Mein Deutsch ist nicht das Gelbe vom Ei, aber es geht.

Bekannt? aus /r/germany, /r/german, /r/greek und /r/egenbogen.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Although I never used it, I am aware that Calibre can serve books in your local network. I imagine that this offers some position and annotation sync.

    Also, a bit off-topic for this sub, but… how do you read? E-readers? Tablets? Software choices?

    Unfortunately, there was never great ebook hardware. I use a tablet with Android. KOReader for ePub, constantly trying new Android PDF readers but finding nothing decent.

    While not intentionally, running Syncthing between all my computers means that my PDF annotations get synced across devices. ePub ones do not; afaik KOReader uses its own metadata format that it stores as a standalone file.

    Before, when I was still in university, I used Zotero also for annotation management. Feels like an overkill nowadays since I only read for leisure.



  • Let’s not overstate Duolingo’s effectiveness for language learning.

    The technological challenge to adopting a self-taught language learning method into an app is rather small. You just need the content. Either you develop the course under a Free Culture license, or you purchase the rights for an existing method and you port it. Plus maybe some volunteers to handle user-interaction.

    A good example is the VHS Lernportal which implements three levels of German class in a way that actually has some pedagogical merit. It’s killer-feature is nothing technological, but that they have some teachers in the backoffice that will read your occasional text-production exercises and offer corrections (no, language tool wouldn’t be able to replace humans in that case, because language tool doesn’t know what you are trying to say and therefore gives you multiple guesses but no way to know which one you actually need).











  • I basically take the position “you need a different, non-confusing term”. Open Code is not such a term.

    My view is shaped from the cultural realm more so than the software side, but I think the concern at the centre of it is transferable: it becomes extremely messy to capture the desired acceptable uses in the legal wording of an enforceable license. The outcome is that every use will have to be individually authorised.

    I was helping run and occasionally held the editor role of a leftist magazine which we decided to make Free Culture under CC-BY-SA. Content using the Non Commercial clause gave us such headache, while even though we did not charge for the magazine nor we ran adverts, we accepted and strongly encouraged donations from our readers. That money went to pay off the printing costs (the NC clause already has a problem with that, but we assumed that would still be defensible), but the rest was also invested in other endeavours like public events, or eventually helping fund a community centre.

    At that point, it didn’t matter if creators with NC works released them under a supposedly free license. Our -in our opinion- non-for-profit use was still so tainted with money changing hands, that we still needed to seek their consent and get a written permission on top of the original license. At the end of the day, it was the same as working with All Rights Reserved works, where we get a special license from a sympathetic creator. The NC clause solved nothing for us.

    That part is, I believe, the same with software licenses. We will end up having to get 1:1 license agreements for so many things because the new anti-commercial licenses will not be able to predict all the scenarios which are “false positives” for the anti-capitalist software developer (as in, some desirable re-uses will be blocked by the license, and individual licensing agreements will be needed often).

    My focus would be to fix the loopholes that go counter to the copyleft spirit in AGPL, if such loopholes are identified, and perhaps get a more reliable organisation handle the AGPL definition in the future.



  • This will sound very pessimistic, but I think what you are witnessing is a more accentuated version of reality.

    It’s more intense for a number of reasons (it takes less dedication to spread hate online, these communities are small so moderation isn’t as effective, the userbase is small so a few users make a bigger splash, communities of this technical nature have a historical lineage that selects for a certain strain of uncritical laissez-faire individualism, etc), but they are nothing that is totally alien to the rest of a given society.

    Reality won’t let us catch a break, we are forced to actively maintain the good stuff at any given moment.