@bilb@lem.monster cover
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

bilb

@bilb@lem.monster

All things are possible through Christ!

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I honestly don't get the outage over that. I feel like I'm in the minority on that, though. I don't care if linguistic statics are gathered from my public comments. Knock yourself out.

This story is about "private" messages on a free hosted service, and I think their users are just being naive if they think this is beyond the pale. But I get the feeling of violation at least a little.

bilb , (edited )
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I see it as a social signifier more than anything else.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Framework laptops are undeniably expensive. I say that as a happy owner of both the 13 and the 16. The value is not the appeal. To be honest, I don't even expect it to "pay for itself due to upgradability and repairability" like many people say.

More availability of refurbished mainboards should help over time, I guess.

bilb , (edited )
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

It is.

The people in charge of maintaining Mastodon in particular though need to establish some kind of legal entity and that needs legal recognition somewhere.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

On my instance, I follow most of the biggest communities with a "seed account" to fill out the "all" feed. This seems to work pretty well.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Did they transfer ownership of the code to Nintendo? If so, it might be a violation of Nintendo's copyright on Yuzu itself.

bilb , (edited )
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

"In case this is a real question?"

Anyway, I just read through the settlement and I didn't see any explicit transfer of ownership of he code in there. I'm not a lawyer though, there are some things in there I may not understand the implications of.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Don't worry about it, the angry edit was meant to be humorous- in general I agree that it's a mistake to let downvotes upset you.

(And because I'm the admin of my own instance, the votes are made visible through the UI. So if I wanted to be a vindictive weirdo about it, I could... 😉)

Rotating banners on /r/piracy ( lemmy.dbzer0.com )

Hey mates, recently I've developed a tool to use the GenerativeAI on the AI Horde to created random avatars and banners on lemmy. To keep things spicy, I wanted to deploy to rotate the /c/piracy banner daily, as I've done in a bunch of other communities like !stable_diffusion_art and the lemmy.dbzer0.com....

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Exactly, you never intended to commission an artist because you think so-called “AI art” is good enough to replace them.

Weird argument to make on a piracy sub, honestly. The existence of an AI generated image does not imply that a somewhere an artist lost a commission. Nobody was replaced. It's not a choice between AI art and commissioned art, it's a choice between AI generated images and nothing at all because that was the point of his project.

Whether we find it tasteful or interesting is another topic.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

"Instead of working on that project that you were enjoying working on in your spare time, why not do this completely different other thing?"

That's not reasonable.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I run my own instance that technically does have open registration, but I can't really recommend anyone actually sign up to use it. It's not running on very powerful hardware, and my commitment to keeping it running 24/7 is "as long as it stays convenient and interesting." There are probably many, many of those. But there are a good collection of second and third tier instances now as well, I'm not to worried about .world's popularity so long as they don't do something like switch to a federation allow-list rather than a block list.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I'm aware of the risk, but so far the captcha seems to have prevented any mass sign-up, and none of the few other existing accounts so far have any activity. That said, since I have no intention to support a user base anymore, I probably should close it anyway.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Agreed, and I don't intend to stop at the moment. When I wrote "close it" I meant registration, sorry about the ambiguous language.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Personally, I think it's okay for things to disappear sometimes. Nothing is permanent. I have no anxiety about this.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I drive an EV and I always tell people not to buy one for this or that reason. The truth is that I don't want too many other EVs on the road because I bought it just to feel superior to others, and I can't do that if everyone else also drives an EV.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Oh, that wouldn't be the same! I'll have to supplement my vehicle with incredibly smug bumper stickers.

(I don't mind being downvoted, but I think I should point out for the sake of not making someone's depressive mood worse that this and my previous comment in this thread were meant to be humorous and I'm not actually this insane. I don't expect my Bolt EUV to seriously impress anyone. I do like driving it though!)

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Isn't following the local law the end user's responsibility? Like how in the US it's not lawful for me to install and use certain patented codecs without buying a license. (We all do, anyway.) Would it be "illegal software" or would it just make it easier for the end user to violate the law?

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

You gotta host your own instance so that when it disappears you can only be disappointed in yourself.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

People pretending it's not useful and/or not improving all the time are living in their own worlds. I think you can argue the legality and the ethics, but any anti-ai position based on low quality output ("it can't even do hands!") has a short shelf-life.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Local by default, option to go remote. Even the privacy-first types might want to offload that to a more powerful local machine.

They could even sell access to a Mozilla provided AI server like they do with the VPN service.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I thought Servo was basically dead since the layoffs at Mozilla in 2020, but your comment caused me to look into it and evidently funding was found to resume development on it at the beginning of last year. That’s good news! (to me!)

