FriendOfDeSoto

I can’t remember. As you can tell from my lengthy historical summary, I’m old enough to use that as an excuse.

I have recorded songs off the radio onto cassette. I have made mix tapes. First off records, later CDs. There was a general trade going on at school among friends. Somebody would get a new album on tape or on CD and when the owner had listened to it enough times it would make the rounds so people could record it for themselves. Musical socialism.

I have made Minidisc mix tapes as well. I went as far as recording concerts from VHS onto Minidisc. Adding track names was harder than T9 texting and took fucking ages.

I ripped and burned CDs, some of them are still stashed away in an attic somewhere.

I don’t remember the infancy torrenting service that we used around the turn of the century. It wasn’t Napster. I also made mix tapes of downloaded songs onto CD. To play more easily because there weren’t any iPods yet but everyone had a stereo.

Now I stream the music I used to steal. Can’t feel great about it because I know the artists get next to nothing for it.

I miss having a good stereo. Now it’s crappy phone speakers or compressed Bluetooth shit.

It’s nice that an American company will enforce a 24-hour cooling-off period for the installation of a few 1s and 0s on a device I already own.

They wouldn’t do this for the purchase of a firearm.

This biting satirical take is brought to you by a disillusioned Android user seriously thinking about switching to an iPhone. If a walled garden is inevitable I might as well go where most stuff gets developed for first.

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.

Enjoy the soothing waves and the Iranian missiles overhead! You’ll probably be safer in the water. Just saying.

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.

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 wasn’t able to find an exact match either. It’s possible flying this flag is a sign of the right-wing politics of the owner. But I would like to add another theory: this is Orlando. They might just be pulling a Disney. They famously fly weird variants of the US flag so they are not compelled to hoist and lower them all over the park every day. I’m not saying this flag is a Disney non-compliant version of the US flag - they tend to look more cartoonish. But due to the proximity to the magic kingdom the owner might just be both aware of the flag code and lazy.