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skullgiver

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Giver of skulls

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skullgiver ,
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Damn, they really overfit their music models. With image generation and text prediction it's very hard to prove a direct connection, but with four or five of those songs it's unmistakable that the original songs were used to generate the music output

I wonder what the effect will be of fixing the models' overfitting. I'm guessing it'll generate worse music, or they would've done so already.

Quite sad that it took the music industry to notice before any lawsuits with a chance of succeeding got off the ground.

skullgiver ,
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Could be that your phone lacks the necessary certificate authorities. I don't think I've seen this happen on anything newer than Android 7 before, but maybe some root cert expired that I don't know about.

If you haven't already, try a reboot. The WebView server may be initialized once, and if you've just activated the cert in Magisk then you may need a reboot to activate it.

If not, I'm guessing the app explicitly does something to only use a particular system trust store.

skullgiver ,
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Looks like people are finally finding out they've been using AI all along.

Seems to me that employing the use of AI to alter an image should be labeled as "made with AI". It's not made by AI, AI was merely one of the tools used.

If you don't like admitting you used AI, just strip the metadata, I guess. This feels like something you should be able to turn off in your editor's settings, but I guess Adobe hasn't implemented that.

This comment was made with AI, as my phone's keyboard uses AI to automatically complete words, in a process strikingly similar to how ChatGPT works.

skullgiver ,
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The edits are what makes it made with AI. The original work obviously isn't.

If you're in-painting areas of an image with generative AI ("context aware" fill), you've used AI to create an image.

People are coming up with rather arbitrary distinctions between what is and isn't AI. Midjourney's output is clearly AI, and a drawing obviously isn't, but neither is very post-worthy. Things quickly get muddy when you start editing.

The people upset over this have been using AI for years and nobody cared. Now photographers are at risk of being replaced by an advanced version of the context aware fill they've been using themselves. This puts them in the difficult spot of wanting not to be replaced by AI (obviously) but also not wanting to have their AI use be detectable.

The debate isn't new; photo editors had this problem years ago when computers started replacing manual editing, artists had this problem when computer aided drawing (drawing tablets and such) started becoming affordable, and this is just the next step of the process.

Personally, I would love it if this feature would also be extended to "manual" editing. Add a nice little "this image has been altered" marker on any edited photographs, and call out any filters used to beautify selfies while we're at it.

I don't think the problem is that AI edited images are being marked, the problem AI that AI generated pictures and manually edited pictures aren't.

skullgiver ,
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Is there a database of "this IP belongs to this state" these companies use? Or do they just use GeoIP stuff? I don't want my Lemmy server to accidentally violate American laws and get in trouble/banned, so I may need to start doing some IP filtering myself.

skullgiver ,
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Same with Microsoft. I have a Microsoft account for a Gmail address, but Microsoft doesn't realise that they should disable Outlook, leading to the funny weird situation where you can log in to Outlook.com with a Gmail address and enter a completely useless empty mailbox. I bet Google has the same quirk.

Alright, I guess I could enter IMAP or POP details and use Outlook as some kind of email client by proxy, but that's an even worse idea.

skullgiver ,
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These companies typically use AI analyses of uploaded files to prevent people from doing stuff like upload child porn. Unfortunately, they can't distinguish between "pedo shit" and "picture of naked child with a nasty rash emailed to a doctor".

Several people have lost years of email because they uploaded pictures like those to OneDrive. By separating accounts, you can keep your files and your email separate.

There have also been instances of people attacking others by inviting them to WhatsApp groups (which still isn't disabled by default) and spamming a bunch of illegal shit. If you have WhatsApp set to auto backup, you may just end up sending that illegal shit to Google, who in turn detects it and kicks you out of your account.

For this reason, I think it's a good idea to separate any cloud storage accounts from your email accounts.

skullgiver ,
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In theory you get the benefit of them banning your Drive Google account and leaving your email Google account alone. Google will probably link the two, but I don't think the ban will cross accounts automatically.

"Moderation tools are nonexistent on here. It also eats up storage like crazy [...] The software is downright frustrating to work with" - Can any other instance admins relate to this?

