edwr

s/countries/country/

Given the variety of agreements on international intellectual property law such as the Berne Convention, WCT, TRIPS pushed through multinational organizations like the WTO, the only country in the world with 0 copyright is the Marshall Islands (excluding audio-visual media regulated by the Unauthorized Copies of Recorded Materials Act, 1991). Even North Korea has life + 50 years.

Some countries decide to leave their copyright laws unenforced (or selectively enforced if they don't like you). Not much choice for people who don't agree with copyright law itself though.

Physical property is zero-sum. If someone else is driving your car, you can't drive it. If you copy my PDF, I still have my PDF and can use it exactly the same. I'm only deprived of a hypothetical profit I could have made by selling that PDF to you (if you would've paid for it).

Imagine I believe that depriving people of hypothetical profits is morally wrong. By the same logic, libraries are stealing from authors by depriving them of potential sales. Peaceful protesters are stealing from retail businesses by obstructing hypothetical sales. Municipal water suppliers are stealing from bottled water companies by depriving hypothetical sales.

My logic wouldn't have internal consistency with societal norms unless I accepted that creative production is somehow unique and special, and warrants special rules to protect hypothetical profits with the threat of lawyers and state-backed violence.

Still, let's assume I agree. There are many scenarios, illegal under intellectual property law, where the author/creator isn't deprived of anything, even a hypothetical profit. Consider that copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. For 70 years, the author isn't deprived of even hypothetical profit, because they're already dead.

Tax credit for mortgage interest encourages speculative investment in the housing market. Tax credit for credit card debt encourages consumer economic activity.

In the same way the risk premium of a financial security is proportional to its riskiness.

I think you're right. It's a good change for people who want to build web applications. Maybe that's the right thing for future development ease. I feel it's a shame though, the de-emphasis of web documents leads to more content being centralized on large platforms like Facebook, Medium, etc. People at the small scale don't benefit as much from programmability. It leads to a less open and inclusive web.

In my opinion, whether or not a website uses JS is orthogonal to this (though, I would argue websites shouldn't need JS just to repeat some elements). The issue is web has changed from JS enhancing a structure defined by HTML to JS subsuming the role of the web entirely (see HTML-in-JS, CSS-in-JS). Perhaps the greatest issue is that people don't realise that this is an issue.

It's a useful paradigm for people making highly dynamic websites like Google Maps but the vast majority of websites are not Google Maps. Since 2011, browser vendors and standards bodies have expended an astronomical amount of time, effort and resources into designing and implementing the Web Components spec. The resources used to develop Web Components came at the expense of other features that could have improved the web. More than a decade later, adoption into non-Google websites is a rounding error.

Web Components are designed as a behavior (JS) first standard, not a structure (HTML) first standard. This is not the way many websites are designed, it's evident in the popularity of structure-first frameworks like Vue and htmx. You can't force a website into a web application shaped hole.

All too often being 'mobile first' means being desktop last. It feels like a betrayal when UX becomes a zero sum tradeoff between new users and the enthusiast users who built the platform and community to be what it is. User research metrics will favor the new users every time because inexperienced users tend to be the majority. Eventually, the enthusiast users leave, causing many to wonder why the original culture and appeal of a website disappeared.

But none of that matters, the conversion rate went up 5% so the product manager still gets promoted :)

I'm very confused with the PDF appreciation comments. I have to read lots of PDF textbooks and reference documents for school and the experience is grating, especially trying to navigate a document with upwards of 1000 pages on the Chrome PDF reader or Adobe Acrobat on a laptop. Trying to manipulate a tiny scrollbar with a laptop touchpad is very frustrating and using gesture scrolling is tedious for a large document when you have to flip around to various pages. Perhaps I've been doing something wrong, any thoughts?

I think they have greater incentives for filtering out spam on YouTube.

self driving light rail would be interesting

"Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl." - Rob Pike on the UNIX principles