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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • I focus on that because it is a danger of people doing the work themselves. I didn’t say that companies weren’t capable of the same problems. I said that it’s unlikely that the grandson would face the same kind of legal repercussions that a business or corporation would and that’s problematic.

    If you’ll take a step back and stop assuming that I’m arguing against right to repair and just look at what I actually said you might see that I have a point.

    And while I agree that there is also risk in not repairing the devices in question or being able to have them repaired by the manufacturer which is a significant risk, I still feel like it’s important that it be said that there exists a risk in people making more technical repairs themselves.



  • That depends entirely on who’s safety is on the line. When you repair your brakes wrong (to follow the original example), and it causes a pile up that kills 4.or 8 or 10 people, someone should be held liable for that.

    When you repair the electrical box in your basement wrong and it causes a fire that takes out the houses on either side of you, someone should be held liable for that.

    This is like saying “just because some people who drive drunk kill people doesn’t mean that everyone shouldn’t be able to”. The difference here though is that we know there’s a statistically significant increase in the likelihood of death or serious injury from driving drunk.

    There’s a statistically less likely chance of death or bodily injury when people repair their own devices, but I would wager that has a lot to do with the fact that the pool of people doing it have the knowledge to do so and aren’t completely ignorant of how those devices work, or it takes into account that right to repair also encompasses people getting a third party who is qualified to repair the device to do it, but outside of what the manufacturer allows per user agreement. Once more random laymen start doing it because they are allowed or perceived themselves to be allowed, I would expect that the number of wrongly repaired devices would go up.

    Some states have mandatory car inspections. So for instance, if you repair your brakes wrong and leave a caliper bolt off or don’t grease the slides or any number of other things there’s another qualified person looking over that and noting it. So there’s less possibility that it won’t be fixed properly. We do not have anything like that for medical devices except when they are repaired through the manufacturer.

    I’m not even arguing against the right to repair. I’m just pointing out the hurdles that are going to be there and saying they should be addressed. I’m actually generally for people learning how things work so that they can do simple repairs or even complex repairs if they need to.

    But I still think that some things should be handled by professionals. Or at least with a professional QC’ing the work.

    In the field I work in, work can be done by the owner but only with a qualified and licensed A&P present. Would you suggest that any old person off the street should be able to repair a plane and fly over your house?


  • I read the article. Third party repair not being your grandson who’s replacing the seal on your CPAP mask, because that’s not what I mean not does it mean going to a third party repair place.

    It being less safe for the vast majority doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be people who get it wrong. People repair their brakes wrong all the time. It’s absolutely caused accidents. But not enough to be statistically important in the grand scheme of 8 billion people. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen or that it can’t.

    There’s a reason a lot of YouTube videos that show you how to repair things are “for educational purposes only”. It’s because they can be held liable if something bad happens because you followed their guide.


  • We probably shouldn’t let people repair their own brake pads but that’s another argument. Not enough people die from randoms repairing their own brake pads. Repair an insulin pump the wrong way and it will absolutely kill you. Oxygen masks, CPAP machines, pace makers. So many medical devices that people rely on for life or death care.

    I’m all for right to repair. But having seen some of the thing people have done to repair safety items I have serious doubts about the efficacy of someone repairing something wrong and killing their grandma. I can appreciate that not everyone feels the same way. I can appreciate that there are absolutely people out there who can and do repair their own devices, cars, machinery etc, and they may do it well. But there are always going to be people out there who don’t know what they’re doing but will try and then we’ll hear about them on the news because they touched a capacitor or something.







  • I haven’t read everything in this comment yet because to be honest it’s a lot. But one fundamental thing I think you misunderstood about what is said is the bit about it being illegal to self host. While there’s no law against using residential broadband service for the purposes of a web server, there’s definitely a lot of sections of the TOS for broadband service that prohibit this and those have been deemed to be legal and enforceable.

    I claimed everyone can’t afford self hosting, and that’s because it’s true. Not everyone has the kind of Internet setup or computer that would allow it regardless of what you’re saying about older computer’s and raspberry pi, and that doesn’t even take into account the fact that it still requires technical knowledge, not just of running a server or a network, but also of the security measures that would be required to do so to protect yourself.

    The thing is, you hadn’t before now, laid out what you assumed that the fediverse in your vision would function as, you just threw some quick terms at me attached sort of tangentially to the fediverse and assumed that I would know what you meant. I’ll continue reading this when I have more time but, I just don’t understand the motivation anyone would have to join Subway’s instance. Or why they’d want to be federated with it.




  • The idea of evolution is that the parts kept are the ones that are helpful or relevant, or proliferate the abilities of the subject over generations and weed out the bits that don’t. Since Generative AI can’t weed out anything (it has no ability to logic or reason, and it does not think, and only “grows” when humans feed it data), it can’t be evolving as you describe it. Evolution assumes that the thing that is evolving will be a better version than what it evolved from.



  • That doesn’t sound reasonable for a lot of reasons. The idea that each family can host their own instance (which still has costs, and as you reasonably pointed out can’t generally be done with a server in the basement because of broadband laws preventing that kind of usage, is kind of ludicrous. That would lead to an internet where only people with money would be able to host a website of any kind. And even then, public services (video hosting, cloud storage, news, any kind of public service or so on) wouldn’t get anything out of the deal so why would they let you connect to them and mirror their content?

    Also, if we keep things small scale, social networks die because new people aren’t coming in to replace dead accounts as people leave. So what happens then? Those social networks die. Social network sites like Lemmy and mastodon and so on need people. Without people to post content and people to consume it the site is basically just an empty husk of random 1’s and 0’s.

    Keep things responsible? How do we do that? You’ve given me an outline of an idea you have but it’s all broad strokes and no details.



  • No, I’m not wrong. I’m telling you that there is a threshold beyond which a service cannot support the number of users it has without additional funding and that ads right now provide that additional funding, and always have. And now that we’ve gotten to this point with billions of online users using services daily, we’re to the point where in order to provide a service to that many people bills must be paid and to do that one of two things needs to happen. Ad aggregation, or subscription.

    The only reason most of the fediverse survives as it stands now is that it has a small userbase or daily users. When it grows too big to sustain in that regard (given that most of its users now do not actually donate to it), it will die or move to a model that pays the bills. That doesn’t have to be ads. But it absolutely could be, in the same way that it could be subscription service.

    Grayjay is an example of a competing service that is subscription based. So was floatplane. Both of these service compete with YouTube. Both of them cost money to run. Each of the examples I have been given that don’t run on ads or subs can be supported currently by the user base because the user base is small and people are providing what it needs out of a labor of love because it doesn’t cause them a hardship to do so. That will not remain the case as the user base grows.

    The ones like bittorent and such offload the bandwidth cost to the users but that’s only one facet of what we’re talking about here.