After a year online the free speech-focused instance 'Burggit' is shutting down. Among other motivations, the admins point to grievances with the Lemmy software as one of the main reasons for shutting down the instance. In a first post asking about migrating to Sharkey, one of the admins states:...

skullgiver ,
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I've got my Mastodon and Lemmy servers hooked up to a postgres server that's running separately, and the CPU usage between the two is now about the same.

That actually proves that Lemmy is more efficient, because it's handling a hell of a lot more data. I don't follow a lot of big accounts, and I'm the only user on my server, so I rarely get more than 40 posts + metadata through Mastodon. On Lemmy, however, each post can easily produce hundreds of events to process because of comments and likes all federating out.

In total, Lemmy seems to be heavier, but only because it does more. Mastodon is super inefficient, especially with things like RAM. I think it has something to do with the framework and language it's running on; Gitlab seems to be using the same runtime and that eats through RAM like crazy as well.

skullgiver , (edited )
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Apply the steps on https://dontkillmyapp.com/ to Google Play Services and Google Play Messaging, that may help. Also check if you have an app running in the background that eats all of your RAM and forces the OS to clear up scheduleable tasks.

Thirty minutes is way longer of a delay than I've ever seen. You may want to try a factory reset in case it's a ROM issue. Fairphone has had its ups and downs over the years when it comes to the built in software.

How many people actually want fully on-site IT jobs?

I've been looking for a new job as a software developer. The huge majority of job listings I see in my area are hybrid or remote. I just had an introductory phone call with Vizio (which didn't specify the location type in the job listing). The recruiter told me that the job was fully on-site, which I told her was a deal breaker...

skullgiver ,
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I've heard a lot of people about how much they enjoy working fully remotely. Almost all of them have a separate home office room to work in.

skullgiver ,
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ActivityPub doesn't do DMs per se. Many ActivityPub implementations will use AP messages that are not posted on any public list or timeline. Basically, a Tweet with visibility set to "only people mentioned in this thread".

This design makes it quite easy for AP servers to misimplement DMs. Asking a server for all messages of a particular user (to get their timeline) and forgetting to filter out messages not published globally is trivial to get wrong.

ActivityPub DMs are, in my opinion, not a good feature. This has come up before in Mastodon, where DMs mentioning a third account will add that account to the thread and destination of all future messages (and possibly authorise it for accessing past messages); one mention will give them full access to your "direct" messages.

I doubt this scraper did anything wrong here, I think it's just a matter of a buggy server or users sending DMs that aren't really DMs because of Fediverse software with GUI design flaws.

Edit: looks like it's probably a Mastodon bug: https://hackers.town/@thegibson/112604700601089641

skullgiver ,
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Yes, just like on twitter, reddit, and most of the other platforms the Fediverse is trying to replace, server admins are free to read your messages. There's no encryption. The Fediverse just adds more server admins to the mix.

I would not recommend using the DM function on most Fediverse platforms for things you'd like to keep private. While in most cases there are no privacy risks, there are also very few guardrails to ensure that.

You're better off using a federated platform with encryption support like Matrix or XMPP. Neither of those are very safe if you don't verify the other's keys (although neither is any other chat service, even Signal) but both are much safer.

If it weren't for the lack of shared credentials, I would've expected someone to add a minimal secure chat client to the Lemmy frontend already. Especially on the servers that host a Matrix server already

Apple is bringing RCS to the iPhone in iOS 18 ( www.theverge.com )

Apple has announced that its Messages app will support the RCS messaging standard in iOS 18. RCS offers more advanced features compared to traditional SMS, including higher-quality media, typing indicators, and end-to-end encryption. This move will improve messaging between iOS and Android devices, which currently rely on the...

skullgiver , (edited )
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The bubbles should probably still be different colours (as RCS is unencrypted, so there's still a good reason to differentiate) so the vapid people who care about such things will still make a fuzz. But at least on a technical level things should work a lot better, I guess.

There's a good reason to use iMessage over SMS or RCS and making the bubble green will hide the privacy implications of using RCS. I'd rather this thing said "unencrypted" rather than RCS to be honest.

