@anzo this comment originally posted on a Reddit ELI5 thread might be a better starting point for people who aren't familiar with Aaron's legacy and the controversy around his death.

I'll actually try to explain this like you're five, because that doesn't ever seem to happen on here anymore.

Aaron Swartz was a man who was a part of a whoooole lot of really cool things. He helped to make a thing called "RSS" which helps people learn all the stuff they want to without going to all the different websites that that takes. It's like if you want to make a sandwich, but normally you'd have to go to a bread store, a meat store, a cheese store, and a vegetable store. RSS makes it so you can get that all at once (and enjoy your sandwich much more easily).

Aaron also was part of a group of guys who helped give out information from "PACER", which is a big system full of information about what happened at courts. But, even though all of this information should have been free, they charged people for it. Imagine if each time you asked your teacher a question you had to pay a quarter. Even though that's their job, and it should be free, they made you pay. Well that sure did make some law-people mad. They started to investigate Aaron, but eventually stopped when they realized Aaron was right.

Aaron did some more stuff, too. You know this website you're on? Aaron was a big part of it at the very beginning. A lot of people call him one of the founders, but that's not entirely true. What is true is that Aaron helped to shape and mold and make this website what it is today. It's like when mommy buys you Play-Doh. She actually started it, but you're the one that made the amazing sculpture out of it (with help from your friends, of course).

Aaron also did something that made some people pretty mad. You see Aaron thought that information should be very free. He though that people like you, and me, and everyone else should be able to read as much information as we could on stuff. He thought that the work that scientists did at colleges should be seen by everyone! So he went to MIT to access JSTOR, basically a virtual library of science, and went "out of bounds" according to MIT. He went somewhere he wasn't supposed to go, and went there to try to get all this information and science from JSTOR, which he was actually allowed to do. The problem was like this though. Imagine Aaron went to the library. He can check out as many books as he wants, right? What Aaron wanted to do was check out every book, and make sure that everyone around the world had the same chance to read them that he did. But in order to check out those books, he had to go behind the desk, which was a no-no.

So what happened is that Aaron got in trouble with JSTOR, the library, and with MIT, who is pretty much the librarian. Eventually, JSTOR decided they didn't think Aaron did anything wrong, and didn't want to try anymore. MIT was a little slower though, and didn't say much. Then the US Attorney's office came in. They're like the cops that might come to the library. The owners of the library didn't think that you did anything wrong, and wanted the cops to leave. The librarian didn't answer as quickly though, so the cops stuck around and kept asking Aaron questions and checking through his pockets for stuff.

This whole thing was very scary for Aaron. Aaron didn't have a whole lot of money, and if he got in as much trouble as the cops wanted to put him in, he would have to give it all up, and go to prison for a long time. This scared Aaron a lot. This was especially tough for Aaron because he had been really sad for quite some time. It was a special kind of sad that doesn't go away with a tight hug from mom, so it was especially hard to deal with.

On Friday, Aaron hung himself. Some people think it was because he was so scared of the cops that he just couldn't deal with it. Some people think it was because he was so sad that he just wanted it to go away. But most people think it was a combination of the two.

There are a lot of people talking about it now though, because if the cops hadn't been so mean to Aaron, he'd probably still be alive today. This makes people very sad and very angry, because Aaron was a very smart, very kind person. We wanted him to stay around much longer than he did, and now we want to make sure that nothing like what happened to Aaron will happen to anyone else again.

@Yazer@lemmy.ca there is also the 50501 group organizing protests in all 50 states April 5.

As others have commented, there haven't been protests this large and often in the US since the Vietnam War. Organizing this takes time. Organizing without using billionaire owned services with questionable privacy policies takes even longer... but it is happening.

https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

@Tea@programming.dev being threaten with jail time and fines won't be enough, but the potential punishment needs to be so severe and harasment so relentless they'd consider hanging themselves instead. Aaron Swartz will not be forgotten.

@juergen@feddit.org "Fuck Elon" is becoming the punch buggy of this generation.

Combine a toxic brand with a level of ridiculously poor Quality Control we haven't seen from a US automaker since the Saturn brand, and you get a price point/distressd asset that PE will be looking at. They've already calculated the value of selling Tesla for parts and just waiting for the stock to hit a number to act. Elon is so over leveraged, there will be nothing he can do to stop it.

@Cris_Color@lemmy.world being nice helps establish the "tone", but I'm not sure that wouldn't change with another "API event" on Reddit that results in another, larger mass migration.

Another suggestion I have for college graduates is to ask your alma mater if they are going to start using something other than commercial social to engage with alumni.

Most universities don't want to make mistakes investing in the bleeding edge, but they are quick to follow. When a few schools do something, many more quickly copy that. They are also looking for low cost wins. Their engagement numbers are already telling them that Xwiiter no longer works to reach alumni or potential students.

If even a handful of alumni suggest a change at the right time, that is often enough to get them to give federated social a try.

That is when the less toxic "tone" really helps.

@OrganicMeatbag@sh.itjust.works Zoom Meeting Barbie - dressed for work waist up. Still in stained PJs and slippers waist down. Hair looks good from the front, but back of her head is a rats nest.

