Because you popularized it, GitHub admins took it down.

The world belongs to those who do the work. Capitalism sucks, but it’s always capitalists who drive the production of things. It doesn’t have to be that way but it is because we are lazy. SteamOS exists because Valve put in the work. Any of us here could have made SteamOS. We didn’t because we are lazy.

why do you write the obsolete English letter “thorn”? is this your Homestuck typing quirk?

There are layers below the bits. Writable CDs are made from different chemicals, so it’s obvious they are copies. Heck, some of them are obviously different colours, like blue.

Optical media don’t even have a bitstream. When you dd from something other than a CD-ROM, it’s not clear what you’re getting. You might just get an error saying it’s not a CD-ROM. Different kinds of CDs use completely different encoding layers in between “the bitstream” and the actual pattern of dots engraved on the disk. Obviously a CD-ROM has “a bitstream” because it’s designed purely for computer use and the computer wants to see it as a bitstream, but for other kinds it’s not so clear.

You can’t fast-forward or rewind an audio CD in a CD player is that the CD player has no idea which sector it’s on. At most it can just count how many seconds of audio it’s played so far. It just keeps the laser locked on to the spiral, and keeps playing as long as the data keeps coming. And there’s some kind of skip code for tracks so you can skip to a track number, but only for tracks. If it accidentally skipped over a bit of audio it would have absolutely no way to know, that’s why programs like cdparanoia employ so many heuristics to know they got it right. A CD-ROM by contrast has a sector number on every sector, because that’s non-negotiable for computers.

There’s no such thing as a bit-for-bit copy of anything, you are always deciding what to copy and what not to copy. When you copy a file you might or might not copy the last modified time.

Optical disks use error-checking codes. You usually don’t want to copy those. Even on a non-encrypted disk you don’t want to copy a scratch on your disk onto a new disk with a scratch, you want to decode it and then encode it again to one with the scratch patched over. And it would make your file bigger for no reason when copying to a medium that can’t scratch.

ISO format is designed for computer disks. It doesn’t work for audio disks or other types of things you can put on a CD. ISO has the bitstream as a computer reads the filesystem, which is already after several layers of decoding. Audio CDs don’t use that decoding so they can fit more data, so they just can’t fit in an ISO file.

Encryption is like this too. If you could just copy an encrypted disk as an ISO and it would still work, that’d be shitty encryption so they wouldn’t bother with it. They use tricks to put data outside of the normal copied areas. A really old form of copy protection was to mess up the lower layers - write a sector that would look so scratched it was unreadable, and if you can read it, it must be a copied disk. Or write the same sector several times, so the drive will find a different version of it depending on where it started from. The PS1 wrote the track a bit wobbly, like the CD writer was drunk, but not so wobbly the PS1 couldn’t read it, then used the shape of the wobble to encode a signature that said it was a genuine disk. Don’t ask me how Bluray DRM works, I don’t know it, but it must be using similar kinds of tricks. Storing data in the disk’s barcode was another trick some consoles did.

there’s anti-AI, and there’s ridiculous anti-AI hysteria, they aren’t the same

Did you know that “fascist” has a meaning?

You are saying: “I don’t want to call people racist, because what if it turns into a slippery slope and everyone is called a racist? That’s what racists want.”

we should normalize accusing fascists of fascism

Ridiculous anti-AI hysteria is pushed by the AI companies themselves to make the anti-AI side look insane. Don’t fall for it.