• 7 Posts
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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2025

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  • public domain code can’t really be released under the GPL

    Disney created films based on old fairy tales. Disney has a copyright on those films even though they include elements from the public domain because the films also include the artists’ original expression. The linux kernel (probably) contains public domain AI-generated code alongside original work from its many contributors. If you wanted to get the entire project into the public domain, you’d have to get permission from nearly all its contributors or wait for their copyright term to expire. The small snippets of code which were AI-generated are public domain. The bulk of the project isn’t, and the project as a whole isn’t.

    As much as I dislike AI, I can’t say I understand forbidding AI-generated contributions on the grounds that the submitted code is public domain. I suppose somebody can come along and “steal” the public domain snippets, but I suspect it’s difficult to definitively tell apart the human-written code from AI-generated and strip out the human-written bits. If they do, what’s the issue? It wasn’t yours to begin with and you can still keep it in your project. Moreover, now that the magical plagiarism machines exist, who’s going to be lifting code in this way, anyway?










  • I’ve spent more time than I care to admit reading Wikipedia entries on significant people from past centuries. Way too often their life story is full of disease and death. A dozen siblings. All of them suffer the same disease in childhood. Half of them don’t make it to adulthood. Mother dies during childbirth. Father struggles making money from their creative work, dies in a duel. Subject cared for by wealthy uncle. Is affected for the remainder of their life by the lingering effects of the childhood disease. Repeat for the next generation.





  • The NoScript extension will properly do this. The extension blocks domains from running scripts except those you’ve whitelisted. There’s a drop down that displays a list of domains from which the page wishes to run scripts. It makes much of the web a pain to use, though. I sometimes have to go through a loop of whitelisting a subset of domains which want to run followed by a page refresh until the page works. Javascript is often not optional. If you had to live like Richard Stallman professes you should, you’d probably have to join the Amish.