehicle cooking (food trucks, RVs) use propane.

If you want to cook with something akin to gasoline, there’s Coleman camp stoves. The fuel basically amounts to gasoline without gasoline additives that might be an issue for cooking; I thought that this was “white gas”, but according to the WP page, Coleman fuel has some additives aimed at stoves rather than cars that aren’t in white gas. The fuel will cost more than gasoline; it looks like about 4x, checking online.

EDIT: There are also denatured alcohol camp stoves. The US has a huge amount of non-food-grade ethanol production. Last time I looked, it was about 40% of global capacity. This is a subsidy to corn farmers and mostly gets mixed into gasoline, but I’d guess — without actually comparing prices or how the subsidy gets applied — that it probably also means that if you’re in the US, you probably also effectively get subsidized denatured alcohol fuel, since if nothing else you can leverage economy of scale in the production infrastructure.

So, I don’t know exactly what’s happened with instructional languages, but my guess is that they may be trying to use languages that have broader real-world applications, even if they’re somewhat more-complicated. Logo is great in terms of having a low bar to letting you do something fun…but it also doesn’t see a lot of real-world use. I’ve seen some programming games using Javascript, for example.

Not “first programming language” stuff, but on the subject of instructional languages…

Around the mid-late 1990s to early 2000s, it was common for a lot of computer science courses to be taught in C++, since it was a commonly-used “serious” applications language. If you took an intro computer science course, you’d have good odds of doing C++, maybe blending into Java towards the end of that period.

I remember eating dinner with a Stanford University computer science professor once, and he was talking about how he was much happier teaching intro students in Python. The problem was just that C++ has a lot of stuff that’s designed to help programming languages produce performant code or scale up, but which added a huge amount of complexity as an instructional language. With C++, he was spending more time helping students learn the language than the concepts that he was aiming to teach.

Now, okay. C++ (especially C++ in 2025, as it used to be a considerably-simpler language) is a complicated programming language. A lot of that isn’t stuff that the compiler will handle, either, and stuff that the programmer needs to know to avoid screwing up.

• A lot of error-checking happens in type-checking using templates, and at least with the compilers I’ve used – and maybe things have improved – the errors are stupendously-unreadable, where you can get the compiler telling you that half-page-long templated type A is incompatible with half-page-long templated type B, and not trying to reduce the error to just show the differences.

• C and C++ also expose some of the underlying bare metal, and effective debugging means knowing something about the underlying, in-memory representation. It really is a huge bar to overcome to “writing useful software”.

• C++ inherited C’s preprocessor, so you’re actually needing to learn a macro language (which has some odd quirks) as well, and understand that you’re working with two languages.

• C++ has gone through several “paradigms”. Originally, it was “better C”, then more-OO stuff, RAII-structured OO, what looks to me like some kind of stuff with implicit static typing akin to the ML family today. I kind of like C-style OO code using PIMPL. But point is, if you’re trying to learn a language and documentation at various dates has pretty different ways of writing code, that’s another pain to dig through.

You don’t have to know (all) of that to get Hello World working, but it also shows up pretty quickly.

I wasn’t sure that I entirely agreed with the guy, because I think that part of what a lot of people were doing in Python was writing incorrect software that there just wasn’t a strong static type-checking system to catch. I mean, maybe he didn’t care about that in terms of getting across his topics, but I do think that writing rigorously-correct code is a good habit to get into for most fields of software, though it certainly matters more for some than others.

Now, that’s C+±versus-Python. My guess – and I haven’t looked recently – is that neither is probably the “first language of choice” these days in schools. But while I don’t know if I’d agree with the guy as to Python being a great option – I think that Python makes a great language on Unix sitting halfway between shell scripts and C – I think that his broader point holds, that there is a valid point that keeping the bar down to getting something up-and-running is truly valuable for learning.

I kind of wish that someone would take a major modern “real world” applications programming language, something like Go or Rust or something, and then make a stripped-down version to help introduce students to concepts, with the idea that they’d later transition to that “larger” language, but to try and get the barrier down as far as possible from the “sit someone who has no idea what they’re doing” to the “can make interesting output” stage.

