For those of us that, say, just got a new battery months before this was announced... a while ago (I forget when), there was talk of possibly sharing designs to enable repurposing them as power banks. Any word about that?
Also is there a way of exposing an existing touchpad to that new control board for your external one? (Or keyboard I guess, but the use case is that I had to replace my keyboard too, and for what was available at the time ended up just going with a whole input cover. Truthfully, I was already curious about exposing it to USB-C before hearing about this, and prefer wired anyway, but am also curious about the more immediately relevant part of the question.)
The competitive incentives between insurance companies in the US have pretty unfortunate consequences, and it would probably be good for people if rules could be changed in a way that socialised costs more across ages, etc. But so long as insurance companies are expected to be profitable, this argument is pretty poor.
The bird’s eye view of a health insurance policy is that you have some amount in premiums coming in, some amount of administrative expenses, some amount of profit/loss, and the rest is claims going out. As a percentage of premiums, the profits and expenses are pretty tiny. The reason for claims being denied is making the numbers balance out so as to not have the insurance company risk going bankrupt (insurance regulators tend to want insurers to be only writing policies they expect to make money on on average as insurance companies going bankrupt is bad for other policyholders). If you have a policy where you pay more in premiums, you can expect to have more claims approved.
The big reason healthcare is so expensive is not so much the small profits made by insurance companies as the large costs from providers (some is profit, some is remuneration for well paid doctors, some is having more expensive facilities or equipment or treatments than necessary). You could imagine a world where the insurance company is more of an agent for the patient, trying to avoid providers overcharging to keep premiums down, but that’s not the world we live in. There don’t seem to be good competitive pressures to reduce the costs from the providers. If you compare this to places where people often pay out-of-pocket for healthcare, providers can be much more conscious of this, eg for dental work there can be a choice of having a tooth removed, and then various different qualities of filling that can cost different amounts.
It's almost as if we could solve the problem by having only one payer (a "single-payer", if you will) primarily motivated by patient interest instead of profit motive exerting downward pressure on costs.
I don’t think that’s sufficient without mechanisms to keep down providers’ costs. Eg if a hospital decides to have private rooms for patients as opposed to open wards, should the single payer have to pay more? What if they just decide to charge a higher rate for surgery? Or prescribe a name-brand drug instead of a generic? I think you can look at the fights between Medicare and doctors unions in the US for examples of this, where the doctors seem to do a much better job of winning over public sympathy (though they have even more success when it’s an insurance company declaring they will pay Medicare rates for a procedure).
It does seem to be nonsense, yes. The duck test makes more sense. In the duck test, you can't claim something is an eagle if it walks and quacks like a duck. In POSIWID, however, you can't claim you intended it to be an eagle.
And if the tradeoff was grandma's health for child's health, people would be sympathetic to what you are saying. But the tradeoff was your health for his profit.
I'm not saying I'm for those over open source licenses in general, but Prusa brought up some fair questions when discussing the OCL. Essentially: define "personal use." Have I violated a non-commercial license if I print this keyboard and then use it to build someone a website? Does CC-NC mean a Prusacaster -- or any guitar knob with such a license for that matter -- is strictly barred from being taken on tour? Or used to record albums that are then sold? (And I say "guitar" knob, but I'm choosing an example a little consciously that could exist in any variety of controls, instrument and otherwise.)
Where are the lines of that when it's physical things? How far downstream does that go if it isn't CC-NC-SA in particular?
I'm not really sure that Creative Commons had the idea of physical production in mind, given that it dates back to a time when we were more broadly talking about digital piracy, and I honestly haven't kept up with its evolution much in more recent years. But maybe it just doesn't make the same sense for designs of physical things, for comparable reasons to why it wouldn't make sense for code -- and, conversely, open source projects that opt to use CC licenses for assets.
(None of this would stop me from attempting to build/mod one for fun, mind you. It just raises what a more averse person might call risks, and what I will at least call curiosities.)
Where are the lines of that when it's physical things?
The automotive aftermarket has largely settled that; even without the original design files, it's perfectly legal to make compatible parts, patents and the like notwithstanding. You can build an entire "small block Chevy" engine wholly from parts that GM did not make, and it will fit perfectly in a car that originally had the "genuine" one.
IANAL but as long as you don't violate any patents they have (if any) nor use their trademark, feel free to make and sell keyboards that look like theirs (not that a keyboard of their design is particularly distinctive anyway.)
Hasn’t Creative Commons disavowed or at least really downplayed the NC license for exactly these reasons? There are so many ambiguities and headaches involved that the only advice I’ve ever seen is not to use it.
- If it’s a company doing an NC license, probably best to be careful because they can make your life hell with lawyers.
- If it’s a random joe doing an NC license, feel free to ignore it because they don’t have the money to defend it anyway. Especially so if it’s CC-BY-NC-ND, people that pick that one are especially likely to be in the all-bark-no-bite category.
At least that’s how one of the companies I worked for treated CC licenses… I don’t work there anymore.
Likewise, I was unaware of this (and still see it in use regularly, especially on places like Printables as I've recently gotten my hands on a printer myself)
Not a lawyer, but as I understand it the license is a matter of copyright, and the copyright only applies to the design files. So as long as you're making that keyboard for yourself then you should be good to do anything you want with the keyboard, because it is no longer using the license at that point.
Now, what is interesting is if someone were to blatantly violate the license and start manufacturing commercial keyboards. I believe their only recourse would be to revoke their license of the design files, and then it would be copyright infringement. The thing is, I don't know how copyright law would handle any damages.
I don't know if making a physical product could be a violation of copyright, regardless of if you had a license to use the design in the first place. I could definitely imagine a company trying to enforce this, and a judge throwing it out because it should have been handled with patents.
