The key difference, is that the US is many jurisdictions (Federal + 50 states + a lot of others, from counties to cities to territories to MANY others), and the variance amongst those is high.
The key thing well regulated places like Sweden get right, is that in consumer contracts you have minimum bars that you must meet regardless of what you can get the consumer to agree to. So, for instance, return policies, for goods bought online have minimum standards they must meet.
In the US, these things have huge variability. There are well regulated states, and well, the others.
>The key thing well regulated places like Sweden get right, is that in consumer contracts you have minimum bars that you must meet regardless of what you can get the consumer to agree to. So, for instance, return policies, for goods bought online have minimum standards they must meet.
Yes, but Swedish contract law actually is like this. A contract is a specific agreement, it can never be "Oh well, you can add provisions as you like if you send them to me" or "I will pay whatever".
The workaround is that each change is a new contract. If you don’t accept the changes the existing contract ends and that’s it. But the power is mostly with the provider, you need it more than it needs you, so you will want the new contract. You can also ask and negotiate terms and the provider has the same choice. If there’s healthy competition you have some power, otherwise you are out of luck.
But that would supposed need to have some explicit text stating the expiration of that contract. An existing contract can't just end when provider feels like it, I suppose?
I would guess it can end the moment either party wants, unless a length was established. At the end of the month or year you’ve paid for, perhaps with a minimum notice, would make sense. Otherwise the provider can refuse to let you stop paying, citing the contract.
Every contract has that, either party can exit the contract under normal conditions. You can cancel your Netflix subscription with a short notice period. They can do the same. They use the notice period as grace period for you to accept the new conditions. You accept a new contract with new conditions.
I negotiated my mobile phone or internet contracts again and again, to get better deals. I threaten to leave, they throw a bone. Because they know I have options. Providers who know you don’t will squeeze you however they please.
Do you think it's likely that these kinds of things come about because there's varity in the myriad of jurisdictions in America or that there are monied interests who stand to benefit from it?
Like to put it another way how much of this is 'We must do it this way because Americans are simply built different and we're just special' vs 'this makes a handful of people a bunch of money and they have teams of lobbyists, marketers, and lawyers to normalize this kind of stuff in society over time'?
It's probably a bit of both from what I've seen of how Americans tend to react to their government doing things (online anyways).
The US's quagmire of incoherent laws and many jurisdictions seems to be a bad combination of:
* Apathetic voters that are raised on a media diet of "big government bad", which impedes any regulations on a federal level. (Note that this is irrespective on if the voters actually want a small government, it's what they're led to believe.)
* Politicians that don't like to give up power; there's an unusual desire for local/state US officials to claim responsibility and get very pissy when the federal government steps in with a standardized solution. This is very unusual compared to other countries; punting responsibilities to local officials in other countries is generally seen as a way for politicians to abdicate responsibility by letting it die in micromanagement and overworked administrative workers and isn't popular to do anymore these days. (This is also a two way street, where federal US lawmakers can abdicate making any legislation that isn't extremely popular by just punting it down to the states, even if they have legal majorities.)
* The US has a court system that overly favors case law rather than actual law. Laws in the US are permitted to be painfully underdefined since there's an assumption that the courts will work out all the finer details. It's an old system more designed around the days of bad infrastructure across large distances (like well, the British Empire, which it's copied from). It's meant to empower the judicial branch to be able to make the snap decision even if there's not directly a law on the books (yet) or if a law hasn't actually reached the judiciary in question. The result is that you end up with a bunch of different judiciaries, each with their own slightly different rules. It also encourages other bad behavior like jurisdiction shopping where people will try to find the judiciary most favorable to them, crafting "the perfect case" to get a case law on the books the way you want it to get judges to override similar cases and so on and so forth - in other countries, what the supreme court judges doesn't have nearly the same lasting impact that a decision in the US has.