Like, what changes would it take to make it pretty easy for a six-year-old to be writing something that is either a subset of Rust or something that can mechanically be transformed into a subset of Rust? What do new learners find confusing? I mean, if you had to ruthlessly cut anything, across-the-board, what would come out?

And OP, sorry, I know that you’re mostly looking for basic computer familiarity, and I’m kind of heading off specifically down programming language learning, but I do think that that’s an interesting issue too.

Can the kid ride a bike yet? Kick a football? Swim?

I love reading now, but when I was 5 I only wanted to look at the pictures in books, not the words.

I was writing code in first grade, which I guess would be 6 or so. And I didn’t have a home computer back then, had to do so on what time I could scrounge up in my limited windows of time of access to other people’s computers or computers at institutions, which raised the bar. Today, computers are cheap and plentiful enough that it’s pretty easy to get ahold of one.

I could definitely write software before I could ride a bicycle. I still don’t know how to kick a football.

It’s definitely doable.

I think that a lot of what we set our expectations around is around when schools choose to teach things. Like, I remember — as an American — being shocked when I discovered how young people in the UK and some other countries started being taught foreign language. In the US, our school system doesn’t really do much by way of foreign language education until…I guess high school? 9th-12th grades, so maybe around 14-17 years old. But in the UK, you can (or used to, dunno if things have changed) take Latin in primary school.

kagis

Yeah, sounds like they made it mandatory recently:

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/school-year/subject-guides/languages-at-primary-school/

The 2014 Primary National Curriculum once again made learning a foreign language compulsory at Key Stage 2 (Years 3 to 6). Schools are free to choose whether to teach an ancient or a modern language; it is much more about language learning skills than the particular language on offer. Your child could therefore learn French, Spanish, Mandarin, German, Arabic or even Latin — the choices are endless! However, once your child begins secondary school the teaching of a modern foreign language is compulsory.

I thought “that seems like an incredibly-advanced topic for a young age”. But…really, that’s just my expectations set by convention here in the US, not that there’s an inability to learn language at a young age (and in fact, there are some strong arguments that learning language is easier the younger you do it).

I almost want to get him something Linux based and turn him loose.

I don’t have a five-year-old, but if I did, I would. Worse he can do is wipe what’s on it. Can just reinstall the OS.

Maybe also hand them a simple programming environment. When I was a kid, starting kids out with Logo was a pretty easy way to go. Pretty sure that current Linux distros have some Logo variant, lets you make pretty pictures. Dunno if that’s still considered an effective route to get kids interested today.

kagis

It looks like, in Debian trixie, there’s kturtle and ucblogo; the latter was written for university students, though. I’ve written code for ucblogo myself some years back, when I wanted to generate organic-looking desktop backgrounds.

For a five-year-old, if it’s a laptop, I’d probably get something relatively-inexpensive (unless you don’t care about the financial aspect). If you can install a Linux distro on it, can probably use any old secondhand laptop, even. Don’t think that the brand matters that much, as long as one can get it up and running.

A point someone made before, though, on a Reddit discussion I was reading talking about how “kids these days can’t use computers any more, just mobile OSes” – kids used to need to learn to use a computer if they wanted to play video games, so they had a major incentive. A lot of games are accessible via mobile OSes today, so that may degrade the appeal. YouTube/TikTok are accessible on both.

I teach him about basic electrical circuits and how that translates to computing, if, and, or, xor, nor, etc. He’s got some familiar with hex (colors) and the concept of binary (on/off).

There’s a genre of programming video games. Steam doesn’t list suggested age ranges, though, so shrugs.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=5432&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

I haven’t played much by way of programming games myself – I mean, I’ve got enough real-world programming stuff that I’d do – so I can’t recommend much personally. Played some Mac-specific Core War knockoff years back. When I got into programming, it was because personal computers shipped with an actual – if simple – programming environment built into it.