> Not a lawyer, but as I understand it the license is a matter of copyright, and the copyright only applies to the design files. So as long as you're making that keyboard for yourself then you should be good to do anything you want with the keyboard, because it is no longer using the license at that point.
What if I take the design, print it, include the thing in a staged photo, and sell prints of the photo?
What if I skip the printing and use the design files as a basis for a rendered photo or animation?
What if I print the design, then use a 3D scanner to recreate a file from the physical artifact?
You're asking some pretty niche copyright questions that even a lawyer would have to spend time searching for case law for. It may be more expedient to look for that case law yourself.
Copyright law forbids the creation of derivative works (excepting any region-specific fair-use rules) so you're only allowed to create them under the rights granted to you in the terms of the license - thus under this particular license you can't make commercial use of derivative works.
But is a physical item a derivative work of it's technical specifications?
If the design files qualify for copyright protections, then modifications to them would clearly be derivative works.
I don't think it is clear if the keyboard itself would be a derivative work, as it almost certainly can't be protected by copyright. This is what patents are for.
The design files don't qualify for copyright protections, they describe the design which (maybe) qualifies for copyright protections.[0]
The artistic design of a specific keyboard can certainly be copyrighted, but not the functional nature of it.
[0]The exact wording might be protected, but not the factual information contained. Sports scores, or say measurements of a keyboard, are not copyrightable items as they are just facts, though their presentation might be.
> What if I take the design, print it, include the thing in a staged photo, and sell prints of the photo?
This is probably acceptable
> What if I skip the printing and use the design files as a basis for a rendered photo or animation?
This is probably NOT acceptable
> What if I print the design, then use a 3D scanner to recreate a file from the physical artifact?
If you used that for personal things yes that would be acceptable. I do not think that would give you the right to then sell that as a product neither digitally nor phsically
What if I'm a sculptor and I design and produce a statue? Shouldn't I still have the copyright to the statue, no matter what kind of machine I used to do the actual sculpting?
What if I print the design, then use a 3D scanner to recreate a file from the physical artifact?
Hmm, without patents it would definitely be fine to scan an existing one and recreate it. I think this would be fine too, but any time you are clearly going out of your way to skirt the law is a red flag. The thing is, I don't even think technical designs are copyrightable outside of their aesthetic value.
What if I take the design, print it, include the thing in a staged photo, and sell prints of the photo?
What if I skip the printing and use the design files as a basis for a rendered photo or animation?
If it is indeed covered by copyright, then these would likely be violations, though I guess it depends on how prominent it is in the staged photo.
Yeesh. People. C'mon. It's okay to use some common sense here.
Keychron is a keyboard/mouse company. It is VERY reasonable to interpret "non-commercial use" as meaning "don't sell mice/keyboards built or derived from these designs."
NOT "we are going to sue you if a 3D-printed copy of our mouse ends up in the background shot of your movie," or similar contrived madness.
I think CC originally did have producing physical items in mind. For example, one use case for the NC licenses for photos was that you can pay someone to make a print and frame it for you. This went sideways when Flickr offered to streamline the process because for many creators, NC means that no one (else) should be able make a profit using the work.
This is maybe just that I switched to Linux years ago and haven't touched Apple hardware much, but what strikes me is how little the OS matters anymore. So much of the tooling is cross-platform now, so many of the applications are web based, and so much of the native platform can know be emulated, that part of why the market share isn't guaranteed is a level of portability that didn't exist a decade or two ago.
Everything from Edge as a cross-platform Chrome derivative to .NET as a cross-platform open-source toolkit to their React Native builds and experiments with Android suggest that MS itself understands this. The Linux side demonstrates it with things like Proton and the forthcoming Android desktop mode. The Web demonstrates it in general as it expands in capability and more applications skip shipping native entirely in favor of technologies like Electron. And not that I don't personally sob in system RAM, or have extreme reservations about how we got these things (see: Google and antitrust), but I can't say I hate the ease of switchover.
Ecosystem lock-in didn't go away, but it feels like it's changed a lot.
Yeah but it's one of those cases where even if an alternative works 99% of the time, it still isn't worth it because of that 1%. Same with web browser compatible - that's why even Microsoft switched to Blink. Same with electric car range - "it covers 99% of your journeys!" isn't as persuasive as proponents would like.
I mean, relative to IE, everything else was the alternative.
Whereas in more recent years, keeping a closed-source rendering engine that was no longer competitive in implementing the spec, wasn't being used when people had a choice, and was being used as a dependency for core components of the OS, probably wasn't winning many arguments.
(Edit: yes, I know Chakra was open source. I meant Trident.)
Elon Musk is all of those things personally (see: that heil-handing incident), and it's public knowledge that he made the Twitter engineering team amplify his own posts.[1]
I'd say it's more that when I hoard links, a small slice of them end up becoming useful reference knowledge long-term.
Though I don't really have a system for storing them effectively as of yet, and as someone with a strong preference for open source on my critical workflows, I never got on the Obsidian train myself. Current experiment is Silverbullet.md, because I do very much like raw Markdown and file-based notes, but that's different from having a meaningfully fleshed-out setup haha
That makes sense — link hoarding is basically “maybe-useful reference capture”, and the hard part is turning that small slice into something retrievable without spending your life organizing.
The open-source + file-based constraint is a strong signal. One direction I’m exploring is to keep everything as raw sources (links/files) and build a local index over them, so you can pull a “what do I already have on X?” brief on demand, without needing a fully curated Obsidian-style setup.
For Silverbullet specifically: what would “meaningfully useful” look like for you as a first step?
1. better recall (fuzzy/semantic search over saved links + notes)
2. periodic resurfacing (a digest of “you saved this months ago, might matter now”)
3. extracting a lightweight summary + a few key takeaways per link
Details in my HN profile/bio if you want the longer context.
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