Made me think of this bit from Tim Urban’s classic blog post, The Tail End[0]:
>It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
If you don’t mind my asking, what is the occupation you found? And what led you to an ADD diagnosis? (Asking as someone in their thirties who suspects they might have undiagnosed ADD.)
This project came about because we kept getting emails from companies saying something along the lines of “We’ve updated our terms of use. Click here to see the new version”. This was very annoying, as most of these emails would, at best, include a summary of the changes, but most often not give any indication of what changed, leaving you to hope there’s an archived version you can compare the new version with. We made Changewatch to help people see exactly what’s changed between versions of policies in a simple, human-readable way, so that they can know precisely what changes they’re agreeing to.
We’ve started by monitoring things like privacy policies from large tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., and over time we’ll expand the number of policies we track. Changewatch currently only accesses the UK versions of policies, but we’re planning to support multiple locales per policy in a future update.
Sites like https://tosdr.org/ do a good job of breaking down the meaning of different policies, but don’t solve our problem of knowing that something we had agreed to had changed, but not precisely what had changed. Some companies, like Google, keep archived versions of old policies, and include diffs, but this is by no means the norm, and in those cases Changewatch provides an independent verification of their claims.
We experimented with several ways of diffing natural-language text to try and find one that yields an intuitive and readable diff display. We ended up with a two-stage process where we first compare the two pieces of text by paragraph, and then by word. The resulting diff matches nicely with the original text structure, which helps with readability and comparison with the original document.
We faced several challenges with the scraping, some of which aren’t solved yet. For instance, Facebook (seemingly) randomly serves our scraper either the UK or the EU version of their privacy policy, even though we’re accessing it via a UK-based proxy. This results in policy revisions being created where the only changes are the differences between the UK and EU versions of the policy. Hence why Changewatch doesn’t currently track Facebook’s privacy policy.
Thanks for reading. We would love to hear your comments, feedback and suggestions.
As you say, it seems like there’s a significant grey area that needs to be resolved, and I could see it being quite difficult to figure out where to draw the line in practice.
Going by this definition of public domain, I don’t see how this could be the case:
> The public domain consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply[0]
Think of it this way. Imagine I wrote some code, and when I ran it it generated a piece of art. Surely I would have IP rights over the artwork? Otherwise you could make the same argument about art made with a somehow automatic paintbrush I built.
I hope I’m not talking at cross-purposes here and using a completely different definition of “public domain” was was intended, apologies if this is the case.
I'm not sure it's true that something being algorithmically generated means it's public domain. Plenty of assets for things like video games are procedurally generated, but that doesn't mean they're public domain by default.
I would argue that a lie involves deliberate deception, not just untruth. Fiction, then, is not a lie, as by definition it is something imagined or invented, and therefore not created to deceive.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, it was really interesting to hear your point of view.
I can't imagine what it must have been like to lose seven children before birth. I have a young daughter myself, so things like that really hit home. I'm glad that you were able to recover and keep going with the help of your faith.
>It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html