Stuff like this and the “base” he has created give off pretty harsh trump vibes. Here is a link confirming for those wanting one. Sorry I did not include it originally. www.cbc.ca/amp/1.712106
Yeah, I’ve used qbittorrent, deluge, utorrent, and a number of other clients over the years. I greatly prefer transmission. I don’t need my torrent client to do anything but download and seed.
Americans largely haven’t had much of a choice. In states where the laws are decent and political corruption isn’t heavily entrenched, things are alright and the system isn’t totally broken. But in places where it has? There’s less and less ability to vote in more reasonable laws.
The problems are systemic. The same states have shitty education systems, mass voter disenfranchisement of prisoners and anyone else they can justify taking the vote from, extensive gerrymandering, and every other form of corruption and political inefficiency. The major population centers take a very different approach, but they have to compete with these backward and broken states through an electoral system that skews the results in their favor.
Trying to take direct action outside of the official political framework is also problematic. In Europe you’ve got the benefit of an extremely high population density and a relatively small area regardless of which country you’re in. In the US everything is extremely spread out. The result is that protest is often not terribly effective. You might be able to shut down a couple of streets, but there’s no way you’re disturbing commerce for more than a single metropolitan area (of which there are many) at a time. It’s the same reason mass public transit runs into issues: we’re way too spread out for strategies that require high and comparatively uniform population density.
That doesn’t mean there’s no answer, but it does mean we’re going to have to get a little more creative.
Europe at least has had the benefit of being able to work country-by-country, whereas the US is one massive tangled morass. Hell, even achieving the kind of restructuring and harmonious cooperation that you see in the EU had to come as a result of two of the most atrocious wars humanity has ever mustered in the span of less than half a century.
Kinda puts it a little more into perspective when you consider the absolute shit-show Europe had to turn into before it was ready to grow up.
The attitude toward celebrities on Lemmy versus on Mastodon is really weird. Same thing with reddit, a lot of the time. Like, okay, I have no idea if that’s really Margot Robbie or not, but famous people do use the internet. Attention doesn’t make them a different species that forgets how to use keyboards or something.
I mean, I have no idea if she’s Margot Robbie, but I figure I might as well treat her as if she is. Doesn’t cost me anything. It’s basically the solution to the solipsism problem with lower stakes.
Personally, I think doing a goofy impression of yourself and occasionally breaking character would be a good way to fly under the radar.
I fucking hate these shitheads, I was arguing with one earlier and no matter how many facts I gave him with proper sources he just refused to actually show any kind of respect
I don’t think it’s possible to have a significant impact on transphobia on the internet purely via debate and text. I do think it’s very possible to have a substantial impact in real life just be being a visible trans person out in public life interacting with people.
A lot of people have never once in their life had a conversation with a trans person. It’s a lot harder to weaponize someone’s existence when they become a fixture in your life. It also gives you an opportunity to occasionally share some of your struggle with people and educate them in a more direct way, but I think the former is often more valuable.
You’re literally asking for the ‘average’ of a country containing everything from desert to tundra to a variety of types of forest and just about every biome in between. We’ve got political situations ranging from state endorsed persecution and torture of minorities on the one hand to policies that are at times to the left of the European mainstream on the other.
You might as well compare Norway and Turkey as Massachusetts and Texas. In the latter case they share a federal government, but both also ignore that government when it suits them. Like, look at the confusing legal situation around marijuana in the US. It’s legal in more and more states, but it’s federally illegal. So like, technically it’s federally illegal in states where it’s legal, but we just ignore that for most purposes. It does mean that dispensaries largely have to operate with cash, though.
In Massachusetts it’s even weirder. We have a ballot initiative process, so the people can make new laws by making a big enough petition and putting it on the next election ballot. That’s how we passed decriminalization, then medical, then legalization. No Massachusetts politician really took up the issue and endorsed it, we just voted it in. Which forced our state law makers to basically ignore the federal prohibition.
You could also expect to see this happen in Massachusetts if, for example, abortion were federally criminalized. We already ignore other states’ laws about things like family planning and immigration.
The US really isn’t a monolith legally or culturally.
Starbucks violated federal labor law when it increased wages and offered new perks and benefits only to non-union employees, a National Labor Relations Board judge found Thursday....
I worked at Starbucks back in like 04-06 or something like that and it was a great job for what it was at the time. The pace was reasonable, the hours were genuinely flexible, the pay was decent, and the benefits were actual. I was in the highest volume store in the metro area I was living in and I loved working there. It was busy, but the line kept it reasonable, we’d mark drinks ahead of time on cups, and half the time by the time people got to the counter we’d have their drink ready.
