Literally every movie ever made was made by an LLC created specifically to make that movie. This is not some nefarious thing. It’s common business practice in any number of industries
The whole reason why the Catholic Church doesn't allow priests to be married anymore was because it used to be that the individual churches were mostly the property of the priest, and would be passed down generationally (with some restrictions). The church phased in the ban on marriage so that over time, the churches would all in up in the estate of a priest with no heirs, where they'd become the property more formally of the Catholic Church proper. Today the Catholic Church is the single largest landowner in the world, with about 170 million acres.
More recent religious organizations have taken note of that, with LDS owning about 2.4M acres.
Your comment dragged me into a rabbit hole, which is always a welcome surprise.
From my readings, one can always debate whether this reason for celibacy is whole or not (of course, more holy reasons were given, like purity of the ritual among others), but avoiding inheritance from father to sons was certainly a big factor. By barring heirs from the equation, it solved the whole dispute over inheritance. Yet, when it comes to clerical office and priesthood, "property" is not quite right, since it's mostly about usufruct and benefices, moreso. Which can be significant assets, that goes without saying, hence the Church did everything it could, for holy and not-so-holy-reasons, that traditional generational transmission does not apply. No next generation, no problem.
Quite importantly to the Roman Catholic Church, they wanted to avoid dynasties of priests that would grow in importance and out of their control, so they did whatever they could (ban marriage and fatherhood) so that a mis-aligned priest would only be a temporary nuisance to the Institution.
A lot went into this short burst of investigation, like the fact that early Churches were private property of land-owners, building churches for indulgences and power, reinforcing their ties with the Church, and I may dig deeper. Thanks for your comment again, if you have some references you recommend, I'd appreciate you share them!
I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean I or the GP used LLMs?
If you mean I did, yes, I have, to begin with, to get an overview and links. But to do any of the reading or to write my comment? No. What's wrong with that?
That does not sound correct. Priests in Eastern rite Catholic churches get married, but they do not own the land in which their parish chirch stands and they do not pass that land on to their children. Note that the Catholic Church itself does not own that land, either. As I understand it, in most cases the parish land is owned by a Catholic episcopal See or eparchia, as in Latin rite Catholic Churches, in which the diocese owns the land.
I literally had never heard of this before. I don't check HN every single day.
It's extremely reasonable to ask for a link, very easy to include one when making a claim, and attacking someone for asking for evidence is extremely anti-intellectual independent of the level of effort required.
(n.b. that doesn't excuse the hostile way that they asked for proof - "Let's all just believe this baseless assertion shall we")
They were pointing out the lack of evidence on my part. I agree it was rude but I don't think it's helpful to start calling it misinformation with no evidence. They had a valid point that not everybody Just Knows already, hence why I did reply with a link. I don't think it's constructive to jab much more than I did in that reply.
In some parts of the internet you can't mention a pirate site (or left wing stuff, anything sexual, or Palestine) without being banned. HN isn't one of them, but people have learned to be overly cautious.
Correct:Also, archive.* has actively edited archived sites to promote their agenda. Why folks continue to use them confuses me. One would think the big wikipedia purge would curb such behavior.
They bulk replaced one string (a name) with another one across many archived pages, and added malicious code to all archive pages that would rapidly send requests to gyrovague.com in an attempt to DDOS them.
Just out of curiosity, how do we know that what is in the Wikipedia comments is accurate? I have no skin in the game. I was just wondering. Anybody can post anything on Wikipedia comments. I find it odd that Ars Technica would use that as a source. Maybe it's fine for gossip and speculation but it shouldn't be in Ars Technica then.
And you obviously have no reason to believe me, but I was following this when it was happening at the start of this year and can confirm that the DDoS script and archive text replacements really did happen.
Convenience as a higher order motivator than disgust at the bad behavior of archive.{today,ph,...} mentioned elsewhere, I think is the point of the comment to which you replied.
That isn’t the point being discussed. The point being discussed is that it’s bad form to abuse a service (archive.org) that is provided for free, for the public good in order to run commercial scraping operations.
Yes, arguably, and for reasons I already gave. I’d genuinely spend a bit more time reading and thinking rather than replying. Your replies are pithy but you’re missing details and frankly making cognitive mistakes. (Apologies if this seems harsh, I don’t mean it as an insult, but this thread has blown up entirely unnecessarily- and yes, I know I’m not helping either!)
It is different, precisely because the end result is not the same - one broadly benefits the public while the other doesn't.
Substitute almost any disruptive public service to see the issue with your line of reasoning. For example - you seem to think that [ bulldozing private property ] to "construct an emergency fire break" is somehow different than [ bulldozing private property ] for any other reason.
Never mind that the sort of scraping being objected to is actually harmful to service health while what the wayback machine does is almost entirely unnoticeable.
The minuscule traffic generated by the wayback machine, which serves to preserve the content for years to come, is completely incomparable to the scrapers that hammer every single href linked on a website.
I'm guessing you use search engines, right? Those use scrapers and have to use scrapers. It's how they work.
