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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • That’s honestly more of a problem than a feature at this point. The GPL at least protects open source projects as a “public good” and forces corporate users to contribute their changes back to the public (in some manner). All permissive licenses do is let corporations leech off the community without a requirement to give back.



  • Honestly, while Pepsi isn’t a great company either, if they made an ad pointing out how much “their competitor” spent in water, electricity, etc. on making an ad using AI, and then included that “since AI-generated content can’t be copyrighted, we stole it and paid an intern 1 million dollars to replace the logo with our own” and then just play the ad with the trucks drawn over like in a school notebook to be blue pepsi trucks with the pepsi logo.

    I think if a big company went all in on being a world-class AI hater, they’d do really well. It’s kinda a huge untapped market as consumer sentiment against AI grows because it’s being pushed so hard.



  • Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

    Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.




  • I have a bunch of different zigbee models, but my overall favorites are the Sengled Zigbee plugs. They have power monitoring, which can be really useful for automations.

    For example, my computer monitor makes an annoying high-pitched squeal when in standby mode, so I have it and my PC on separate Sengled smart plugs and if the PC plug is drawing low enough wattage for 10 seconds that I can be sure it’s off or asleep, my automation turns off the monitor smart plug, and when the PC plug wattage jumps back above the threshold, the monitor plug gives power to my monitor again.

    Obviously that specific use is a bit niche, but the ability to know when not-smart devices are using more or less power and run automations accordingly can be really useful.

    There are other brands besides Sengled that have power monitoring, but I’ve found theirs to be pretty reliable, just make sure you get the zigbee plugs, because they also make wifi plugs that look basically identical to the zigbee model.




  • With as much as I’m ready for the AI bubble to burst, Sabine Hossenfelder isn’t a very reliable source on much of anything - especially her newer videos from within the past year after she got called out for some unscientific takes on transgender care. Since then, she has kinda doubled down on her anti-science-establishment takes acting like she knows more than actual experts.

    I’m not really criticizing any of her takes in this particular video (I’ll be honest I’m at work and haven’t had a chance to watch it yet), but just want to caution anyone who may watch this and start getting her videos recommended a bunch by their YouTube algorithm that she’s not considered a reliable science communicator by anyone who is.




  • I agree, this doesn’t look like a deepfake. There does appear to be a quick crossfade that also explains the shifting leaves outside the window, there’s some motion blur around the time of the edit that contributes to the confusion. Admittedly, I haven’t had the time to give it a full analysis, but the rest of the video looks fine to my eyes as a film school dropout. I’m only a very part-time mod of this community so I hesitate to take down the post on my own. But if another mod wants to, I’d agree this isn’t clearly a deepfake, and probably doesn’t belong.




  • Honestly the DMCA strikes are probably way better on YouTube than the alternative of getting hit with lawsuits and cease and desists on a specialist site. The amount of things that are considered normal now on YouTube that were just straight up considered copyright infringement prior to YouTube getting massive is wild for anyone who was in media and used to having to get clearances and pay royalties for anything that wasn’t public domain. Those expectations haven’t changed, and the laws haven’t either, it’s just YouTube has done a lot to normalize things, and license things for the whole platform where they can, because they know it helps keep the site alive. But if you aren’t under the protection of the platform and their agreements, the consequences can get way worse.


  • I went to college for filmmaking. Being a field that revolves around communication, we ended up learning some fundamentals of communication theory. By definition, communication happens when the “listener” percieves a message - whether that message was intended or not. No matter how much work and thought you put into your message, if you shout it into the void, it isn’t communication. Likewise, you can say nothing in a room full of people, and still unintentionally communicate just by being seen.

    The percieved intelligence of LLMs very much feels like a result of this. There is no intelligence in the machine, we’re just percieving communication from a probability machine, and thinking that it’s intelligent and trying to communicate with us.


  • It can be, but sometimes packages are removed from the official repos, but still available in AUR, only running yay -Syu will install the AUR versions of dependencies that are no longer needed, and can leave you with a bunch of unnecessary packages from AUR.

    If you run pacman -Syu on its own the unnecessary dependencies will be removed and you won’t get the AUR versions, and then yay -Syu will only update things you actually want from AUR.