Not saying I agree with OP, but for the law you described: any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description (unless you’ve explicitly disabled the automatic location and time stamping default).
So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
There’s a difference in intent, and you’re aware of that. Aggregating photos of license plates for the express purpose of building a database of license plates with location and other metadata to make profit from granting access to that database is clearly different to most other cases of taking, storing, and even selling photographs. There is no overlap here at all.
Its not hard to distugush individual pictures that contain trackable attributes like a license plate number from building a large scale database of them for sale. Or making such a database not legal to sell access to without removing that information, etc. It doesn't need to center on the contents of a single photo.
No I don’t think it’s “very hard”. But I also don’t pretend like OP that it’s super simple, only to suggest a law that would make most people criminals.
I think regulation is critically needed in this area, but acting like it’s easy to do well is a recipe for laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that have massive unexpected consequences.
Basing it around the act of selling data seems like a much better approach to me than what OP suggested, I agree. I imagine there are edge cases to consider around how acquisitions of company assets would work, although it’s not a use case I particularly care to defend.
“Intent to track” could be an approach, but the toll bridges near me use license plate scanners for payment, so I could see it not being that clear cut. There are likely other valid use cases, like statistical surveys, congestion pricing laws, etc.
Also, currently have a ton of MMR, Punk Planet and HeartAttack. These were far and away the "bigs". I am really hunting for more underground stuff. Back in the day (I am old) we had a physical zine library in our punk house and it was a treasure!! My goal is to connect later to institutions via IIIF (Pratt, Barnard, Brown, RISD) and other institutional databases. Hunting up Burn Collector and Cometbus currently.
Seeing this on the front page again prompted me to dig into some of the Whole Earth Catalog successor publications for the first time.
I came across an article in Whole Earth Software Review, where many participants on a forum discuss the emerging technology of word processors — particularly interesting given the rise of LLMs as a new tool for "writing".
> LEVY: I readily admit that using my Apple and Wordstar has changed me considerably. I do stories faster, write them more organically and have time to play more. I play on my computer a lot. Word processing, even in our current brain-damaged technological state, is something that significantly improves lives.
> SPEZZANO: … You could thoroughly try out five cars in one day, but it would take a month to really test out five word processors.
> SPEZZANO: … I think the overall plan should be to work towards a software aesthetic, a capacity on the part of the reader to appreciate a good program. Most of us don't have this because a computer program is a new medium. Like the appreciation of art or music or literature, software appreciation may not lead to one perfect word processor but an increased ability to see the subtleties of the medium, and to be articulate about what you think and don't like.
> ICENOGLE: … Transparency isn't a property of the program. It concerns the relationship of the user to the program. If you don't have to think about it, it's transparent.
> LISWOOD: Some day I will be able to talk at the screen, and then I can really screw things up in a hurry.
> McWILLIAMS: I have noticed my handwriting has deteriorated significantly ever since my word processor arrived. Is this happening to anyone else?
> NAIMAN: … Yes, my handwriting has gotten much worse since I've been using a word processor. And I find I can hardly ever write a short note, even just a line or two, without scratching something out and rewording it.
The list of "Fifteen Word Processor Commandments" at the end of the article is also a fun read. And right after that:
> The typewriter is a tool that extends human capabilities. It lets the dysgraphic writer read his own writing and allows him to share it with others. The word processing computer goes further. It separates writing (modeling ideas with words) from printing. This is why this tool is so important to me. Since the writing first exists only electronically, one can word and rework it for as long as necessary — moving things around, correcting spelling, transpositions and typos — before it gets printed.
> It's unfortunate that there's been so much hype and lack of imagination an insight about all of the wonderful things computers can do for us. Given this, it was hard for me to visualize a personal use for a computer until I found out about word processing.
It seems fairly easy to figure this out with a little thought…
When talking to a chatbot you're likely to type more words per query, as a simple measure. But you're also more likely to have to clarify your queries with logic and intent — to prevent it going off the rails — revealing more about the intentions behind your searches than just stringing together keywords.
It'd be harder to claim purely informational reasons for searching if your prompts betray motive.
The way Dropbox has mismanaged Paper over the past decade, and squandered so many opportunities in the productivity tools space, has been one of the most frustrating things to watch.