After unemployment ran out from COVID I went back for about a year, and it was a completely different beast. Where one line used to create a bottleneck at the register and allow us plenty of time to mark and make drinks, we now had to deal with the drive-thru and mobile ordering all at the same time, which shifts the bottle neck to drink preparation by a wide margin. Working at Starbucks now is essentially standing in the middle of the narrow point of a labor funnel. They’ve also added a lot more tasks and spread them out all over the place, so the footwork is way more than it used to be. Floor mat coverage also tends to be insufficient because of this, and there isn’t really time to slow down to a reasonable pace. Doesn’t help when you’re scheduled until 15 minutes before the hour in order to avoid having to give you another break.
Pay is basically what it was the last time I worked there plus a couple of dollars. Benefits and stock options are still left dangling as bait, but management seems to try to ensure that as few employees as possible actually get enough hours to qualify. Where previously corporate, in my experience anyway, supported positive managers who had their crews backs, they now seem to love slimy corporate boot-lickers who will rake back every bit of benefit and extract as much labor as possible.
With the drive-thru model it’s hardly surprising to see it getting worse, but it is disappointing. What was once a boon to the working class has become just another exploitative company. Not only that, but an exploitative company that’s taken their market share and has moved on to cost cutting and labor squeezing. Replacing nice little local cafes first with a polished corporate cafe and slowly turning it into an expensive McDonald’s.
I do hope the nice little cafes see the opportunity to capitalize on selling a better product and treating their employees better and take back a bit of that market share.
I mean, yeah. Have you been on reddit since the API stuff? It’s absolutely flooded with bots trying to make up the difference. Which is like, reddit playbook 2009. The broken links are pretty prolific too at this point.
It’s not going to like, close its doors, but it certainly isn’t in the position it was just a few months ago.
It’s not reactionary to say that capitalism is bad. Capitalism is literally terrible. Not commerce, capitalism. Buying and selling things isn’t wrong, but extracting and consolidating surplus labor from the working class is.
AppLovin’s attempts to acquire Unity last year turned sour when Unity opted for a merger with rivals ironSource instead . Now, in the ongoing shockwave of Unity's unpopular introductio...
The thing is, this could change at any time. The problem with enshittification is that it spreads. A company that’s doing great work today could be bought out by corporate profiteers and leeched of its actual value at any point in the future. We’ve had plenty of companies that started out with a vision and a set of strong principles who’ve been reduced to predatory business practices that are bad for everyone. You can’t assume that because a company seems to have integrity now, that integrity will remain.
Remember Elon Musk 15 years ago? Wasn’t quite the same, was it?
To me, sitting in a position of getting started in game development, that makes me want to sink my time and effort into an engine that I know can’t be enshittified because it can’t be bought out. I want to know that in a few years I’m not going to completely scrub every asset and mechanic that I make for the engine because somebody’s pulled some Darth Vader shit.
Unreal is safe now, but there are no guarantees under capitalism. A FOSS license does guarantee that enshittification won’t be a factor because it literally can’t become the exclusive property of some company with a greedy executive board. Unreal doesn’t have that protection, Godot does.
Could Godot be compromised some how? Sure. Can it be enshittified? Not really.
ShadowDragon tracks BabyCenter, a website for people expecting children, as well as social media sites specifically for Black people, bodybuilders, and the fetish community.
I think in general people would have an easier time interacting with the system and just existing in proximity to it if the stakes weren’t so artificially raised.
Honestly, I’d argue that raising the stakes via the penal system as well as through things like corporate culture and work ethic have more to do with many of our problems than anything else. We’d probably be a lot better off if we took the time to try to teach people patience by not demanding constant impossible perfection and by giving them the room to exist.
So many people get so stressed about literally nothing. I’ll pick people up driving my cab and they’ll literally apologize for needing to be picked up or apologize for paying with cash or a card or a thousand other things. I spend more time reassuring people that everything is fine and it’s completely acceptable for them to call a taxi than nearly any other endlessly repeated interaction.
It’s not a big deal. We’re all going to die. Just take a second and let yourself enjoy your life instead of subjugating yourself to assholes and apologizing for it. Part of that is minding your own damn business and not locking people up for dumb shit.