I do wonder if Apple's fallback when connectivity is limited will now also switch to RCS or if it'll still fall back to SMS. This could theoretically be a nice improvement for people in dead zones, unless they implemented RCS the Google way (hosting their own server instead of using cell carrier services).

skullgiver ,
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I don't blame them. Google invented their own E2EE and kept it proprietary. Apple is asking the people behind RCS to make an official standard everybody can use instead.

If I recall correctly, Google uses MLS for group chats (which should be usable between messaging services) but Signal's protocol for individual chats, which requires a centralised key server. The latter is also why Signal can't federate.

Apple and Google could make some secretive deal here where they share the design docs, or Apple could try to reverse engineer Google's work, but neither seem like a great solution to me. The ball is now in Google's court.

skullgiver ,
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Neither is proprietary, but Google doesn't document how they implement either of them. Signal's normal protocol is intended for use with a direct client-server connection, but Google wrapped it into a different message transport (RCS, which is just a predefined set of HTTP calls with lots of XML).

They do some sort of base64 encoding to transport the messages themselves, but they don't document what key servers are in use, how registration works, or how key material is exchanged with those servers. Do they use RCS to communicate with key servers? Do they require a direct internet connection? What about video calls, are they done through standard RCS or do they add encryption there? Do they exchange the encryption keys for video calls through RCS as well? How do keys work if you deregister from Google Jibe and register RCS with your own carrier?

Lots of open questions here. All stuff that can be reverse engineered. I'm sure plenty of companies are trying to figure out how Google RCS works.

I hope Google switches to full MLS (if they haven't already, they won't say!) and implement MIMI for secure cross platform messaging once it's been finalised, but there's no way of knowing right now.

skullgiver , (edited )
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People with healthy diets don't need them to, and there are advantages to teeth secured very tightly into our jaw. Teeth are actually very strong and resilient.

And when people do start losing teeth, it mostly happens past the age of reproduction to the evolutionary impact is lessened. On an evolutionary scale, we've only fucked up our diets with sugar and processed foods very recently. Plus, we now have dentistry to reduce that impact, so I doubt evolution will make it happen to humanity in the future.

There are actually people that grow more teeth, but they have more complications than advantages. I suspect this has been the case historically as well. If everyone else can do with just the normal amount of teeth, these people don't get an evolutionary advantage and their teeth gene quirks don't become common among humans.

That said, scientists are working on stimulating teeth growth for people who have lost them or never had them. It's not impossible, it seems, just very difficult.

skullgiver ,
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You say you stick to open source, do you happen to block your messenger apps from using Play Services? I know from experience the fallback notification delivery mechanisms of a lot of apps will keep the radio on for much longer than it would be with Google Play Services, so I wonder if that could make up for some of the difference.

skullgiver ,
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My bank has its own app to do payments. That's what I use, mostly because it doesn't need any shitty workarounds for my custom ROM.

There's also Samsung pay (I think that still exists?) and Garmin Pay.

skullgiver ,
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There's this project that'll try to read your old water meter with a camera. All you need is a $10 dev board of the right model and a power supply near your water meter.

skullgiver ,
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It's strange for SMS/MMS, where recipients are explicitly listed.

I don't think there's a practical use preventing the arrival of such messages, but on a technical level it's a bit peculiar.

I'm not familiar enough with the RCS spec to know if RCS has the same design or if it's simply incapable of hiding messages from members of a group chat. In encrypted chats, you'd expect encrypted messages to become undecryptable for blocked recipients at least, that's one of the major advantages of using encryption, but I guess there must've been a reason why this wasn't implemented.

American wanting to move abroad, what's the best bet for an registered nurse?

Hi there, I'm a registered nurse in Phoenix, Arizona and I'm seriously considering moving abroad because this country is driving me insane for a lot of reasons. I was considering moving to Israel since I'm Jewish and I've heard they have a better healthcare system there and pay nurses well but this war has made me not really...

skullgiver ,
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I don't want to dash your hopes of emigrating to a better country, but don't underestimate how painful emigration can be. You can't just pick a country and move there. Moving countries is not like moving states. You'll need to convince the country you're going that you're worth letting in. If I were you, I'd start with a list of countries that might be willing to let you in, and work your way down from there.

