The way I remember it, on old phones before smartphones, speakerphone was a very obscure feature that many users didn’t know how to turn on. I certainly didn’t (I was a child at the time) unless someone showed me.

On modern smartphones it’s very easy, maybe that should be changed again. 😁

I use speakerphone a lot in my own home too when no one is around. It’s just more comfortable to hold my phone in front of me instead of to my ear. Never in public unless specific other people need to hear it.

I’m not sure if that law will pass/has passed,

It has already passed the legislature and been signed into law, but not become operative yet, won’t until 2027-01-01.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.

I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(

I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently

Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621

Is our entire information “ecosystem” so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they’ve already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!

OK, that’s about the elaboration I was looking for…

Somehow I don’t think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn’t explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.

Billionaires certainly are people, but these laws don’t even serve billionaires in any meaningful sense, so that’s hardly an explanation without more elaboration.

In my youth I was taught that democracy meant that the government served the people.

What do any of these laws have to do with serving the people? Do they have anything to do with the will of the people?

I miss the days when making money from posting things on the Internet wasn’t really a (widespread) thing. In the earliest days of YouTube there was no partner program, everyone who uploaded anything there did so out of enthusiasm; if we still had that, maybe we’d have fewer videos overall, but no one would have a reason to post AI slop or other low-quality videos just for profit.

It used to be that similar (and equally bad) ideas were getting traction because of copyright law, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act

Now other excuses for the same thing have been invented. I wonder which will be next.

This debate is about as old as the existence of free licenses. I doubt anyone will have anything new to say in this thread.

One aspect that isn’t raised very much is that for a company to maintain software (including their own fork of any software however licensed) costs developer time (= money). It may be cheaper to contribute back anyway, no matter the license, just in order to outsource that effort. If we are talking about software where this is true, companies have an incentive to work with the existing maintainers even if they aren’t legally obliged to.

The thing about PDF is that the whole point of PDF is that it shouldn’t be easy to edit. So you’re asking for hacks around something that isn’t supposed to be easily possible.

It’s possible to import PDFs into Inkscape. But my experience is that the result is usually not very easily editable (probably depends on the PDF) because it puts everything into very complex groups and other structures.

What if I’m running an email client in the terminal? ;)

I myself prefer dark mode for everything. But if somebody prefers a bright background, why would they not in the terminal too?

It makes sense to use the same setting for this, at least by default, as for dark and light mode in general. Why would you want your terminal dark but your email client bright?

???

I agree with that of course.

and it seems to be not true at all that “California just killed” anything, so far the bill has only been introduced, not passed as the title implies

sad John Perry Barlow noises

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

That is one option. I myself use VSCodium (vim mode <3) for all my text editing; if you want to avoid that, there is also Kate.