Dropbox bought Hackpad and launched Dropbox Paper a decade ago!
Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then — and had a good internal product team behind it, but leadership failed to see the potential. I think it's because the Dropbox founders were so consumer-focused that they couldn't envision how huge Paper could be in the productivity tools space. They kept framing it as an Evernote competitor, instead of seeing it turning into something like Notion.
Even when they finally seemed to understand that Dropbox was never going to be a B2C sensation, they kept acquiring "side product" businesses instead of ones that built on Dropbox's existing value. (To their credit, this was the zeitgeist back when they started — B2B was not cool at all, and the sort of B2C/B hybrid that exists now wasn't a thing.)
Meanwhile startups like Notion actually saw the opportunity and blossomed. And nowadays, even super-slow Google is releasing features like pageless mode, markdown support, etc. Such that Paper is almost irrelevant at this point, despite having had such a massive head start.
It's sad because I can easily imagine an alternate future where Dropbox understood what Paper could be, and invested in it alongside things like an Airtable competitor, to create a truly viable, and forward-looking alternative to Google Docs/Sheets/Drive, without all the baggage of being a Microsoft Office clone.
"Thanks for subscribing to Dropbox Pro ianstormtaylor! Would you like to upgrade to Dropbox for Enterprise?"
"Thanks for sharing a file, ianstormtaylor, Dropbox for Business will do some bullshit"
Dropbox was a great product, but a shit company. They have a software platform and core technology that for B2B would readily displace high dollar stuff like managed file transfer and had a good early API that many apps took advantage of. I had a great experience working with them to capture shadow IT use of the product and get it in a managed environment.
But the relentless nagging, even of paying customers, is unserious and stupid. I wouldn't touch the product with a 10 foot pole.
Dropbox saw that the only B2C path for a company like them was to become Box, and they did not like it. Also, we kept criticizing Dropbox for moving away from a "folder that syncs".
I agree with a folder that syncs. Today I use dropbox, but I do my best to avoid interacting with it, because just clicking on the menubar icon makes me upset that no feature there is what I actually need. No sensible ignore rules, etc.
But I could have been wrong and focusing on dropbox was not the only path. But even if it wasn't, they fumbled every promising product they could. I mean, Mailbox, they pioneered (read acquired) the email swipe UX, then killed it.
Then there was that launch where they hyped some iCloud sync service that would allow apps to store settings and game states, etc. Whatever happened to that?
Today I'm so afraid that dropbox's more daring products will die faster than Google can retire theirs, that I simply do not use it for anything other than a folder than syncs where I can share links. And now that I think about it, it's been a while since I had to share a single link, so maybe I can just move to synching.
> only B2C path for a company like them was to become Box
What does this mean? I used Box once in about 2011 at work (before Google and MS got serious with their "Drive" features my company had paid for Box) and my impression was actually "this is like if Dropbox were built by Oracle" -- worse than Dropbox in every way, both usability and performance, but with some corporate-tailored features. As a consumer, I would never have dreamed of switching to Box.
So that's why I'm curious what you mean by the comment with respect to B2C.
I mean exactly what you experienced. They did not go the enterprise way bc they did not want to become Box. They didn't think they could provide a good UX if they focused on enterprise.
They're not even a "folder that syncs" anymore, at least on android if you make a folder "available offline" (which should be the default to begin with) it stores it internally to the dropbox app where it can't be accessed by other apps. There is another button "Save to device", but that's just a one-time snapshot of the file that won't stay in sync. I deleted my account after they pulled that enshitification.
Yeah, Dropbox Paper remains the best pure writing experience I've ever used at work. I think Notion has a lot of nice features, but just writing in it still feels more cumbersome than Paper did a decade ago.
I completely agree. Paper was so frictionless that you could actually use it as a tool to think and sketch ideas with. Instead of Notion which feels clunky just to type in.
Stripe used to live and dir internally off of hackpad with some custom search engine attached to it. It was all binned after the Atlassianfication, but I don't think many devs saw the move away as positive.
In my experience Dropbox is actually really good at syncing data between devices.
It’s fast. It’s way more reliable than iCloud, and for “simply” keeping folders in sync just “simply” the best - for simple user requirements simplicity and reliability are key.
Did I stress ‘simple’ enough? Maybe I should stress it Latin? Simplex veri sigillum.