I would suggest Europe, the Nordics in particular; the Nordics are some of the best countries to live in in the entire world, with (in my opinion) rather pleasant politics in comparison. Germany and other north-western countries tend to score well too, but you'll have to look into how much they match your ideals and culture. Europe is generally on pretty good terms with the USA, which helps a lot. However, you're not alone in wanting to move there. Don't be surprised if the process of applying for permission to enter the country takes months to years and several thousand dollars in paperwork, time and money you don't get back if you're refused. Things can go a bit smoother if you've got a claim on citizenship by blood or family history, but that too can take time and paperwork to arrange, and is entirely dependent on the current laws in the countries your ancestors are from.

In many countries, being a highly skilled worker gives you a major advantage. However, your nursing education may not be accredited in other countries, or be considered "highly skilled" enough; with some bad luck, you may need to go back to school in your country of choice to get your education revalidated (if you're let in for that). The same goes for driver's licenses and certifications you may have achieved over the years.

One trick you may be able to use if you're of European descent is getting European citizenship by blood (I believe Italy, Spain, and a bunch of other countries allow for this) and then use the freedom the Schengen accords provide to move elsewhere in Europe, skipping a whole lot of paperwork. This way, you can, for example, work in Denmark without needing to go through the strict Danish immigration system (though validating your education may still need work).

Just as an example: if you want to apply for a license for a general nurse in Norway as a non-EEA citizen, processing time takes at least 11 months if you provide all the required paperwork and costs $152 to file (which you don't get back if you're refused). You need a license to be a general nurse; without a license, you can't do your job. Without a job, you can't just move there; you can get a temporary holiday visa but you can't apply for jobs with that. This is on top of the other requirements, like speaking B2 level Norwegian. If you apply, you may be given a deadline to conform with the requirements.

skullgiver ,
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That's unfortunate, these automatic visas bypass a lot of crap. Best of luck to you and your moving endeavours!

How old is the oldest building in the town you live in?

To those from the Western hemisphere, it's always fascinating to hear that some homes and businesses from the times of the Greek philosophers still have inhabitants, and then you remember that the Western hemisphere is itself not without its own examples, for example some Mexican villages still have temples from the times of the...

skullgiver ,
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The oldest local church was constructed in the 13th century, but has undergone renovations over the centuries.

Not a lot of very old houses have remained because they were mostly built out of wood and the occasional fire and the tendency to build newer homes rather than patch up the old rotten ones meant that most houses didn't make it past the 18th-19th century, when stone overtook wood everywhere except in remote farms.

skullgiver ,
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Maybe this will be the biggest contribution AI will do for programmers: figure out good names. I should try that some time!

On the other hand, AI will only generate output as good as its input, and most large code projects (including Linux) are terrible at naming things.

skullgiver ,
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Ligatures are great. Don't use them if you don't like them, but don't try to shame people for having different preferences.

The biggest exception to using ligatures is in documentation. I believe Kotlin used (uses?) ligatures in some of its documentation, leaving the reader to figure out if they actually need to type ≠ or if != will suffice. Not a great move, even if the IDE will render the ligatures just fine!

skullgiver ,
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Windows isn't any better I'm afraid.

I blame C for forcing users to use goto, conditional returns, or terribly nested code. Language features like defer or even try/catch/finally make it much easier to write readable code with limited returns.

skullgiver ,
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sudo isn't simple at all. SUID binaries shouldn't be LDAP clients, IMO. Unfortunate bugs like "user environment variables are used to select the editor" make all the complex configuration a huge risk, because permitting a single user to edit a single file suddenly gives the user full root access when they set the right env variables.

I have no specific love for run0 (doas works just as well) but sudo does way more than it should do in a binary with the SUID bit.

run0 doesn't exist because systemd wanted to build their own sudo, they just realised their systemd-run already offers most sudo features so they may as well make them available to end users.

skullgiver ,
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I don't think they want to change anything for non-systemd environments, but their solution not requiring SUID is just a nice little advantage.

