Philosophically, it doesn't. No art project needs to exist. Neither did the first HN client app, or any of the dozen HN readers on the app store.
But "Why does it need to exist?" kills every art project, side project, or anything built for the love of building. None of those need to exist either.
There's also the argument that if something isn't forbidden, it should be allowed. The way you lose rights over time is by your existing rights getting clipped off at the edges.
A lot of the criticisms leveled at me here would also apply vs Google back when Larry and Sergey were grad students. If they'd had to worry that indexing content equals copyright infringement, they'd have a steep hill to climb.
i love that you patiently answer these hopelessly antagonistic comments with reason and substance. you'll never convince them, but still i respect that you don't lose your cool. ofc, you're no stranger to this.
I don't know why people decided to jump on this one specific project but there have been numerous replacement frontends for HN published over the years, and put on Show HN. And clones of HN. And datasets of HN comments.
I can't speak for other people, but I commented here because the person I replied to shared their project and then in response to concerns about it copying other people's content, tried to position that first as being OK because they'd offer opt-out, and then said that was viable because if it were opt-in the site wouldn't be possible.
No, they are not "replacement frontends". Those are known as "3rd party clients". These are not clients but clones. They are cloning all the content. That means they've replicated the backend, the frontend, and the database full of content, by scraping/pirating it from the original source.
old.reddit.com is an "alternative frontend". Clones of scraped content are not.
While you can generally restrict new ones, you can't eliminate existing ones without basically paying out the lost revenue+etc to whoever is running it.
There's been a moratorium on new billboards in SF for a long time already. No new ones are getting built. Given the reliable revenue they provide, will be a long time before they naturally go extinct.
You can actually just eliminate existing ones. The government can just do things and absolutely already does whenever politicians really want something to happen (data centers, etc.). There's no law of nature that billboards must be allowed to remain where they are.
It's not a government problem - it's a constitutional one - Banning existing billboards is considered both a first amendment problem, and a takings problem.
Doing it without compensation is a constitutional violation, and even if california modified it's constitution, it would be a federal one. Less of one for sure, but still an issue.
The current law (Business & Professions Code § 5412) is a codification of what the court requires.
Banning existing billboards isn't a first amendment problem if it's not contingent on the contents of the billboard. Much like some radio frequencies are reserved, other media are forced to obey regulations.
>Doing it without compensation is a constitutional violation, and even if california modified it's constitution, it would be a federal one.
Only matters if the constitution is enforced. Courts can easily overturn previous decisions. If there's a will, there's a way.
It would help but probably you'd still owe something.
Business & Professions Code § 5412 is the current controlling statute, and that is a codification of what the courts have required.
That requirement is not just a california constitutional problem, but a federal one.
So even if you modified the california constitution, you'd still have the federal problem.
The federal problem is much less than the state one (SCOTUS has found the floor here to be quite low), but it's still bad enough that feds require compensation as well. Just less compensation.
For example, 23 U.S.C. § 131(g) conditions federal highway funds on paying just compensation for removals along Interstate and federal-aid primary highways — 10% of apportionment forfeited otherwise.
I looked into this quite heavily, and had long discussions with legislators, because there was a huge ugly billboard 150 feet from my house in San Jose :)
It would still get tied up in litigation. The “takings” doctrine that requires compensation is based on the fifth amendment: “ nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
I believe regulatory changes similar to what you propose have been ruled takings in the past. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the state would lose, but this supreme court doesn’t seem particularly amenable.
Why do people keep making these models? Don't they care about the effects this has? It's either that, or they do it on purpose. Just let people push clips about foreigners eating dogs, Jews dry-bleeding babies or the police choking another black man on TikTok, and sit back. "In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."
If you buy one of the Motorola Grapheneos phones, you're gonna be marked. You will stand out in the crowd. It has happened before and will happen more frequently as the world becomes more authoritarian.
Oh but “the government already knows everything” as all the other privacy doomers like to say. “They” can probably already predict what phone you’re going to buy and what you’re going to eat for lunch, right? So why worry about this?
On the other hand, privacy becomes a luxury. People love signaling their status and standing out from the crowd. Entire car and clothing brands exist solely because of that.
And if enough people stand out, it doesn't matter anymore.
> Paper books are just decaying bundles of plant fiber — and the ideas within them are likewise ephemeral.
We still have 1000 year old codex in quite good conditions.
A paper book will still be readable 500 and 1000 years into the future, if properly stored. A digital file will be effectively lost in decades, if not mere years.
Most likely though is your kids, or a company paid for from your estate, will chuck it all in a skip (dumpster) and it will be dumped somewhere to rot, or be burnt to make electricity.
Millennia old codices are extremely rare, and they've survived either by dumb luck or because they were treasured.
Maybe OP is a famed thinker, whose disciples will carefully preserve their notes; or their house is in a cave that will be at sealed in a landslide; or they will die in a peat bog clutching their notes to their pallid breast as the life force seeps from their body, submerging them in preserving ooze...
The current generation cannot bear the accumulated weight of all past generations. Loss and compression are inevitable.
99% of an individual's life experiences are lost when they pass. 99.99% of what's left moves from distinct memory to amalgamated collective experience within a generation.
Even for those of us who are blessed with loving friends and family, nearly everything will fade away. The adolescent me harbored mild delusions that history might care about my notes. The mature me is no longer burdened by those expectations, and my notes are better for only having a single audience.
When I was a child, I imagined that books and the ideas within them lasted forever. The shock is not in how quickly the written word dissipates, it's that it dissipates at all.
There is no intelligence. If anything, this just shows that natural language and mathematics are both fields which are structured in a logically computable way. And if you have a machine that can compute symbolic logic, you can process both natural language and mathematics.
A second corollary is that rational consciousness and thought is less likely to be contained in language than previously thought, because if language is so simple that a machine can process it, it can't contain consciousness.
If natural language was structured in a logically computable way, we'd have had interesting chatbots by the late 80s, basically as soon as a dictionary fit in local RAM, and for the same reason we got compilers.
Da hole raisin y nat-lang be v. hard is dat i kan rite lik dis an it be cool 4 native engrish speekrs 2 unerstand. LLMs are of course fine with this sentence in exactly the way that Zork's engine couldn't be.
The underlying structure of language, which is grammar, is obviously logical. That the symbols used to represent this grammar can be sometimes fuzzy or ambiguous, is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure.
It's not "obviously logical", it's a pattern which we mimic to avoid mockery.
example For, semi-randomise I word order can this like, Yoda worse than, and be understood.
> is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure.
We had to invent Transformers to be able to do that with reliability anything close to being worth caring about. Transformers have to learn from examples, not be pre-programmed.
That's just defining intelligence or consciousness as whatever we specifically can't put in a machine. It's not a very useful definition. (And it's one that completely breaks down to nothing if we do manage to fully put these things into machines or somehow prove it's possible.)