Side note: Why do people like Notion? I just can't get into it. It feels like every time I type, some autocomplete thing pops up and stops my typing. I just went back to the good old Notes app.
As someone who switched from Dropbox Paper to Notion...
There's no question that Paper is a better pure writing experience. If you're viewing Notion as just a note-taking app and nothing else, I think you're misunderstanding what it's for.
For starters, it's way easier to organize stuff in Notion than Paper. This is less a feature of Notion, and more of a terrible limitation of Paper. Paper was stuck with the "files within folders" model. Just the fact that Notion lets you control what shows up in the navigation sidebar was a huge time saver for me. And being able to create pages within pages within pages (which is very different from having sibling documents inside a folder) made it much more flexible for organizing everything.
But the real power of Notion is when you start to treat it as a database builder rather than a note-taking tool. Yes, it's useful for taking notes, but those notes are about something, and with tools like Paper, Obsidian, etc., the thing is always living somewhere else.
With Notion, I was able to make a database of projects and another database of tasks which linked to those projects. Each developer on my team has a custom dashboard showing just the tasks that are assigned to them and currently in-progress. I have a totally different view showing all the projects going on right now. And then each of those tasks have a pretty good (I admit it's not great) note-taking feature. The notes are living within the actual object you're taking notes about, which is totally different from Paper.
I even use Notion for personal stuff. I have a Notion form that my wife and I use to enter things we need to buy next time we're at the store. And there's a view showing the things we need to buy from each separate store with checkboxes next to each one so it's easy to remove them when we're done. There's a separate database listing the movies we want to watch, with a view for all the ones we previously watched, and when. I have a database of cocktail recipes along with ingredient lists (so I can easily filter by ingredient), formulas to calculate different volumes based on how many drinks you're making, a rating system, etc.
Basically, if you look at Notion as a bucket of unstructured notes with a markdown editor, I agree, it's nothing special. But that's not what it really is.
I have tried several times - real genuine multi-week efforts - but I'm with you. It never worked for me. I can see potential in there but it's just too much, for too little in return.
It's possible to lock pages in Notion (from the ... menu on the page), which prevents editing without unlocking. Most org-level pages in our workspace are locked. People also typically lock project pages after they ship, for example.
I'm with you. I've been working on making Obsidian great for work with real-time collaboration, SSO, and the ability to have fully private document collaboration [0].
Performance aside, it's crazy that in the age of Claude Code people don't insist on having their docs local, private, and in markdown.
Here is the thing: Dropbox has no business being anything other than a cloud storage solution. Stop trying to do everything, it's too difficult and too expensive. Find what you're great at, and just improve it little by little. Stop adding shit.
Never, ever used any additional Dropbox services. All I need it to do is be a reliable cloud storage. Nothing else.
Lower the price below Google Drive and be better at being Google Drive than Google is. It wouldn't be that hard. You wouldn't need to be more expensive if you weren't pissing money away on acquisitions no one wants all the time.
ah yes, make your product cheaper than the same thing from company that has the greatest number of free software offerings with the largest user bases in the world
The changelog states: "Added support for “differential” uploads. When large files are edited, Drive for desktop will now upload only the parts of the file that changed."
Okay, but let's say Google implements that. Than Dropbox is toast, right?
It's such a shame, because I absolutely believe that simpler products which focus on one thing and do it well are basically always a better user experience (and I personally try to use them wherever possible). But I think the business case is hard.
You have no business telling anyone what their business is. Dropbox has "business" doing whatever they want to try to make great products, achieve their mission and turn over some cash.
> Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then
Except that you had to have everyone use a Dropbox account. So if you are already in bed with Google as a company, adding Dropbox for everyone might not be such a fun idea.
Conversely, when you already collaborate with people in Dropbox, mainly via files, having real time co-editable docs under same folder with same sharing was nice, esp. for people who never remember where they put stuff :-)
Integration was not perfect, but it does create a json .paper file containing a url. But at least it makes you aware the doc exists every time you look at the folder.
Alas, with Paper desktop & mobile apps being deprecated, that's increasingly useless :-( Will the main app at least take over the ability to [double-]click these .paper docs to open them in a browser?