Of course you can use the many systemd tools to replace a kludge of alternatives (just systemd vs dnsmasq+netplan+rsyslog+...) but most distros seem to selectively apply a few parts of systemd, and use their own preferred alternatives for the parts that systemd isn't particularly great at.

skullgiver ,
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Nobody is "cheering" for anything here. Neither is anyone claiming they did something miraculous here. Windows' elevation system has worked without something as risky as the SUID bit for decades, for instance. Using system services to spawn root (or NTAUTHORITY\SYSTEM) tasks has been a thing since what, Windows XP? systemd-run does a bunch of really cool stuff that I could consider revolutionary if the tools all line up, but this isn't one of them.

All that's happening is that one of the systemd devs is happy to announce a sudo alternative that doesn't have the common sudo risks. No distro has announced implementing this in place of sudo, and it wouldn't make sense in the first place; sudo does stuff like LDAP that systemd-run doesn't even support, so it can't be replaced. It's taken years for Wayland to be enabled by default, I doubt we'll see distros with run0 instead of sudo this decade. It'll be available on recent distros and you can use it if you want, it's up to you.

I've never seen doas come close to taking sudo's place so I doubt this will change much. With Ubuntu and a few others having recently released a new LTS, it'll be a while before run0 will be available in distros in the first place, if it doesn't get patched out by the likes of Debian.

However, if people find run0 to be better than sudo, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to be happy about that. Personally, I'd rather see sudo implement a daemon/client model rather than systemd-run having an alternative argv[0], but until sudo gets better, this is the best we get.

skullgiver ,
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Up until GPT3 they were quite open. When GPTs became good, they started claiming sharing the models would be risky and that there were ethical problems and that they would safekeep the technology. I believe they were even sued by one of their investors for sticking to their open mission at some point.

The source code they would provide would be pretty useless to most people anyway, unless you have a couple million laying around to spend on GPUs.

Plenty of AI companies do what OpenAI did, without ever sharing any models or writing any papers. We only hear about the open stuff. We see tons of open source AI stuff on Github that's all mostly based on research by either Google or OpenAI. All the Llama stuff exists only because Facebook shared their model (accidentally). All of this stuff is mostly open, even if it's not FOSS.

Compare that to what companies are doing internally. You bet data brokers and other shady shits are sucking up as much data as they can get their hand on to train their own, specialised AI, free from the burdens of "as an LLM I can't do that".

skullgiver ,
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If that would happen, I assume companies would just grab an older copy of the dumps from before people started editing their stuff because of the AI bullshit.

SA would ban everyone sabotaging their business plans and things would move on like normal, like what happened to Reddit.

skullgiver ,
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AI companies are hoping for a ruling that says content generated from a model trained on content is not a derivative work. So far, the Sarah Silverman lawsuit seems to be going that way, at least; the claimants were set back because they've been asked to prove the connection between AI output and their specific inputs.

If this does become jurisprudence or law in one or more countries, licenses don't mean jack. You can put the AGPL on your stuff and AI could suck it up into their model and use it for whatever they want, and you couldn't do anything about it.

The AI training sets for all common models contains copyright works like entire books, movies, and websites. Don't forget that most websites don't even have a license, and that that unlicensed work is as illegal to replicate as any book or movie normally would be, including internet comments. If AI data sets need to comply with copyright, all current AI will need to be retrained (except maybe for that image AI by that stock photo company, which is exclusively trained on licensed work).

skullgiver ,
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The funny thing about Lemmy is that the entire Fediverse is basically running a massive copyright violation ring with current copyright law. The license bit every web company has in their terms exists because Facebook wouldn't have the right to show your holiday pictures to your grandma otherwise. The pictures are your property, and just because you uploaded them doesn't mean Facebook has the right to redistribute them. Cropping off the top and bottom to fit it into the timeline? That's a derivative work, they'd need to ask permission or negotiate a license to show that!

The Fediverse runs without any such clauses and just presumes nobody cares about copyright. Which they don't, because the whole thing is based on forwarding all data to everyone.