The real question is whether or not people will continue to use Unity. Apologies mean less than nothing in a case like this regardless of whether or not they’re sincere. This is a company that’s shown their cards. Why give them business when you can go elsewhere?
Personally, this has made me start looking more into Godot. I’ve got a project I’m going to be working on that I was going to do in Unreal, but this Unity stuff has made me skeptical of tying my creative output to any one company that can’t be easily replaced. Getting that wrapped up with a proprietary platform that comes with licensing that might change just seems like a bad idea now. Maybe Unreal is okay today, but what about down the road? Why start building into a system that there’s no guarantee won’t enshittify a few years down the road?
I’d like to get my major mechanical stuff squared away and develop a visual style and then tell more stories without reinventing the wheel every time. Once I’ve got my assets built on top of an engine, I’d rather add to it over time than arbitrarily scrap it every few years. Updating and refactoring is all well and good, but I’m not in it to code the same system over and over.
That makes Godot look pretty appealing, and any closed source corporate offering look pretty shady.
The bucket is also increasingly full of bots and astroturfers. I think they’re doing a half decent job of hiding the impact when it comes to numbers, but the drop in quality sheds a little more light.
I’ve covered the lights on several of my devices with black nail polish. It works pretty well. Some of them have angles that it won’t adhere to very well, but even then it’s a lot less obnoxious.
One coat to dim slightly, 3-4 to block light effectively.
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own....
Literally every seeder is part of that archive. You can look at individual trackers in the microcosm as individual archives and indices, but it’s the culture of piracy that causes the wide scale collection and preservation of media.
We’re actually at this kind of interesting cross-generational point of guerilla archival where it’s become easier to find certain obscure pieces of media history. I suspect this is in large part due to things like bounties, where suddenly a forgotten VHS of a 35 year old HBO special that aired once or twice could be a step toward a higher rank and greater access to a wider range of media.
Modern piracy has a strong incentive toward finding lost material that’s no longer readily available. Zero day content is great, but have you seen the RADAR pilot or both seasons of AfterMASH?
They belong in a museum. Indie would be proud, even if Harrison wouldn’t. Not that I know his perspective on piracy.
What a terrible interview. The interviewer literally repeatedly asks questions that they’ve already answered and shows pretty clearly that they haven’t bothered actually researching or trying AI art technology. They certainly seemed to have read plenty of articles about how bad AI is, but didn’t even bother scratching the surface of how it’s actually used.
It reads like a hit piece coming from someone who only reads what comes up in their feed.
People who haven’t used this tech really have it backward. This enables indie artists to create stuff on their own without corporate oversight. This interview was an opportunity to explore that, but they decided to follow the corporate line of attacking this actually successful four person studio instead of asking about what makes them tick with any actual interest.
You’d be making a mistake there. AI elements can’t be copyrighted, but human-created elements can. There’s also a line somewhere at which point AI generation is used as a tool to enhance hand-made art rather than to generate entire pieces wholesale.
Like, let’s look at this Soul Token for my Planescape themed Conan Exiles server (still in development).
I went into GIMP, drew a simple skull based on a design I found on google image search, slapped it on a very simple little circle, and popped it into NightCafe for some detail work. The end result is something I composed myself, with the most significant visual elements created by hand and spiced up a bit essentially using a big complicated filter. The result saved me hours and gave me one of many little in-game items to mod into my server that I never would have had the resources to produce in bulk otherwise as an independent developer.
Who owns it?
Well, I drew the skull after training myself on google image search data, but presumably my hand drawing of a fairly generic object still belongs to me. I drew the circle that makes up the coin itself, but NightCafe added some nicely lit metallic coloring, gave it a border, and turned my little skull into a gem. This, of course, requiring some prompt engineering and iteration on my part.
So is adding a texture and a little border detail enough to interfere with my ownership? Should it be? If I didn’t hand-create enough of the work to constitute ownership, surely there’s some point at which a vanishingly small amount of AI detail being added to the art doesn’t eliminate the independent creation of the art itself. If I were to paint an elaborate landscape by hand and then AI generate a border for it, surely that border shouldn’t eliminate the legitimacy of my contributions.
At some point, the difference between the use of AI and the use of a filter in an image editor becomes essentially non-existent. Yes, an AI can create a lot more from scratch, but in practical terms it’s much easier to get it started with a bit of traditional art than it is to spend hours engineering prompts trying to get rid of weird extra eyeballs and spaghetti fingers.