Problem is, what you’re talking about is really a child-rearing problem, not a technical problem. I don’t know how one makes engineeringy-stuff appealing relative to non-engineeringy stuff. I didn’t have a smartphone with YouTube and TikTok and a huge library of video games as a kid.

Pets will be told about foods, walks, and treats in a foreign language as to prevent them getting excited about things they love during normal conversations

And this was how TheAlbatross’s Labrador became fluent in Croatian.

Your way is now the right way.

My way was always the right way!

The standard Lemmy Web UI on desktop. Eternity on Android.

who do you recommend I follow?

What I like may not be what you like at all. I mean, depends on your interests.

And I don’t “follow” any of these, watch every thing when it comes out. These are just some YouTubers for whom I’ve had a high proportion of their material wind up being something that I feel is worth watching.

Montemayor

Does military history, mostly naval. Does not put out a lot of videos, but from the ones that I do follow, has really done his research through the written material out there before putting the material out, does a good job of highlighting what’s important.

To a lesser degree, Drachinifel and The Operations Room. They’re also military history, but I don’t feel like they do as much research or highlight the important bits as well. Drachinifel focuses more on surface gun-era naval warfare, and The Operations Room tends to deal with newer stuff.

The Slow Mo Guys. Not exactly deep stuff, but they do one thing: high-quality interesting slow-motion footage. Pretty popular, so you may have heard of them before. I think it might be interesting to have some sort of analogous channel that does videos of microscope stuff, pans around something with a nice microscope.

SmarterEveryDay does, I think, a good job of explaining interesting things in our daily world from an engineering/technical standpoint; guy does a good job of researching his material. You’ll probably walk away from this knowing this that you didn’t.

CGPGrey does stick-figure illustrated things that also highlight interesting stuff, often relating to legal or political or historical stuff.

Perun does defense economics, and has had interesting and informed material on the Russo-Ukrainian War. Michael Kofman, an analyst who focuses on the Russian military, doesn’t have a YouTube channel, but many YouTube channels do interview him, and while he’s kind of dry, I also think that his material on Ukraine is pretty worthwhile – he’s consistently avoided alarmist stuff or cheerleading over the course of the war. Can find material with him via searching for his name.

One of the problems I have with YouTube is a side effect of the fact that it pays content creators. I don’t have any real problem with that per se – I mean, sure, you wanna do work and get paid, that’s fine. The problem is that there’s no real “YouTube of articles”. The result is that a lot of content creators out there are putting stuff in video form that really doesn’t need to be in video form, just because they want some reasonable way to monetize it. The above videos are from people who generally take advantage of the video format (well, Michael Kofman could really do just fine on a podcast and often does, but aside from that). I’ve seen too many YouTube videos – including those being submitted on the Threadiverse – that would really be better as text and possibly image articles.

EDIT: Oh, right. Someone else mentioned Primitive Technology, which I would definitely second. Has a guy go out in the woods with just his shorts and basically manufacture a lot of basic technology from the ground up. Does have subtitles, but no narration or speech. The practical use of what he does is probably limited, but I found it fascinating. I remember that this was very popular for a while on Reddit.

If they have the same home instance…hmm.

Does one account maybe have the NSFW filter on and the other not?

I don’t, but I do have a search engine.

kagis for “myq beep”

https://support.chamberlaingroup.com/s/article/Why-is-the-MyQ-Garage-Wi-Fi-Hub-continually-beeping-1484145690676

Same reason that it’s uncommon for any page to have most of the page covered in ink, regardless of whether it’s a book or a sheaf of papers or whatever. Ink costs something, and it’s cheaper to put ink on a little bit of the page than it is to put ink on everything but a little bit of the page. Unless there’s a compelling reason to do otherwise, you take the cheaper route.

It’s an interesting idea. If their thesis is true, it might cause compression of the income range.

If we wind up in a situation where the EU mandates a form of censorship that the US bans, I assume that the platforms in question would have to separate their EU and US users and sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.