One way to gain a different perspective could be to ask a similar question, but replace typographic adjustments with something in your domain of expertise that requires deeper experience to see the value in. Assuming programming, it might be things like linting, refactoring, testing, version controlling, etc.
Linting, refactoring and testing all have obvious benifits for anyone who has done any small to medium sized project and has had to rewrite and debug some amount of code, even if they don't know the concepts by name. Even version contolling is ubiquitous in almost any entry-level programming job, even if it wasn't before.
Most people who have made a website with CSS before would at best change the font size, the line spacing and the font face and tweak it to a point that feels easily readable and call it a day. Introducing variable widths between the characters of the font, digraphs and so on feels like more like exercising artisanship that only the experts would see value in rather than solving a technical problem.
Perhaps advanced web design/typesetting is the main application of this and it has a chance of inducing a better subconscious effect on the viewer. Sort of how magazines and books were designed back in the day I suppose.
>Linting, refactoring and testing all have obvious benifits for anyone who has done any small to medium sized project and has had to rewrite and debug some amount of code, even if they don't know the concepts by name
I'm curious but have you ever heard of anyone that works as a programmer that has not been especially keen on linting and testing (as in automated testing)?
I thought that examples of not being overly keen were quite abundant.
And it is often lamented on this site about how much work it is to get even people who have made a small to medium sized project and have the word programmer or developer in their job title to actually want to do linting and testing.
So what I'm saying is that at least for linting and testing yes, these really might seem like
>exercising artisanship that only the experts would see value in rather than solving a technical problem.
Yeah, I’ve been coding for 30 years, and to me, linting seems like alphabetizing the tools on your peg board. There are plenty of times where I want to break an expression into multiple lines—or not—in the service of readability. And there are no clear rules I could dictate to codify how I make that call.
I get that it helps people who are collaborating on large codebases. But to me, typography is orders of magnitude more important, because it’s facing the end-user.
And the answer is still no. Users / visitors don't care. We keep writing tools for ourselves and products, UIs, UXs, etc. *from the user's POV* aren't any better.
No one wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says, "I want to use an application build with React, has no tech debt, and has great commit msgs...".
I'm not suggesting the tech and stack don't matter. They do. But they are a means, not the ends. The sad fact is, the ends aren't - from the users' POV - noticeably better. More bloated? More buggy? Probably.
Honest question out of curiosity, since you seem genuine and open to discussion…
I agree with all of your points about Waymo vs. Uber-like ridesharing—the average Uber ride is so much less safe that it’s hard to argue for.
But I also agree with your aside about the growing isolation of society—the longer term implications of every event, meal, and errand being separated by autonomous journeys are staggering.
So the question is, how do the societal isolation factors play into your decision making? (Honest question, not a gotcha, I’m curious how others think about these tradeoffs.)
If you're already inclined towards isolation, like I am sometimes, driverless taxies will help with that. But if you're inclined towards going out and doing things, which I also am sometimes, there are few incentives more alluring than a fast and cheap way to get from point A to point B. If labor and gasoline are removed from the equation there's no reason rides can't be ridiculously cheap, and spending $20 on a round trip instead of $80 lowers one of the biggest barriers for going out (at least in urban areas and/or when drinking/drugs are involved).
I can spend more times at my friend's place, maybe have a beer or two without having to worry about driving back - so I think it encourages socialisation
I'm not sure if you mean about Waymo/self-driving cars or more broadly, but I'll assume you mean cars. Let me first say I'd love to create a list of all of the long-term pros and cons of self-driving cars because I'd be far better-equipped to answer, but my off-the-cuff thought: this technology, if it survives, will make it easier, safer, less stressful and less costly for people to transit, and will also make almost every place more livable (the impacts will be more profound in urban areas than rural, but both will benefit). That sounds like a great way to increase interactivity, not lessen it.
Uber sometimes offers a service called UberPool where you share the car with another passenger in order to save money right? Couldn't Waymo do the same?
Didn't Uber start branded as a "ride sharing" app where the app helped you find someone to car pool into work with?
I suspect an underlying issue with socialising is faith in humanity. It's hard to have faith in humanity in the modern world when every front appears to be telling you otherwise. If you don't have faith in humanity, then you're limited to only interacting with those: "you have to" and "are vetted".
