Rob T Firefly

The fact that the company forced him to stop getting ready to open source it strongly suggests they aren’t interested in it being open sourced.

Turning it on by default (opt-out instead of opt-in) is still a huge concern and needs spreading the word about.

I wanted to stop using my Walkman when I got a Discman, but my main use for portable music was during long walks and commutes and the Discman worked like crap if I was moving around at all. The skippy little expensive bastard got put back on the shelf, and I kept using cassettes until the portable MP3 player era finally hit.

Fitting that it’s ending in (eternal) September.

So I ask everyone again, what business model exists for a software company to make money without ads or charging a monthly subscription.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software

Speaking of WIkipedia, https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports/

I assume you hired that person for being clever.

Add some massive unregulated grifting and hideous environmental consequences to your idea, and you’ve just invented Bitcoin.

Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)

The full post by linked source Taylor Lorenz about this appears here on her Patreon (openly readable, not locked as of now).

She still writes on Substack, though, which ultimately works in support of This Sort of Thing.

Lemmy’s federated structure makes it easy to block the instances which don’t moderate the nazis or tankies or anything else away to your satisfaction, while Substack is a centralized platform which has chosen to not only allow, but actively encourage and reward its nazis.

So, any such problem on Lemmy is “better” because we can all (as individual users, and/or collectively as instances) deal with it as we like instead of bowing to Substack’s decision to be a nazi bar for all its users.

https://slashdot.org/software/p/Substack/alternatives

The linked story has been updated. The headline now reads:

Labour rules out VPN ban in UK but issues warning to UK households

Labour won’t ban the use of Virtual Private Networks

And the story begins:

Labour has ruled out a possible VPN ban after reports thousands of UK households were at risk following the Online Safety Act kicking in under the government. Labour Party Tech Secretary Peter Kyle has revealed that the Government is “not considering a VPN ban” - after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.

From what the article says the app watches you while you change expressions as prompted, so you can’t use AI-generated still images. That’s why using a game’s photo mode, where you can toggle the CG facial expression around in real time while pointing your camera at it, is such a clever solution.

You could swap one screw from that case into your current one. It wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else, but you’d know it was there!

This is a clever way to bypass. If they get wise and somehow filter out Sam Porter Bridges’ face, you could always fire up any of the games of comparable visual realism which let you design your own character’s appearance.

I still keep my actual ancient 5.25" floppy drive from my first 286 DOS box installed in a spare bay in my current PC tower. The drive hasn’t worked in ages, but as a chunk of my first PC is still part of my current one it means that, in a Ship of Theseus sense, I’ve been using the same computer for 30 years.

Enjoy the laptop, Cool!

Immature crap like this makes me very grateful to be a grownup married to a grownup.

I argued with my old bank for ages about this and they continued to insist enabling it on my account was a great idea.

The film Sneakers showed the world why voice ID was a massive security hole and an all-around crappy idea back in 1992, and some idiots are still insisting it’s a good idea in 2025 when it’s only become astronomically easier to beat than Robert Redford and friends demonstrated.

In my case, I’ve been doing radio, podcasting, and other voice work for a long time and as a result there are hundreds and hundreds of hours of my voice freely available out there. People can cut and paste me saying “my voice is my passport, verify me” or anything else they like together in Audacity, no AI needed, and fool any telephone-based audio security computer on the planet with it. And explaining this in-person to the branch manager of my former bank elicited nothing more than the blankest expression I’d seen since the pet goldfish I had as a kid.

What Mark Hamill Joker fan doesn’t have their own Mark Hamill Joker impression? Screw AI, just do the voice like we’ve all been doing for 30+ years.