There are ways for not closing HTML tags to backfire in some scenarios.
Some rules of thumb, perhaps:
— Do not omit if it is a template and another piece of HTML is included in or after this tag. (The key fact, as always, is that we all make errors sometimes—and omitting a closing tag can make an otherwise small markup error turn your tree into an unrecognisable mess.)
— Remember, the goal in the first place is readability and improved SNR. Use it only if you already respect legibility in other ways, especially the lower-hanging fruit like consistent use of indentation.
— Do not omit if takes more than a split-second to get it. (Going off the HTML spec, as an example, you could have <a> and <p> as siblings in one container, and in that case if you don’t close some <p> it may be non-obvious if an <a> is phrasing or flow content.)
The last thing you want is to require the reader of your code to be more of an HTML parser than they already have to be.
For me personally this makes omitting closing tags OK only in simpler hand-coded cases with a lot of repetition, like tables, lists, definition lists (often forgotten), and obviously void elements.
Arguably, the advertiser is not merely a third party whose interests the service provider must consider, but rather the actual paying customer (and much more of the second party) whose interests the service provider must satisfy to make revenue. That to me puts into perspective the absurdity of this business model: the user is not the customer, the product or service itself is not the product but only a means to keep offering the actual product to the paying customer.
Yes, I mean from the consumer perspective. You're right that the user of an entirely ad-funded service isn't the real customer. They're still at least somewhat the customer when they're still providing some of the revenue though.
If improving some portion of the codebase would make it better, but inconsistent, you should avoid the improvement. Take note, file a ticket, make a quick branch, and get back to what you were working on; later implement that improvement across the whole codebase as its own change, keeping things consistent.
An unprocessed photo does not “look”. It is RGGB pixel values that far exceed any display media in dynamic range. Fitting it into the tiny dynamic range of screens by thrusting
throwing away data strategically (inventing perceptual the neutral grey point, etc.) is what actually makes sense of them, and what is the creative task.
Yeah this what I immediately think too any time I see an article like this. Adjustments like contrast and saturation are plausible to show before/after, but before any sort of tone curve makes no sense unless you have some magic extreme HDR linear display technology (we don't). Putting linear data into 0-255 pixels which are interpreted as SRGB makes no sense whatsoever. You are basically viewing junk. It's not like that's what the camera actually "sees". The camera sees a similar scene to what we see with our eyes, although it natively stores and interprets it differently to how our brain does (i.e. linear vs perceptual).
When talking about range I mean not naively remapping it to fit display media, but compressing it to fill the range of the media in a way that achieves the desired look. (Accounting for non-linearity of colour vision is part of that mentioned in the article.)
Don't you think you're being a bit too pedantic? Nothing really "sees". Eyes also do gather light and the brain analyzes the signals. We've invented a word for it but the word is a high level abstraction that could easily be applied to a camera sensor as well.
I am very much on the triggered side when people say things like “this is how my camera sees it”, because it’s never what they show. What sensor sees is numbers that without interpretation by you, the human, and/or automated software are meaningless.
What people show when they say “this is how my camera sees it” is always “this is how I see it”, or more more specifically “this is how I want you to see it”—as the interpretation of that raw data is a critical part—and I think it’s not very pedantic to point it out.
At some point after ever conversation terminates in you getting a "random ad hominem" you have to re-evaluate the thought process that led you to that point.
When we become ghost content producers for LLMs, you are not supposed to hear something in reply to your post, book, or other work. Most of the time, your work will be ingested by a handful of companies as training data; the readers benefitting from your work will pay these companies, and in return these companies will thoroughly shield and insulate you from being thanked by the people you helped. These companies will do their best to ensure you are motivated to continue producing honest content that can keep their LLMs from choking on their own output.
The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.
Obviously the solution here is to have the LLMs post thank you notes, and offer a complex network of job offers for all of these people contributing to open source. Of course the jobs don’t actually exist, but these acts of kindness will keep the producers thinking that they are both in demand and appreciated.
Current LLMs seem to have an opposing goal baked in; don't reveal the exact source. They may ignore copyright when training, but revealing actual lists of sources with quotes would be too much of a giveaway.
The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.
> unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
Does it though?
I know that people who like intellectual property and money say it does, but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.
3D printers are a great example of something where IP prevented all innovation and creativity, and once the patent expired the innovation and creativity we've enjoyed in the space the last 15 years could begin.
Yes. The alternative is that everyone spams the most popular brands instead of making their own creations. Both can be abused, but I see more good here than in the alternative.
Mind you, this is mostly for creative IP. We can definitely argue for technical patents being a different case.
>but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.
People who like innovation and creativity still might need to commission or sell fan art to make ends meet. That's already a gray area for IP.
I think that's why this argument always rubs me strangely. In a post scarcity world, sure. People can do and remix and innovate as they want. We're not only not there, but rapidly collapsing back to serfdom with the current trajectory. Creativity doesn't flourish when you need to spend your waking life making the elite richer.
Property is a local low - it applies to a thing that exists in one place. Intellectual property is trying to apply similar rules to stuff that happen remotely - a text is not a thing, and controlling copying might work in some technological regimes while in others would require totalitarian control. When you extend these rules to cover not just copying of texts but also at the level of ideas it gets even worse.
>The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
This is a strange inversion. Property ownership is morally just in that the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life. Meanwhile, intellectual property is a contrivance that was invented to promote creativity, but is subverted in ways that we're only now beginning to discover. Abolish copyright.
>the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life
That mentality is exactly why you can argue property ownership being more evil. Landlords "own property" and see the reputation of that these past few decades.
Allowing private ownership of limited human necessities like land leads to greed that cost people lives. That's why heavy regulation is needed. Meanwhile, it's at worst annoying and stifling when Disney owns a cartoon mouse fotlr 100 years.
>Allowing private ownership of limited human necessities like land leads to greed that cost people lives.
You're not "allowing" it unless you've already decided that you own it and can dispose of it (or not) as you see it. And this is why you'll always be the enemy of all decent folk.
"Real communism's never been tried!!!!"
>Meanwhile, it's at worst annoying and stifling when Disney owns a cartoon mouse fotlr 100 years.
It's actually destructive of culture in ways that are difficult to overstate. Disney nor any other "copyright owner" can't be trusted to preserve culture and works, they're the ones that threw the old film reels into the river and let them burn up in archive fires. No thanks. It's amazing how wrong you are on every single point.
Well, you could agree not to be a rabid communist hellbent on destroying everything, and we kind of muddle through this the way we've been doing. Or, you eventually work up the nerve to do the violent revolution thing. And then people like me respond.
Property ownership is ultimately based on scarcity. If I using a thing prevents others from using that thing, there is scarcity, and there should be laws protecting it.
There is no scarcity with intellectual property. My ability to have or act on an idea is in no way affected by someone else having the same idea. The entire concept of ownership of an idea is dystopian and moronic.
I also strongly disagree with the notion that it inspires creativity. Can you imagine where we would be if IP laws existed when we first discovered agriculture, or writing, or art? IP law doesn’t stimulate creation, it stifles it.
In early societies authorship was implicitly recognized. If you invented something cool, all of the dozen people you know most likely knew you did it; me trying to pass it as my own would be silly since anyone would see through it and laugh me out of the cave.
It’s not unlike theft, murder, etc.—when societies grow, their ways of dealing with PvP harm (blood feud, honour culture, sacrifice, etc.) can’t scale sufficiently (or have other drawbacks), and that’s when there is a need to codify certain behaviours and punishments in law.
(I wouldn’t claim that respective legal code is perfect and implementation-wise it’s all good today—but to say “there was no law against X back when we lived in tribes and didn’t have writing, therefore we shouldn’t need that law now” seems a bit ridiculous, unless you propose that we drastically and fundamentally reconfigure human communities in a number of ways.)
The concept of IP law only really started to be a thing a couple hundred years ago, and the vast majority of IP law has been created in the last century. Human societies have been large and complex without the concept of IP law most of their history.
A way of making an argument is to craft a statement that at first shockingly contradicts a basic dictionary definition of a word but at a closer look highlights a characteristic you want to bring to reader’s attention, creates a finer distinction between vaguely similar terms. It’s probably the oldest form of clickbait, and perhaps the most useful one—when done correctly, it provides a lot of food for thought in a single sentence, and can present an old truth in a catchy way that is more likely to be internalised by the reader.