They could in theory yeah. I’m not sure if Uber still offers it, but I think its uptake is so low (anecdotally from people I know) that it’s effectively not a solution to societal isolation, because it doesn’t end up being used.
Well, I’d say it’s different in a similar way that Uber’s are different from driving yourself. For physical trips it’s similar, but lower barrier to entry, so you do it more. And for deliveries it’s a much lower barrier because you don’t drive at all.
Plastics don’t sequester additional carbon. You literally have to pump oil out of the ground, where it was already sequestered naturally, to create plastics in the first place.
Yeah, but we are pumping oil anyways and there's all the money in the world against stopping it.
If we convert some of that pumped oil into a plastic that won't be burned but landfilled then we prevented some release of CO2.
If we use the plastic for packaging (instead of glass or metal) we saved energy (which translates today to CO2) and we saved fuel by transporting lighter packaging.
Plastic is pretty much the best thing that happened to humanity in relation to CO2 emissions.
Too bad we want to get rid of it because we find it unsightly, because we fail to properly sequester it at its end of life.
Unfortunately your logic is incredibly naive… it ignores the fact that (a) the money behind pumping oil is partly due to the plastics industry itself, (b) that creating plastic already burns fuels and releases emissions, and (c) that plastics are horrible for our ecosystems for reasons other than pure carbon emissions accounting.
It’s sad to see someone having been on HN for so long having such a myopic view of things.
I totally agree with (c) and believe it should be addressed. Plastics need to be collected when they become garbage and reused as building material and if not possible stored properly for next hundred or few hundred years. We need to create proper incentives for that. Reduction of plastic use should of course be encouraged but not at the cost of functionality. So peeled bananas in plastics should be banned, but juice bottles shouldn't be glass.
As for (a) plastic uses up about 6% of oil we dig up so political influence of plastic manufacturers is probably roughly proportional. That explains why we have paper straws while oil extraction and burning continues and increases completely unrestricted. Plastics are just the easiest political target.
And as for (b) making plastic takes less energy than making glass or metal for the same purpose, plastics also are lighter so produce less emissions in transport so if we magically waved away all the plastics our emissions would rise by many percent, not fall. And we can't just not use packaging because the we would waste even more food which would also cause emissions.
It's like with ethanol for cars. In theory it was supposed to save emissions. In practise it caused greater emissions due to land use change for the purpose of growing corn to make methanol.
Probably half of the things we do (my wild guess) to help the environment or emissions specifically actually increases emissions in the end.
It's sad to see that even on HN there is huge representation of mainstream simplistic views that don't recognize complexities of the world and the need for carefulness to not make things worse.
Lol you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
(a) The massive plastic producers are multinational oil companies, and they see it as a growing industry to capitalize on, so they are extremely influential lobbyists for maintaining plastic production.
(b) Anything that makes shipping lighter, cheaper, and generally more viable will result in much more shipping and thus much greater emissions, not less. This is always the problem with efficiency-driven arguments. (But it takes understanding the complexity of systems to understand this.)
(c) Of course the ecosystemic outcomes are devastating, and we still barely have the knowledge to understand the full impact.
(a) It's a developing market for them. They happily make investment there taking a slice of this pie. It's quite interesting that they do it despite all the media narration against plastic. I'm guessing they know that all the narration won't significantly impact actual volume of plastics sold. Maybe they already planned narration change. Maybe to something closer to reality of plastics impact on climat change?
(b) People won't reduce shipping when you make it more fuel intensive. They will just use more fuel. As long as the demand is there capitalism will mold everything to fullfill it. And the demand is already there.
(c) what could realistically be done is forcing plastic manufacturers foot the bill for cleanup. For example to be allowed to sell 1kg of plastics they should collect and recycle or landfill 1kg of plastic from the environment. To sell one kg of new plastic you need to buy 1kg of plastic waste. With full scruitany of the government paid for by special tax on plastic producers.
Thanks for the link. I'll read it even though I doubt I find anything new in there. It's basically mainstream narration at this point. Which means people with money paid for promoting it because it serves their profits. It's basically a smokescreen for the most profitable and harmful activity to peacefully continue.
Sounds much closer to an apologist than an optimist if you ask me.
Although more charitably, a future apologist—who maybe has good intentions, but hasn’t stepped back to gain context and realized that their projection is at odds with the systemic incentives in play.
So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
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