Nobody is going to sue a Lemmy server for sending their comment to someone else, because there's no money behind any of the servers. Companies like Facebook need to get their shit together, though, because they have large pools of investor money that any shithead with a good lawyer can try to claim, and that's why they have legal disclaimers.

skullgiver ,
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Nobody smart scrapes them, they provide full dumps for you to download: https://data.stackexchange.com/

skullgiver ,
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The training data set isn't the problem. The data set for many open models is actually not hard to find, and it's quite obvious that works by the artists were included in the data set. In this case, the lawsuit was about the Stable Diffusion dataset, and I believe that's just freely available (though you may need to scrape and download the linked images yourself).

For research purposes, this was never a problem: scientific research is exempted from many limitations of copyright. This led to an interesting problem with OpenAI and the other AI companies: they took their research models, the output of research, and turned them into a business.

The way things are going, I expect the law to be like this: datasets can contain copyrighted work as long as they're only distributed for research purposes, AI models are derivative works, and the output of AI models is not a derivative work, and therefore the output AI companies generate is exempt of copyright. It's definitely not what I want to happen, but the legal arguments that I thought would kill this interpretation don't seem to hold water in court.

Of course, courts only apply law as it is written right now. At any point in time, governments can alter their copyright laws to kill or clear AI models. On the one hand, copyright lobbyists have a huge impact on governance, as much as big oil it seems, but on the other hand, banning AI will just put countries that don't care about copyright to get an economic advantage. The EU has set up AI rules, which I appreciate as an EU citizen, but I cannot deny that this will inevitably lead to a worse environment to do business in compared to places like the USA and China.

skullgiver ,
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The idea that someone does this willingly implies that the user knows the implications of their choice, which most of the Fediverse doesn't seem to do (see: people asking questions like "how do I delete comments on a server I've been defederated from", or surprised after finding out that their likes/boosts are inherently public).

If the implied license was enough, Facebook and all the other companies wouldn't put these disclaimers in their terms of service. This isn't true in every jurisdiction, but it does apply to many important ones.

I agree that international copyright law should work like you imply, but on the other hand, this is exactly why Creative Commons was created: stuff posted on the internet can be downloaded just fine, but rehosting it is not allowed by default.

This is also why I appreciate the people who put those Creative Commons licenses on their comments; they're effectively useless against AI, which is what they seem to be trying to combat, but they do provide rights that would otherwise be unavailable.

Just like with privacy laws and data hosting laws, I don't think the fediverse cares. I think the fediverse is full of a sort of wilful ignorance about internet law, mostly because the Fediverse is a just a bunch of enthusiastic nerds. No Fediverse server (except for Threads, maybe) has a Data Protection Officer despite sites like lemmy.world legally requiring one if they'd cared about the law, very little Fediverse software seems to provide DMCA links by default, and I don't think any server is complying with the Chinese, Russian, and European "only store citizen's data in locally hosted servers" laws at all.

skullgiver ,
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The thing with many of these services is that they're not run by companies with a legal presence, just by some guy(s) who do it for fun. For many laws, personal projects are considered differently compared to business/organisational endeavours.

It's the same thing with personal blogs lacking a privacy policy: the probability of the thing becoming an actual problem in the real world is so abysmally low that nobody bothers, and that's probably okay.

During the first wave of some troll uploading child abuse to various Fediverse servers (mostly Lemmy), a lot of server operators got a rough wake-up call, because suddenly they had content on their servers that could land them in prison. There has been an effort to combat this abuse for larger servers, but I don't think most Lemmy servers run on the Nvidia hardware that's strong enough to support the live CSAM detection code that was developed.

skullgiver ,
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It's a tough balance, for sure. I don't want AI companies to exist in the form they currently are, but we're not getting the genie back into the bottle. Whether the economic hit is worth the freedom and creative rights, that I think citizens deserve, is a matter of democratic choice. It's impossible to ignore the fact that in China or Russia, where citizens don't have much a choice, I don't think artistic rights or the people's wellbeing are even part of the equation. Other countries will need a response when companies from these countries start doing work more efficiently. I myself have been using Bing AI more and more as AI bullcrap is flooding every page of every search engine, fighting AI with AI so to speak.