* And finally, the entire system is effectively kept stuck in place because lobbyists like it this way; if they want to kill regulation, they just get some states to pass on it and then hem and haw at the notion of a federal regulation. Politicians keep it in place on their own, lobbyists provide them the grease/excuse to keep doing it. (And those lobbyists these days also have increasing amounts of ownership over the US media, so the rethoric about voters not liking big government regulations is reinforced by them as well.)
It didn't end up this way on purpose; the historical reasons for this are mostly untied from lobby interests (which is mostly just "the US is the size of a continent in width", "states didn't actually work together that much at first" and "the US copied shit from the British Empire"), but they're kept this way by lobby interests.
you can try doing fstrim + Optimize-VMD first . i've found it is good up to 20% savings. On my last run my 75 gb wsl disk saved about 15gb. But wiping and re-installing trimmed about 60 gb
a) The "founder" of the code disappears in to the ether, and it is the equivalent of "version X only";
b) The "founder" stays involved, and if GPL 3 is updated, they can choose.
only b is worth speaking of. In b, isn't having someone in a position to make a choice much better than no one? What is the boogie monster that is the worry? The FSF puts out the 4.0 version, with a special "except for boramalper" clause, that lets you specifically monetise the hell out of it while keeping it closed source? I would not lose much sleep over that.
Stallman is a nutcase, in an endearing way (ok, maybe you have to have moved in the right circles). But he has put in place a system that needed just such a nutcase, who established clear black lines that could not be crossed, and who was also writing enough amazingly meaningful code that we needed to take his license seriously, that could then establish the institutions and governance to make it all live beyond him.
> only b is worth speaking of. In b, isn't having someone in a position to make a choice much better than no one?
Actually, you're right! I thought the proxy can nominate/decide that any other license can be used in the future (i.e. "licensed under GPLv3 or X" where I can chose X to be anything) but it seems that I was wrong. Re-reading more carefully (emphasis mine):
> If the Program specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of the GNU Affero General Public License can be used, that proxy’s public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Program.
So FSF creates the future versions of a specific license the work is under (in this case AGPL) and the "founder" chooses whether to allow its usage or not. That sounds reasonable to me.
I really like this as a suggestion, but getting opensource code that isn't in the LLMs training data is a challenge.
Then, with each model having a different training epoch, you end up with no useful comparison, to decide if new models are improving the situation. I don't doubt they are, just not sure this is a way to show it.
Yes, but perhaps the impact of being trained on code on being able to find bugs in code is not so large. You could do a bunch of experiments to find out. And this would be interesting in itself.
They are very non silly, because whoever is the actual OS vendor gets to implement this. It's relevant whether kernel developers or OS maintainers need to implement this.
These look great, squarely in my breakfast wheelhouse, definitely eggy, but with - well, I guess what I now know as a hint of darkness. Thanks for sharing.
Going to share my advice to people going to Sri Lanka (other than what food to try and where) is to not focus on beaches (which are mostly pretty average) and go to the mountains and ancient cities which are unique and amazing.
Hoppers are not only Sri Lankan - also found in parts of South India and I think in some places in SE Asia.
Same. When I was on a bit of black beach I looked on the internet and found quite a few boats had shed oil along there. Everything else was good though.
UK citizens must now enter on their UK passport (or a citizenship certificate thing + foreign passport), and are not eligible for visa waiver programs (because they're only eligible for people using certain passports, which UK citizens obviously now can't be using).
I was announced in Nov '25, and has cause a mad scramble for lots of people as the passport office has been massively backlogged by the predictable queue of people needing passports suddenly, when they didn't need them before.
The key difference, is that the US is many jurisdictions (Federal + 50 states + a lot of others, from counties to cities to territories to MANY others), and the variance amongst those is high.
The key thing well regulated places like Sweden get right, is that in consumer contracts you have minimum bars that you must meet regardless of what you can get the consumer to agree to. So, for instance, return policies, for goods bought online have minimum standards they must meet.
In the US, these things have huge variability. There are well regulated states, and well, the others.