A "scraper" is simply an automated process that fetches URLs intended for display to a human, and processes it. The act of scraping doesn't imply anything about:
1. The frequency of the fetches,
2. The way that the resulting page is processed.
Search engines scrape. Again, they have to. Same goes for archive.org.
Thing is, there aren't tens of thousands of search engines/archive.orgs that can overload a site at once.
Given that the root of the discussion is about Internet Archive being hit with huge traffic and not the functionalities provided by Wayback Machine, it very much is a distinction with a difference.
Internet Archive's traffic may not matter to you, but that's the main topic of this discussion, regardless of what you care or use website archival tools for.
No they don't. Archive.org is co-operative, it respects robots.txt and allows deletion. It's also very slow. Archive.* is adversarial and archives sites that don't like it. That's why the FBI is trying to take it down.
They are 2 different services, run by different people, one goes out of their way to bypass paywalls while the other doesn't, one is banned by Wikipedia and the other isn't, etc.
I think it's a distinction worth making.
Not to mention that the Wayback Machine itself isn't exactly a good tool to bypass paywalls as most paid sites don't let them archive paywalled content anyway.
Yeah, you're mistaken. One archives web pages, the other maintains a list of paid-access accounts and fetches information from behind paywalls as a service.
archive.org is the more straight-laced archive that doesn't circumvent sites that try to block it, and removes content they deem 'problematic' even if not illegal or requested by the site owner.
Meanwhile archive.today/ph/is/etc is the guerrilla alternative run by a die-hard datahoarder that seeks to archive the information itself, bypassing whatever blockers/login pages/whathaveyou to achieve the result.
It's nice to have both options. When I archive a site, I usually use both for added resiliency.
I don't think anyone is faulting Tailscale for using their blog to advertise, and no one is faulting Tailscale for how they handled this situation in general, or their response to it.
The issue is acting like their response is 'brave' in anyway, or altruistic. It can be considered admirable only to the extent any company doing a good job running its business can be.
This is a good, smart response to what happened. They are approaching this incident as a way to improve their product and offer a better service to their customers. That is good, and it is fine to reward them with your business in response. There is nothing wrong with making good business decisions, but it isn't something that we need to unduly respect.
i said i have a lot of respect for this. whether you do or not is up to you.
anything a company writes is an advertisement by the nature of being written by a company. i dont think that means anything a company writes is bad by default. there are many corporate blogs i enjoy reading, or learn from, etc., despite the fact that they are all technically advertisements.
in this case, tailscale is setting a higher expectation for themselves when no one asked for it. i find that respectable.
> tailscale is setting a higher expectation for themselves
What exactly is the higher expectation? As someone with little expertise and no stake in any of this, the blog reads as "our products are great and could have solved this problem if they were being used correctly, so it's not our fault" with a few vague proclamations about how they will improve their UX. This isn't at all a bad thing, it just isn't very notable in my opinion.
better defaults, better documentation, better UX, and "But, we didn't stop it. Next time, we will." are all commitments that they didn't need to make, but now they need to follow through with or lose face.
>it just isn't very notable in my opinion.
i agree that this seems to be getting way more attention than i would have expected.
I have recently noticed that the words "ad" or "marketing" have become, in and of themselves, with no additional information or context, slurs or dismissals.
I understand why. The modern internet has turned advertising into a morass of constant bombardment and the only sane response is to block as much as possible and ignore as much else as possible.
But it's unfortunate because, in some sense, ever single thing that a company every says that is not legally mandated in some way is a form of advertising.
And in many cases, that "advertising" contains true, useful information that can be helpful.
What is important isn't whether or not something is an "ad", but instead, whether or not it contains true information that is helpful in some way.
Many ads don't reach this bar. They are either misleading, straight up lying, or information that is almost completely useless.
But when I'm searching for a particular product, about the only source of information at all is some form of advertising, and I almost always find at least some amount of it to be helpful in making a product decision.
Ads are more often than not polluting to the informational ecosystem, but that's not because they are ads.
Fun corollary: Self-promotion is only considered to be advertising, marketing, or spam when it’s describing someone else’s self-promotion. When it’s describing one’s own, it’s not a perjorative :)
Nintendo is probably THE most aggressive company in the industry in terms of going after people for using their IP in unauthorized ways. They don't have a blind eye.
I am p sure Showdown only still exists because it would crater their official VGC league if they'd shut it down. And with Champions out now it is slightly more likely they would go after it, but they know that it isn't possible to iterate and test teams as fast in it as it is in Showdown (and I doubt they plan on changing that considering the limitations seem very intentional).
the "Waymo Driver" is how they refer to the self-driving platform (hardware and software). They've been pretty consistent with that branding, so it's not surprising that they used it here.
> Importantly, Waymo takes full ownership for something they write positively [...] But Waymo weasels out of taking responsibility for something they write about negatively
Pretty standard for corporate Public Relations writing, unfortunately.
right-click, search Google: "MSK most commonly refers to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a world-renowned institution for cancer treatment and research"