@Yazer@lemmy.ca my kids didn't have school yesterday because their teachers were protesting.

https://coloradosun.com/...

@CapriciousDay@lemmy.ml we already did this a decade ago with the Do No Evil license in https://www.json.org/license.html and learned the approach is not compatible with FOSS. Projects have added a layer of accountability with contributor agreements, but those only limit your ability to participate in the development of the project directly. They don't limit your rights to do what you want with the code.

@JollyTreecko@lemmy.dbzer0.com I am reading, up voting and commenting on this thread from https://kbin.melroy.org/...

The way I quickly explain the Fediverse to technical folks is it is like public email with voting and open trigger tracking baked in. ActivityPub is the SMTP of an ecosystem of multiple domains and clients with varying policies and features.

What is happening with Threads is very similar to when AOL started making it easier for the people within their walled garden to interact with the rest of the internet.

@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de @Carighan@lemmy.world

@L4s so does this mean I can no longer threaten to cancel my service and get an offer to pay 50% for 2x the speed? There might be an element of agism or elder abuse happening here too. When I check on what my parents pay for internet, they will just keep paying the marked up cost for slow service. They end up paying 2-3x more than someone who calls for new service and for a plan so slow the provider no longer offers it.

@alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml

@wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io

The thing about history is if you don't want your name associated with homeless Trump Towns in every city in America, maybe don't take a healthy economy and run it into the ground. Maybe don't let a PE hack who has never built anything like Tom Krause near the institutions the American people rely on.

https://www.history.com/...

https://pluralistic.net/...

@zachimusprime44@lemmy.world invisible bird people can intervene in your life if you ask to speak to their supervisor

@Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world my kids (8 and 11) play "fuck elon". It's slugbug for cybertucks. We don't encourage profanity, but don't punish them when they use it appropriately. This seems VERY appropriate.

Writing good alt text is more than just identifying the objects in an image. It requires some understanding of the context around why the image is being included. Harvard provides some great advice for humans to do this well at https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/....

Unless Elon puts Tesla's FSD team on this problem, it will be many years before AI can do this well. With the FSD team on it, it would only take a decade.

@dominiquec@lemmy.world

@MemmingenFan923@feddit.org can confirm. My son bought a set that was missing on of the bags. Filled out a form and uploaded a picture of the box + what he had built so far and the remaining bags. 48 hours later, we had the missing bag and he was back to building.

So many other brands wouldn't even respond to something like that. You'd have to take it back to where you bought it for a refund, buy another set and start the build again.

Lego customer service understands that their product is more than colored plastic.

@JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee isn't part of the point of ActivityPub to avoid vendor lockin/single point of billionaire enshittification? I read and interact with a fair amount of Lemmy content through an Mbin instance.

You can already limit Google using site:[DOMAIN].

If every ActivityPub driven service used a common TLD like .edus, you'd be able to limit results to that facet of Google's index, they don't. If they did, we'd be back to a single point of failure.

Google supports limiting searches to content using a Creative Commons license based on the licensing metadata in the URL. ActivityPub content already has the metadata, but it took a decade to generate enough content before Google offered the option to filter searches by CC-BY-SA... and Google was a VERY different company back then.

@hark@lemmy.world

@drmoose@lemmy.world

When I learned to write headlines 30 years ago, the goal was to capture the gist of the article. We'd write something like...

Proposd Take It Down Law Would Be Used as a Weapon

I'm not sure it's possible to train AI to write effectively headlines after 20 years of clickbaiting and controversy "journalism".

@shapis Almost 20 years ago, I followed Lawrence Lessig's RSS feed. He made a request for software that could be used to advance slides on a remote computer. I knew AppleScript fairly well and thought, "how hard can that be?". I wrote a one script that would "listen" for the text "Next Slide" in iChat and then try to advance whatever was open in PowerPoint. I wrote another script with a basic UI so the presenter could easily "type" Next Slide while presenting. It was basic, but it worked. I think I shared the code with an MIT license. Even though the code was free and Dr. Lessig already agreed to meet with a class about IP Law at the university I was working for at the time, he also contributed $50 to my project. He could have just downloaded the scipts and used them without paying anything, but that simple act changed my life. I realized that some people who could afford it would pay for code I even when I was giving away. Most people don't, but enough do that I've been able to continue contributing my code, helping to fix bugs in other people's code and sponsoring other projects today.

https://archives.lessig.org/indexb00c.html?p=2897

@chobeat@lemmy.ml

We are taught as Muslims, that we must do whatever we can when we see an evil.

It is funny (sad, not haha) that christians and jews claim to be taught the same thing.

@AidsKitty@lemmy.world

@juergen@feddit.org Are you a Tesla owner who only charges at Telsa charging stations? Tesla doesn't even own the majority of charging stations in the US. They only recently started allowing non-Teslas to use their chargers. Where did you think all the other EVs were charging?

Tesla will be taken over by PE who will sell off the charging network. Once rebranded as ChargePoint or Electrify America, they will will no lobger be targeted by vandalism and arson. The cost of removing the toxic Tesla brand isn't trivial, but the locations and infrastructure have value. They won't just be turned off when there is profit to made.

https://evadoption.com/...