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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s not really appropriated, as it’s still the same thing, just being used for a purpose other than the one it was originally invented for. Plenty of things end up useful for things other than why they were invented but retain a name based on the original very specific use case that doesn’t make sense for their common use case. USB’s name isn’t appropriated when a device charges over USB-PD and uses resistors on the channel configuration pins to set the current limits without a serial connection, despite serial bus being part of the name.


  • That’s not the kind of privacy that the phrase is referring to. One of the main uses of VPNs is to make it so people not on a local network can see devices as if they were on the same local network (e.g. to access an office intranet while working form home) without having to open those devices up to the public internet. For that kind of VPN, everyone involved typically knows who everyone else is and exactly what they’re using it for, but the office printer is still kept private within the group.


  • You’ve probably created something that would be considered a DRM circumvention device under the DMCA, so possessing it would be illegal unless it’s covered by one of the exceptions. If you think it might be, then you’re probably in a legal grey area as there isn’t case law settling whether the exceptions override the parts about DRM circumvention, but it’s fairly widely accepted that they probably do - DRM-era console emulators like Dolphin rely on it being legal to bypass the games’ DRM in order to interoperate with other computer systems, and no one’s been brave enough to sue them for that interpretation yet.

    If it is illegal, the most likely outcome is just that someone does a DMCA takedown request and GitHub would take it down and that would be the end of that, which is pretty much the same thing as would likely happen if anyone didn’t like it but it was legal, as it’s easy to submit takedown requests, but hard to appeal them if they’re unjustified.







  • Chemically, Sodium and Lithium are very similar, so any improvement that applies to one should be pretty applicable to the other. That’s actually one of the main strengths of Sodium batteries - most of the research that’s already gone into making Lithium batteries can be reapplied with minor tweaks. However, Sodium is inherently larger and heavier than Lithium, with fewer atoms fitting into the same space and those atoms weighing more. If research for Sodium batteries catches up with Lithium ones, they’ll still be worse just because of that, and at that point, research would get easier gains from improving Lithium batteries than Sodium ones.