Why would it be ridiculous for EV owners to charge cars away from home or work? l’d say that it’s pretty necessary for long-distance trips.

EDIT:

Long distance power transmission is normally done with aluminum lines, rather than copper.

https://www.anixter.com/en_au/resources/literature/wire-wisdom/copper-vs-aluminum-conductors.html

Aluminum has 61 percent of the conductivity of copper, but has only 30 percent of the weight of copper. That means that a bare wire of aluminum weighs half as much as a bare wire of copper that has the same electrical resistance. Aluminum is generally more inexpensive when compared to copper conductors.

Resistance is a function of the material’s conductivity and the cross-sectional area of a cable. If aluminum has 61% the conductivity of copper, then one needs 1÷0.61=1.63 times the cross-sectional area for an aluminum cable to have the same resistance. That’s a radius 1.63^0.5 = 1.28 times the radius of an equivalent copper cable.

So you only need an aluminum cable with a radius 28% larger to achieve the same overall resistance.

In the case of the EV charging cables, flexibility is at a premium, and increasing the radius decreases that. But my guess is that it’s probably within the range of acceptability to use a bulkier aluminum cable, if need be.

EDIT2: I was also going to suggest liquid-cooled cables, which electric arc furnaces use for their power busses. Apparently Tesla already tried using experimental liquid-cooled cables, a decade back:

https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-cooled-supercharger-wire-experiment-in-mountain-view-but-the-tech-lives-on/

Tesla’s Mountain View Supercharger has always been a little different from the rest.  Not only is it located at the world-famous Computer History Museum – where Tesla sometimes holds events, but until recently, it was also running an experiment utilizing propylene-glycol-cooled supercharging cables…

These cables are thinner and more flexible than the standard Supercharger cables which are about as thick as gas station hoses and sometimes more unwieldy, especially in cold weather when they become less flexible.

We’ve gotten word today that Tesla has switched out the experimental cables in Mountain View for the standard thicker cables, thus ending the public experiment.  Officially Tesla told us “We changed the cables to unify service procedures and parts across all current Supercharger sites.”

That would have been liquid-cooled copper, but one could presumably also do liquid-cooled aluminum. That’s another option, if one wants to keep heat under control with higher resistance from a cable. Probably some extra cost for the cooling system, and there’s some extra waste of energy as conversion to heat that way, but I doubt that it’d make EV charging impractical, were that what was required to deal with people stealing copper.

So, having a pre-chilled and conveniently-available product can be nice when you’re away from home, but if this is for at home, have you ever considered just, you know, making a pitcher of your own drink with whatever you want? Maybe take a Thermos of the stuff chilled or iced if you’re on the go? I mean, if you want agave as your sweetener, then you can make a drink with just agave and then tweak it to however you want. Food-grade citric acid is a preservative – I have a bottle in the pantry. You can purchase all sorts of flavors.

Like, if you buy a premade good, then you can benefit from the R&D done by the company, but if you have extremely exacting demands that you feel no company is making, you can rage about it or just make what you want. In general, drinks have an enormous markup – I mean, you’re mostly buying water with a little flavoring and coloring – so you can have exactly what you want and it’ll probably be cheaper, too.

The 196 mods say that the Drag controversy is unrelated, as Dragonfucker had been banned from 196 long before for unrelated reasons.

Although…this is some sort of spat relating to pronouns, and as I recall, isn’t that guy’s thing referring to himself using the third person?

I mean, this kind of stuff was going to happen.

The more-important and more-widely-used open source software is, the more appealing supply-chain attacks against it are.

The world where it doesn’t happen is one where open source doesn’t become successful.

I expect that we’ll find ways to mitigate stuff like this. Run a lot more software in isolation, have automated checking stuff, make more use of developer reputation, have automated code analysis, have better ways to monitor system changes, have some kind of “trust metric” on packages.

Go back to the 1990s, and most everything I sent online was unencrypted. In 2024, most traffic I send is encrypted. I imagine that changes can be made here too.