I’d love to see a more elaborate discussion on this topic, but so far all we get is some form of ‘AI bad!’ and then some artists dropping a little bit of nuance without it really seeming to go anywhere.
This technology has the potential to elevate independent artists to the sort of productivity that only corporations, with their inherent inspiration-killing bureaucracy, could previously achieve. That’s a good thing.
AI art of any reasonable quality still requires significant human input. I don’t just mean prompt engineering, I mean actually having an artist using more traditional techniques to make adjustments or provide a base for the AI work. The output of raw AI art on its own can be impressive at times, but it’s not consistent enough to maintain a style for any sizeable piece of work.
If you want to be able to create a bunch of assets that look like they were designed for the same project with AI, somebody still needs to do some art.
What AI does do, though, is give those artists the ability to exponentially increase their productivity independently, with no particular need for the sort of labor-hour organization that a corporation provides.
It should be telling that the corporate media spin on this is to attack it and to publicize voices that criticize it, but never those that express nuance. That’s because it terrifies every useless corporate lackey who understands its actual potential to empower independent artists of all kinds.
Artists aren’t lawyers and don’t want to be. Except for the ones that are. But that isn’t most of us.
Artists make art. If you want to look for the people who like to make policy, look to the jackasses in suits who sit around having meetings about meetings all day to justify scalping the work made by actual artists. The same kinds of people who fund stories like this blatantly uninformed hit piece.
Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
At some point the line will have to be discovered, because the use of AI for art isn’t going away. Suits can whine about it all they want. Art doesn’t really care.
They can be binding in the sense that they can govern the licensing or potentially ownership of submitted assets. So like, for example, a ToS could have a bunch of clauses that carry no legal obligation for you, but could also include a clause that grants the company licensing to use your likeness or things submitted to the server or interaction with it. The same way any ToS can license the use of your metadata for sale to 3rd parties.
That doesn’t have any particular legally binding requirements of you, but it can serve as a shield in the event of a lawsuit if, say, Facebook uses your profile photo in some advertising materials.
It can also be useful if you’re running a small project like an independent game server. Even if there’s literally no money in it, it can be helpful to clarify who owns what in the event of something like a false DMCA. If a developer who once was doing work with you suddenly decides to take their ball and go home, some sort of agreement that outlines your ownership or usage rights surrounding code submitted to your mod can protect you when they turn around and send Steam a DMCA.
But yeah, nobody’s going to get sued for using a service in a way that the ToS prohibits unless it’s already illegal, like theft.
Why does the use of AI to modify art require justification?
We seem to have this general culture of people who don’t make things coming after those who do. Every decision of design, methodology, or artistic preference treated as though the creator has an obligation to please every single person who posts their opinions on the internet.
The reality is that this simply isn’t true. Art that spends all its energy fretting about whether people will like it ends up being some bland bullshit produced by committee. Art that allows itself to be what it is doesn’t need opinions and suggestions to flourish.
If the author of that article were remotely interested in their process or what the actual practical implications of using AI on a project are, they could have had something worth reading.
Instead they went into the interview looking to push a position and badgering without listening rather than making even a passing attempt at something resembling journalism. Because ultimately they don’t care about AI, or art, or games; they care about rage clicks.
This is a bit unrealistic. Games may work better than they did in the past, but performance isn’t 1:1 yet. More importantly, device drivers can be a lot more dicey.
Personally, the main thing keeping me from actually using my Linux partition most of the time is that my mouse buttons can’t be properly rebound. Yeah, I could find some janky work-around, but that would be eating into my workflow.
I also do, in fact, need Windows for development.
GNU is great, but pretending it’s a viable Windows replacement for every use case is just disingenuous. It doesn’t help anyone and it only makes GNU supporters seem that much more out of touch with the average user’s experience.
There are literally people who will think the internet is broken if they accidentally delete their browser shortcut or just straight up can’t find it in the sea of icons on their desktop. These are the users that Windows is protecting from themselves. The same users probably wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use the command line if their life depended on it.
There’s a place for Windows, and there’s a place for GNU. I’d love to see the place for GNU expand and the place for Windows shrink, but that doesn’t make it so.
I emailed the dev who makes Solaar less than a month ago after my most recent attempt. They said clicking and holding would be on Logitech’s end, in their firmware. As the firmware stands currently, it’s not possible to rebind those particular buttons and click and hold them unless you rebind them to other buttons already on the mouse. Works in Logitech Options + on Windows, does not work through Solaar on any Linux distro.
