If you thought habitat destruction from palm oil was bad, that would be nothing compared to coconut oil making up any significant fraction of jet fuel.

They have done zero to destroy the durability. In fact, it’s probably more durable.

If the physical copies are scarce, that is due to the publisher and copyright laws and not them buying and converting a single copy.

If they were that significantly harmful it would be massively obvious at that level of prevalence.

Is that blameworthy?

Many times it's fine to repeat yourself. Many times it's fine for a component to cross multiple concerns.

This looks hopelessly naive now. Programmers need to eat. Cyberspace runs on physical electricity and data centers. Communication requires physical cables and/or physical transmitters and receivers. Chips are manufactured in a physical location. You need a physical place to live. Your kids need schools and playgrounds.

The past 10 years if not longer have driven home the physicality of “cyberspace”.

Most people probably don’t care.

I bet there were painters in the 1800s who talked about how people hated photographs and how they were uncanny and creepy compared to paintings.

Every feature has a cost and port to a different architecture has a huge cost in ongoing maintenance and testing.

This is open source. The maintainer isn’t refusing a port. The maintainer is refusing to accept being a maintainer for that port.

A person is always free to fork the open source project and maintain the port themselves as a fork.

If they ever seize your computer, they can probably also tack on computer fraud charges

One effect of widespread books is we don’t have poets like Homer. We don’t develop the memorization skills like they did in the past.

And that’s ok.

We can use the bandwidth for other stuff.

Congratulations, you rediscovered commercial software - where you are legally obligated pay to use software.

Look at photography.

You have both - the point and shoot people and the ones that use photography as a craft.

And I am seeing that with LLMs as well. You do have craft people that find joy in figuring out craft the perfect one shot prompt or create a system that coordinates a bunch of agents.

That is also craft, but like photography, craft with a more capable tool.

> He used to hold long book club style readings of his books among the prominent literateur in his times to exactly impinge in their minds that what he writes is clever and not gibberish.

My was so clever, that he had to verbally harangue people into finding his writing clever.