I saw this whole ordeal coming the moment ChatGPT came out and I had the foolish hope that legislators would've done something by now. The EU's AI Act will apply March next year but it doesn't seem to solve the copyright problem at all. Or rather, it seems to accept the current copyright problem, as the EU's summary put it:

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, will not be classified as high-risk, but will have to comply with transparency requirements and EU copyright law:

  • Disclosing that the content was generated by AI
  • Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content
  • Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training

The EU seems to have chosen to focus on combating the immediate threat of AI abuse, but seem to be very tolerant of AI copyright infringement. I can only presume this is to make sure "innovation" doesn't get impeded too much.

I'll take this into account during the EU vote that's about to happen soon, but I'm afraid it's too late. I wish we could go back and stop AI before it started, but this stuff has happened and now the world is a little bit better and worse.

I don't know anything about Linux and the idea of installing it frightens me. Where do I start?

I bought a laptop yesterday, it came pre-installed with Windows 11. I hate win 11 so I switched it down to Windows 10, but then started considering using Linux for total control over the laptop, but here's the thing: I keep seeing memes about how complicated or fucky wucky Linux is to install and run. I love the idea of open...

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

Every server I've encountered in my professional life runs either some kind of enterprise™ Linux like Red Hat (licensed, expensive ones), Ubuntu, or Debian, or some extremely customised Linux that's unusable for any purpose other than whatever it was built for. Dev machines run Ubuntu, or maybe Fedora or some enterprise™ Linux.

I've heard from a lot of startups using nixOS and your Arch flavour of the week, but I'm pretty sure that's only used because all four people in the company are Linux turbo nerds who have managed to agree on one specific obscure Linux distro.

Business people do complain about Ubuntu, though. They don't like automatic updates (because their weird proprietary software only works with the specific versions they picked and they can't be bothered to actuslly fix their code) so snaps are a threat. Ubuntu Pro expanding threatens their "use software someone else pays maintenance tax for without any bill" business plan. See also: "I like Debian but I dislike the way they patch things and how hard it is to install proprietary blobs onto it".

They want their free software to be maintained for free not because they care about software freedom, but because they're cheap, and Canonical and IBM starting to charge businesses for the software development they do threatens that business model.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

Why? Because it asks the user if they would like to send feedback to Canonical during setup? Because that's the only privacy issue I can remember re: Canonical, after their weird Amazon lens was quickly killed off.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

Conceptually, Nix is just the next evolution of tools like Ansible, and tangentially related to projects like Silverblue, but in practice, it's only used by enthusiasts. And, of course, you can use Nix outside of NixOS.

Unless there's a tool I don't know about, there's no equivalent for Discover or Gnome Software for NixOS. Because that's the class of boring people that make up the silent majority: the people who don't know how to, or don't want to edit configuration files. This was how Valve made Linux on a console a success, and it's why Ubuntu is still popular despite their experiments causing them to be decried by the community over and over again.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

I don't think it's bad to ask; even Debian asks you for feedback. Ubuntu, Debian, and a bunch of other distros are doing the right thing by making this feedback opt-in, but for some people even that is already too much.

I have no idea what supposed privacy issues Ubuntu has these days. Snap is certainly A Controversial Thing, but it's been years since they made a deal with Amazon.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

I meant boring to !linux :)

Boring is good when it comes to operating systems, cars, and other utilities, unless you like maintaining that stuff as a hobby!

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

I don't see why it would affect anything but Windows' NTFS partitions. Unless you still use MBR boot, all you'd need to do after a Windows reinstall would be to re-order the boot entries in your UEFI settings. Bitlocker operates on partitions, not full disks.

You should probably still back up your important files, of course, just in case your drive randomly dies...

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

macOS has encrypted the system partition since the T2 chip was introduced. Older hardware doesn't do encryption by default, but you'll need a device over seven years old for it not to come with encryption by default.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

That's random writes, tested on a particularly fast SSD. Most consumer SSDs won't get to the 550MB/s random writes, hitting closer to 85MB/s.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

No wonder the percentage is that high, the 990 Pro performs extremely well. I doubt the average gamer has an SSD that fast, though. But, on the other hand, the SSD tested has hardware encryption support, so by default the user wouldn't notice anything regardless.

I'd be much more interested in benchmarks of common consumer SSDs in their standard configuration. Hopefully some tech outlet like LinusTechTips will test this at some point; they'd also be able to test real life video game performance, which would be a nice bonus.

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