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

tl;dw

  • Cory Doctorow coins the term “enshittification” to describe how platforms start out benefiting users but eventually abuse users and business customers to extract all value.
  • Facebook started by prioritizing user privacy over ads but now prioritizes profits over all else.
  • Network effects are a double-edged sword - they lock users in but also make platforms vulnerable if users leave en masse.
  • Low switching costs due to universality and interoperability allow competitors to reverse engineer platforms and plug in competing services.
  • Mandatory interoperability and limiting data control can curb platform power by distributing control to users and smaller companies.
  • Recent antitrust actions aim to roll back decades of lax merger policy that let platforms consolidate power.
  • Breakups will take a long time so interoperability is a faster way to restore competition.
  • Laws should limit abusive behavior rather than rely on platforms to self-regulate.
  • Federated open services fail gracefully and encourage migration to better platforms.
  • Political will is growing but change will be gradual - focus should be on harm reduction in the near term.
bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Yeah, and it also happens to get me access to the tool that was able to summarize this video without watching it. https://lem.monster/pictrs/image/d276f30c-2031-489a-8d2e-eebc33d95410.pngBut most people would probably choose the $5 tier, I think.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Nothing wrong with it, but why am I hearing about it?

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

This is why I prefer using my own instance- I don’t want these federation choices made for me by people like this.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I’m pretty satisfied with Kagi after using it for a bit over two months.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

This seems pretty normal honstly

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I’ve worked in “secure” environments for the US military and yeah, open access to the internet while you’re on the job is absurd to expect

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Why can’t it just be “posts?”

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I remember thinking it was bizarre how angry people seemed to be about that, like it was a huge scandal. It doesn’t matter, it’s not important! Go do something else!

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

“You would be so delicious owo”

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I have to use Windows for work, and I choose to use Linux for all of my personal devices. Windows is trying very hard to corral me into using bing, edge, cortana, etc. and gets in my way when I try to use the tools I prefer instead. It intentionally obscures what its doing with updates and security. That is unacceptable. This is my computer, not theirs.

No Linux distro that I’ve tried does any of that shit. They have never tried to push my behavior in one direction or another, they aren’t watching everything I do to help their product teams develop an even more annoying desktop. The various Linux distros I’ve used have felt like nothing but a way to let me use my damn computer.

I do have a small partition with Windows on it to play the occasional game I can’t run on Linux with Proton. Thanks, Valve!

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Even if that’s true, that’s a different computer.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I see what you’re saying now. Which dell laptop is it, by the way?

I suspect what people are assuming is that your laptop might have some closed source firmware or BIOS, and I assume what System76 is saying is that this won’t be true on their Virgo laptop.

I’m a framework guy myself, at least so far.

jonny , to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
@jonny@social.coop avatar

an analysis of historical video game availability shows that only 13% of classic video games are currently commercially available across consoles and time periods, and only 3% of games prior to 1985

pirates keep culture alive ❤️

https://zenodo.org/record/7996492

@piracy

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

I’m actually a bit surprised by how high it is.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox. It made an agreement with Nintendo to bring Call of Duty to Switch. And it entered several agreements to for the first time bring Activision’s content to several cloud gaming services.

And what are the potential consequences of not living up to these commitments? Call me cynical, but I don’t think a pinkie swear is worth much.

hybridhavoc , to Gaming
@hybridhavoc@darkfriend.social avatar

Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23779039/microsoft-activision-blizzard-ftc-trial-win

From the article, quoting Judge Corley:

... the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.

@gaming

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Sony already does though, just on PC.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Do you use a VPN?

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Jake the dog type

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Bowser Culture strikes again

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Yes, Nextcloud. It’s not perfect, but it has made my life easier for the last few years

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

You don’t see a lot of chatter about the CCPA, I wonder why.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Narp, you're stuck forever

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

Right, even if you don't use anything affected by the restrictions being put on the API, I just feel like Reddit will get noticeably worse from here on out. Huffman is basically promising that it will.

bilb ,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

But unless something changes dramatically, it’ll suffer the same fate as Mastodon or Bluesky.

I have no idea what's going on with Bluesky, but mastodon is... fine? It's not twitter and never will be.

This doesn't mean Lemmy doesn't need a bit of work, though, I don't think anyone would deny that. I don't think they've had quite the pressure to triage issues like they do now, so a decent list of priorities is probably emerging.

I'm tempted to try to help, but I'm (generously) a rust novice. I worry I'll waste their time with bad PRs.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • All magazines
    •