FriendOfDeSoto

I don’t think the author likes mastodon dot social…

I couldn’t get through all of this blog post because it’s repeating the same point 500 times. I get the theoretical threat scenario they are painting; what’s missing are the receipts. Is moderation on that instance actually getting worse? Have we talked with admins on the record how they don’t dare defederate from that alleged wretched hive of scum and villainy? And two other angles are missing: (1) a name brand instance might be a good starting point on the fediverse. It’s still better than Xwitter. And (2) people are not donating enough to their instances, who are then run on dedication and held together by duct tape. The fear of having one’s instance shut down because the admin is out of money and duct tape makes people gravitate towards the bigger instances.

I’m not opposed to recommending people to find other, smaller instances - that is a good idea. It’s just this blog post reads more like a hit piece.

I signed up for Ente last fall as a Google Photos replacement. The backup works fine. The Android app is prone to crashing so I don’t use it as my go-to gallery app. The process of moving a big library of pictures away from Google was painful. Ente does a lot in terms of making it easier - but it’s still a pain in the butt. Their desktop app runs poorly on old desktop hardware if you keep their machine learning on. The ML lets you search images content down the line.

I signed up for a year and I’m already looking at another solution. Laziness may win though because transferring the library was a terrible experience.

Link

Merz is in his 70s. He is not the most gifted politician. One nickname given to him by a journalist is “the unavoidable” in reference to him having no good competition for leadership in his party after a perceived century of Angela Merkel in charge who had successfully sidelined him. For a reason, it seems.

He is very good at dropping shit like this in the media and then having it walked back or watered down. I do not see this idea getting a majority in the country where Google street view is useless because people rebelled against having the public facing side of their buildings photographed for easier navigation. And I can see a few arguments that would occupy the supreme court for a decade, were this to become law.

I appreciate the air of publicity this story brings.

You probably can’t trust your password manager if it’s compromised

In other headlines: water is surprisingly wet.

This is sign that Google is worried that a market of 500 million people could decide to move away from the US tech giants. Very worried, judging by this flimsy fear-driven argument. Good.

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram’s encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I’ll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn’t mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

It happens. A very highly intelligent user will occasionally post something in a lot of communities and gets a rise out of downvotes, annoyed comments, and blocks. It’s annoying but that is often the nature of the internet. Report, block, and move on.

It’s only the very highly intelligent users who do this. So it doesn’t happen a lot.

Don’t engage with anybody you don’t know well on DMs. And if some other very highly intelligent person goes to the effort of sending you abuse via DM, take pride that you really got under their skin. Ignore it if you can.

One thing that what they call agenetic AI will undermine might be a lot of the subscription based biggies of the industry. I’m thinking about Adobe in particular. They charge a monthly premium for having user-friendly, low learning curve software that often has become industry standard. But there are open source alternatives for many of their big hitters (Inkscape, GIMP, etc.). If the agenetic model needs a tool to design a logo or expand an image - and you probably already pay for the privilege of using the agent model - this may prove to be a boon to the open source development of these intermediary software tools. Because the relative difficulty to use them as we hear from Adobe heads all the time won’t matter to the computer. And they are free (with a request to donate). So a chunk of interest and probably money and effort will move from those subscription services to open source alternatives and their development. This is just one positive effect so-called AI could have for some open source projects.

Sadly, at the same time we squander resources and kill polar bears.

You’d be surprised how many people don’t take the time to read a long article like that but will have a quick glance at the comments.

Again, our proposal isn’t that we should cover all of this land in solar panels, or that it could easily power the world on its own. We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining).

This is a thought experiment more than a plan.

To be fair to the lad, he didn’t peddle his wares. He just says if there isn’t a European strategy to develop their own models it is very likely that Europe would run on Chinese made ones that are more open source, whereas American ones become increasingly closed source and expensive to license. Now, that’s his prediction and I don’t really believe him. But this article at least doesn’t make it seem he wrapped his doom and gloom prediction in a Gemini sales pitch.

They would have to try fighting it on non-trademark grounds. However, being able to point at having been awarded one afterwards may carry some weight there as well. My impression is that their strategy doesn’t rest on this alone.

The strategy behind this is also to be able to sue after the fact to get a cut of whatever was created from stuff that ought to have been protected but wasn’t. It’s not just a clip of him doing triple alrights that he applied for TM for. There is also one of him sitting down, one of him standing up. They tried to cover a whole spread of sora et. al. generated bullshit. It’s an interesting strategy that is only necessary because the law on the books lags behind the developments in image or video generation. It may not work at all but it’ll be a success if they win one case with this.

I am not an expert and I think this falls at the first hurdle because a login is required to view more than the latest post or two.

Here is how I use it: you take an old device that you never installed Insta on, run it under a burner account at the OS level, run a kill switch VPN on it (preferably always on the same server), and then create an account on Insta that you’re ready to ditch the moment they want your ID. That device doesn’t do anything else than Insta.

Yes, you must have missed it. And so it begins.

Google is moving to make Android less open source. I’m not sure more devs following suit is going be good for them or their users. The G doesn’t give an F.

What we need is an OS fork that gets maintained. If not that, some other workaround that fools the Google servers. Because you can bet money that nobody made from flesh and blood is going to look at this inside Google.

Maybe devs can band together and form Middle Finger Corp. and designate one willing person as their contact to serve as registered dev for a gazillion apps. Follow the letter of the law, not the misguided spirit of it, in a manner of speaking.

If you are sitting on a mobile OS and you were afraid to fail like Windows, maybe now is the time to give it a go?