Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.

Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.

https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c

Fundraising drive coordinated with their loudest employee saying something else, because... of course.

Set up after the lawsuits that nearly wiped out his personal assets, Brewster Kahle's latest foundation shows $743 million in assets.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/991...

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-arc...

"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"

John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead: "We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."

https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...

Depending on when you click his feed, the ongoing downtime is due to DDoS attacks, bad actors, AI scrapers, power problems, or now an inability to source hard drives.

https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Cost_of_...

Doctorow, Kottke and others didn't seem to think it was odd that a 14 year old was being flown around the country without his parents present. They pre-gamed at a house instead of a bar because Aaron was too young; the host, then nearly twice his age, later dated him. Didn't end well. And then things really didn't end well.

Epstein made his first contribution to MIT that same year (2002). Lessig arranged for Joi Ito to meet Aaron a year later. According to MIT, Joi Ito met Epstein for the first time one month after Aaron died in 2013.

In the most charitable reading of the situation, Aaron was robbed of his childhood.

Sickly Jewish kid has his childhood stolen, gets radicalized, hangs himself is a much more painful story to read. More importantly, it demands actual answers. No wonder it never got told. It's not exactly Brighton Beach Memoirs.

Aaron attracted influential and creepy people and was ill-equipped to handle it. He was also working through a period of sexual awakening while being used by older people to advance their agendas. Little of it would meet contemporary standards of appropriate behavior given his physical and psychological state. I spent some time with him before this went down and was horrified by what I saw.

I was not in a position to help him address his mental health, nor in the right physical location to have positive influence, which is what was needed. Then he cracked under the pressure of this and nobody could get through. This was obvious to all involved at the time and that's the part of the prosecution that still makes no sense to me, from all institutions involved. They all have blood on their hands.

It's not hard to find continuing bad behavior by individuals near him at the time. I've given up on them being held accountable. Let the child rest.

Find some code you're proud of. Find someone else's code you admire. Find something that's been stable for 20 years with no bugs reported. Feed it in, ask it to look it over, and prepare to be humbled.

“No true Scotsman” would require me to redefine “senior developer” to exclude people who disagree with me. I didn’t.

And “you’re holding it wrong” is a strange objection to a tool that, like Git, rewards learning how to use it. The question is whether that learning pays off.

I don't recommend web work, the last ten years or the next ten. Wouldn't touch the stuff. I skipped the phone app era, too.

Early digital hardware makes a lot more sense if you approach it with a voltmeter instead of a truth table.

The issue isn't letting end-users add features. The issue is twelve end-users customizing something that produces output, saving it, and now nobody can read it.

This can get solved. If it even gets a chance to gain traction (it should, though IT will of course push back). But let's not pretend we're there yet.