People don't know whether they are or are not doing things that require consent under the law. That's because, if you haven't noticed, the people concerned are computer programmers, UI designers, and PMs. Notably missing from that list is "lawyers who can be bothered to research the question".
People put the banners up because they see other people doing it and it seems safest. That all of this would be so should have been perfectly obviously to whoever contemplated bringing the regulation into existence. Therefore they are either imperceptive or malign.
> if you haven't noticed, the people concerned are computer programmers, UI designers, and PMs.
Those are the people who should know best what is meant by "ask visitors for consent before you track them.".
Lawyers and more work is needed if you want to track anyway and look for ways to make people accidentally consent. "Let's ask the question, but hide the unwanted answer as deeply as possibly without breaking the law."
You may blame EU bureaucrats, I blame the unwillingness of the companies to fulfill the spirit of the law and putting all the work into pretending.
> People don't know whether they are or are not doing things that require consent under the law.
This knowledge is taught in school and we also had one lecture in university and I am not even studying CS or anything computer adjacent. You can very much rely on CS graduates to know this, and even if they don't, the company could organize a training day, like they do for all the other stuff. This is really a dumb excuse for a company.
Is that what really happens though? EU countries usually don't immediately punish violations unless they're particularly egregious. You're more likely to get a warning and a grace period to meet the requirements. So the rational approach would be to not bother with consent banners, GDPR and whatnot until you attract the attention of the regulators, at which point you should definitely hire a legal team that can tell you what exactly you need to do to comply.
Any company that can hire teams of software developers can afford to hire a lawyer to tell them whether they need to irritate all their customers. And frankly, they'd be dumb not to hire a lawyer if they think they need some legal cover to determine whether that cover is sufficient.
Good god. I certainly wasn't suggesting this situation would be improved by software teams hiring lawyers to advise on their software! You appear to have completely lost perspective.
You think a company worried that they have a legal issue should just ask the programmers and ui designers to sort it out? Or that programmers who think the company has a legal issue should take it upon themselves to come up with a feature that they think addresses it without consulting legal?
You can make it look modern: get rid of all menus and bars so that there is nothing on screen except for the text you're editing. (e.g. search for minimal.el) It looks indistinguishable from any other modern editor / IDE in zen mode. Menus and bars are not necessary in these sorts of applications if you use then daily -- more efficient and powerful to use the command palette and key bindings.
Second this. The "ui" is perhaps useful when learning to use emacs, but every emacs user I've seen after a while has all of it disabled.
I've been using emacs with the "lucid" build since forever, as it's the leanest build that still gets a graphical window working on X11 and see none of the actual "toolkit".
I guess the pgtk build is required nowdays for native wayland support.
Yup, just the other day I was talking about it on subreddit, will repeat here verbatim:
My comment is an honest reflection of long-time Emacs usage. When I started, years ago, I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that there were no tabs for every file anymore - the concept that was seemingly ingrained into my programmer's brain - almost in every IDE/editor I used before Emacs, I had tabs and a navigational panel on the side. I complained and demanded my tabs, asked on forums and called it "bullshit", when people calmly told me that I truly don't need them. Later I realized - they were right.
Slowly I learned that the wise choice is to remove any distractions - you don't need a minimap, side-panels, complicated modelines, and even line-numbers shown all the time. All that can be activated purposefully, on demand and then toggled off again. These "visual clues" are in fact not so much even distractions but micro-bombardments of your brain neurons - you think they are helping, while in fact they are slowly eating up your neural capacity, to the point that the brain just stops even paying attention to them and they become almost useless waste of your screen estate.
I'm not saying that this all generally true for every case and every user - some prefer certain ways, and it's great that we have a system that is able to satisfy any whim, but it's worth sometimes questioning yourself - am I enslaved by my own mental habits?
> nothing on screen except for the text you're editing
Just wanted to clarify, to me that's timeless. Modern would be having modern menus, pop-up configuration screen et al.. All the candy that appeals to a less experienced user, who worked with Idea, Sublime of VS code before.
There's a reason there's no beginner car, no beginner guitar, and no beginner drill. Those are either tools or toys. If all you want is to type some text, notepad (or the equivalent in other OS) is enough. But programmers do more with text. So they should know what tools provide those and how to use those tools. But then you'll find a lot of programmers barely go one level up from notepad with their tools.
I guess I'm not really sure that menus are modern. But anyway I hate the stubbornness over the vanilla emacs UI. The nonsense in the menus and the stupid pixelated pictures of scissors or whatever.
But I've never really got the idea of why emacs should appeal to less experienced users. I think that's misguided: the entire point of Emacs is that you write some emacs lisp. If you're not interested in writing any lisp, then you definitely shouldn't bother with emacs (I used emacs intensively for 20 years and am the author of Emacs packages). And if you're less experienced and looking for Idea/Sublime experience then at this point in your life there's a good chance you aren't interested in writing lisp.
But lyrics are just one example. Are you saying that training experiments must filter out all substrings from the training input that bear too close a resemblance to a substring of a copyrighted work?
Obviously there's a limit, reproducing a single sentence is unlikely to be copyright infringement just because there are only so many words in a language; but if reproducing some text would be copyright infringement if a human did it, I don't see why LLM companies should get a free pass.
If it's really essential that they train their models on song lyrics, or books, or movie scripts, or articles, or whatever, they should pay license fees.
A very worrying number of people nowadays seem to think that forests are a thing to counter climate change. What is the species composition being planted? Is it appropriate to the location? Reforestation must be about recreating _forest ecosystems_, not about creating the photosynthetic counterpart of a vast fucking solar farm.
I used to work at a US healthcare company selling a product that doctors prescribe in a medical consultation in a serious medical context that occurs very rarely in a person's life. Everything the marketing/product side of the company did was predicated on the notion that the product would be something that people would have an emotional connection to and would be an important part of people's mental landscapes for a non-trivial proportion of their lifetime.
Given that the product people concerned must have accepted that the people involved (the patients) would have hundreds or thousands of involvements of similar profundity with other commercial products, I'm not sure what's more worrying: the misjudgement of the role of medicine, or the implication that they think that normal people's brains are teeming with 1000s of emotional attachments to random commercial products.
Does anything like that exist for Typst? I.e. something where you edit the same document that is rendering, rather than exporting or side-by-side live preview?
It's fairly easy to make definitions, and there are several. The real problem is that many biologists for many decades have been confused about whether we are attempting to make pragmatic definitions or whether we are uncovering "true answers" regarding biological discontinuities. It might not seem that bad if you don't consider geographic separation, but when you do, the literature turns into a total mess. The truth is, though it's unpalatable to many, that there's nothing about biological science that implies that the question "are these two geographically disjunct populations members of the same species?" has any particular answer.
People put the banners up because they see other people doing it and it seems safest. That all of this would be so should have been perfectly obviously to whoever contemplated bringing the regulation into existence. Therefore they are either imperceptive or malign.