For example, “you should not spend effort to achieve something” is a weird thing to say at first. It poses a paradox and invites the reader to experiment: let’s pretend we can’t spend effort; but we can still do things, we can spend energy, we can end up having achieved something. Are there examples of how people do things and spend energy, but without spending effort?
This highlights a particular elusive quality of “effort” that, like many ideas in human psychology, may not have a specific dictionary word assigned to it. Having drawn such a stark distinction between spending energy and spending effort makes it easier to recall that quality, even if it doesn’t have a convenient term that rolls off the tongue.
(I’d postulate that if carrying heavy boulders up a hill is your hobby or something you can bring yourself to enjoy doing, there is certainly a way in which you can do even that without spending effort in this revised definition. By contrast, doing something you loathe may always be full of effort, no matter how little energy it requires from you.)
Could the same point be expressed in a more conservative way, like “you should not spend too much effort to achieve something”? Sure. However, for many people it wouldn’t be as easily internalised.
Getting an iPhone model that comes with iOS 26 and cannot be downgraded: what a blunder. It’s not about Liquid Glass per se, more the ability to use your phone without being distracted by constant visual glitches and impaired keyboard typing experience.
“In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…>”
There is always a conflict between the benefit of an individual and that of society or wider ecosystem. Faith or ethics is an example of that: it can be considered a survival mechanism of society, which would fall apart if everyone was doing only what is good for themselves.
It is pointless to look at such beliefs (murder is bad, we should be good to others, etc.) from the viewpoint of a standalone individual, and it is fine for humans do not really exist that way. These beliefs stop being “sour grapes” or rationalising failure as soon as you see the anthill behind the individual ants.
The “goodness of death” belief is one of such, indeed part of many religions, and perhaps the ultimate tradeoff. Is it merely a rationalisation of one biological inevitability, or does it reflect a whole set of constraints we operate under? Realistically, it has always been so that individuals go away for the society to continue. Otherwise there quickly would not be enough food, would it? If somebody refused to die, would they have to be exiled or murdered? If we all stopped dying, would we be able to evolve and adapt, or would we be more liable to be wiped out as a species? To get rid of the concept of death and ensure society’s sustainability given constraints, you’d also need to get rid of our drive to reproduce, and already at that point we are looking at something very different to what we are.
Is it merely a vestige? Is it no longer necessary to die for societal benefit today? IMO not really, unfortunately: if society would unravel without death, which I think it would, then the “deathist” belief remains sound.
Getting out of this predicament, in my opinion, requires one of the two: 1) infinite energy and/or other technology that is not yet available and might be unattainable, or 2) by changing a number of things about how we live, ditching the unsustainable (absent infinite energy) idea that the only right direction is constant growth of production, consumption, etc.
I am mildly skeptical about the former (happy to be proved wrong). Regarding the latter, I am curious as to whether humans would slowly achieve extended lifespans naturally, if they eliminated factors that pressure them to fade away. (It does go contrary to the idea that the purpose of all life is energy dissipation. Sustainable peaceful society with long lifespans, likely much lower birth rates, does not strike me as particularly efficient at that.)
Some rules of thumb, perhaps:
— Do not omit if it is a template and another piece of HTML is included in or after this tag. (The key fact, as always, is that we all make errors sometimes—and omitting a closing tag can make an otherwise small markup error turn your tree into an unrecognisable mess.)
— Remember, the goal in the first place is readability and improved SNR. Use it only if you already respect legibility in other ways, especially the lower-hanging fruit like consistent use of indentation.
— Do not omit if takes more than a split-second to get it. (Going off the HTML spec, as an example, you could have <a> and <p> as siblings in one container, and in that case if you don’t close some <p> it may be non-obvious if an <a> is phrasing or flow content.)
The last thing you want is to require the reader of your code to be more of an HTML parser than they already have to be.
For me personally this makes omitting closing tags OK only in simpler hand-coded cases with a lot of repetition, like tables, lists, definition lists (often forgotten), and obviously void elements.
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