When I look at stunning works of art (especially architecture - how did they build such tall structures when they didn't have cranes) from hundreds of years ago, first thought is - that should have taken a long time and tremendous effort.
But they didn't have Netflix, video games, YouTube... That could be at least a tiny contributor? Maybe
How does one decide what should be in the public domain for the good of society and what should be commercialized? These are a couple of examples that I learned recently
1. In the UK, Royal Mail owns the postal addresses data. I was looking at UK's open datasets - apparently lot of datasets that have addresses can't be used without paying Royal Mail. There are some exceptions - but I am no lawyer. It is depressing to learn that Royal Mail is no longer a public institution, it was sold against public will by the UK government to a private entity, and sold again and as of last year it is owned by a Czech billionaire. Similarly, Canadian postal code database is also not free.
2. CPT code descriptions are owned by AMA (apparently they're super litigious?). Sure they took the time to write them, they should be compensated - but imagine how many interesting projects can be built if this data was freely available
On one hand, multi Billion dollar companies like Bloomberg exist, thanks to free and open data. But also things that should be free (dictionaries, postal codes etc) aren't.
It's not a question of "how do you decide which public standards should be freely accessible". That's easy: all of them. The public benefits more from freely accessible standards whether they're building codes, legal codes, ISO standards, or HDMI. The effect of not having them publicly available is that people make-do without having read the standard and the public has no way to validate things against the standard afterwards.
The question we don't have an easy answer for is how to incentivise the people behind these things without locking their work behind paywalls? Compliance marks, homologation regimes, copyright, and other strategies all have their own downsides.
Do you think it’s good for UpToDate that OpenEvidence scrapes and paraphrases UpToDate and sells the same information in a GPT wrapper to make big investor bucks? I don’t know what the answer is. Go for it, tell me.
I don't know about this part. Years ago, my friend in college was taking all kinds of Microsoft certification exams and passing them with near perfect score. Thing is, he had no clue about most of the topics he passed, he had never worked with those tech. He just spent a bunch of time collecting questions (which wasn't that hard to find) and memorizing the answers. They could've made it difficult enough so just rote memorization wouldn't work, but they didn't (don't know if it has changed now).
Companies had long figured out these certifications are just easy money. It is hard to resist the temptation to just charge hundreds of dollars for a test and add it as a "profit center"
The tech industry, where just about everyone is capable of cleaving off aspects of a problem and reasoning whether those aspects apply to the general case do not just fail to apply serious scrutiny to certification and licensing schemes in other fields but tend to actively go out on limbs to defend them.
I don't know what that says but it sure says something.
I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world
I feel the same. It is easier to hide behind rules, regulations, bureaucracy etc. Not saying we should stop following rules, but using a bit of common sense and having a bit of compassion would go a long way.
I also remember reading about a train that Japanese railways kept running, just for one kid, she took the train to school. They kept it running until she finished school, just for her (I know, someone is going to point out the inefficiency, cost etc about this story, but that is a separate conversation). I suppose stories like these are going to become rarer and rarer as time goes by, as everything has to be "efficient" and everyone has to follow some "rules".
I think you are mentioning a viral but incorrect story: a station was scheduled to close at a given date, a student mentioned in an interview that it will close after her graduation, but then some news sites claimed that the date of the closing was related to the graduation. The station was also used by a few residents.
The story is a bit suspect in that surely it would be more efficient to just hire her a taxi once a day. Even an expensive Japanese one.
I suppose it would be slightly inconvenient to her to change habits, as well as a bad precedent. Still, hard to accept there was no additional factor involved in the decision.
Good question. First start as small as possible. You dont need to design a massive system and burnout is a real possibility... which leads to: find groups already set up around you. We have a local food pantry that also cooks for people. It's ok to test drive various groups until you find good fits. There are various ways. Im helping a group get their non-profit status atm. Not super visible or boots on the ground but needed/useful. Other groups just need people to help reach out on social media.
It's as much a state of mind as physical actions and good for you for starting to see the need and opportunities.
I remember watching a YouTube video where a farmer was talking about how they are squeezed by modern tractors. I suppose any help farmers can get is worth the effort. I don't know anything about tractors, just read somewhere that farmers are looking more and more to purchase older tractors (without all the fancy software and electronics) - apparently those don't break down as much, and when they do breakdown, they are easier and cheaper to fix
We handcraft each game my pulling audio quotes from different media available on the internet and also from the original sources. We also have a workflow to pull clips from clip.cafe via their API (with a workflow process to extract the audio only and generate subtitles and other cool stuff) but we usually still trim and normalize those by hand too.
1. Churn isn't as bad as I would have thought. There is also the use case for someone who has a job and wants to find the next one. But yea if someone wants to only use for 1 month, that is expected
2. I think companies (or the ATS's they use) might object to reposting a job listing on my site but I'm not doing that. You can search/sort/filter jobs but in order to view the job posting you will open a link back to the original job.
But they didn't have Netflix, video games, YouTube... That could be at least a tiny contributor? Maybe
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