I attempted to contact the Logitech devs, but there doesn’t seem to be any open avenue for doing so. I tried talking to Logitech support, but they weren’t able to put me in contact or even forward a message.
So yes, I have tried this recently. And literally the person who makes the software I’m trying to use has told me that my use case is not currently possible without some sort of workaround.
Windows definitely isn’t the solution for all use cases. There are some use cases for which it’s completely ineffective. There is no one operating system that’s perfect for all use cases.
Lemmy needs proper moderation tools. Currently if someone posts an image you have to take like a dozen steps in a command line to delete it, and it doesn’t delete from federated instances when removed by moderators.
So let’s say you access lemmy.world through lemmy.film. Anything federated to lemmy.film through lemmy.world that’s deleted due to content moderation will still appear on lemmy.film until it’s deleted manually.
Couple this with an influx of malicious users and you’ve got a nasty situation on your hands that isn’t sustainable for instance hosts while putting them at significant legal risk.
On the user experience end of things, people seem determined to flood the all feed with bot spam and it seems as though the more hostile tide of reddit users and plants sponsored by bad actors have showed up to play.
Lemmy’s devs need to give some indication that they can even be bothered to glance in the direction of producing more robust moderation and federation tools if it’s going to keep its momentum. User-level instance blocking would help a lot too.
That’s definitely a fair take, but it doesn’t really eliminate the issue. I know Beehaw offered to pay to have some of this stuff done and were turned down. With the project being as substantial as it is, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to accept some of that money and hire a third set of eyes.
I’m running windows for my daily, but I’ve got Ditto and it works great. I have like 3 clipboards set up, could set up more. It just needs a different hotkey combination. It’s really simple.
Mayim Bialik will not be hosting Season 2 of “Celebrity Jeopardy!” as she continues to support the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, Variety has learned from sources....
Racism and the CPC (lemmy.ca)
Stuff like this and the “base” he has created give off pretty harsh trump vibes. Here is a link confirming for those wanting one. Sorry I did not include it originally. www.cbc.ca/amp/1.712106
Torrent client rankings (lemmy.basedcount.com)
Biden worries ‘extreme’ supreme court can’t be relied on to uphold rule of law (www.theguardian.com)
Joe Biden worries that the “extreme” US supreme court, dominated by rightwing justices, cannot be relied upon to uphold the rule of law....
Tom Hanks says AI version of him used in dental plan ad without his consent (www.theguardian.com)
Tom Hanks has warned fans that an ad for a dental plan that appears to use his image is in fact fake and was created using artificial intelligence....
rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
I fucking hate these shitheads, I was arguing with one earlier and no matter how many facts I gave him with proper sources he just refused to actually show any kind of respect
Relatable? (suppo.fi)
bur(ule)ger (files.catbox.moe)
Judge: Starbucks violated federal labor law by withholding pay hikes from unionized workers (www.cnn.com)
Starbucks violated federal labor law when it increased wages and offered new perks and benefits only to non-union employees, a National Labor Relations Board judge found Thursday....
Greyskull? No no no. By the power of social manipulation. (startrek.website)
3,700-year-old Babylonian stone tablet gets translated, changes history (www.upworthy.com)
Hey, hold that door! Hold that door! (cdn.discordapp.com)
The final nail in Reddit's coffin dropped today:
Dear User,...
DuckDuckGo CEO says Google kills competition through phone deals that make it hard for users to switch search engines (fortune.com)
No love lost: AppLovin helpfully releases tool to switch from Unity to Godot or Unreal (www.pocketgamer.biz)
AppLovin’s attempts to acquire Unity last year turned sour when Unity opted for a merger with rivals ironSource instead . Now, in the ongoing shockwave of Unity's unpopular introductio...
Inside ShadowDragon, The Tool That Lets ICE Monitor Pregnancy Tracking Sites and Fortnite Players (www.404media.co)
ShadowDragon tracks BabyCenter, a website for people expecting children, as well as social media sites specifically for Black people, bodybuilders, and the fetish community.
Illinois becomes first state in nation to eliminate cash bail: Here’s how it will work (chicago.suntimes.com)
Illinois became the first state in the nation Monday to completely remove cash bail as a condition to be released ahead of a criminal trial....
Unity apologises. (www.pcgamer.com)
The "cult following" Android phone starter pack (lemdro.id)
This should be illegal (lemmy.world)
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own....
Terraforming Mars team defends AI use as Kickstarter hits $1.3 million (www.polygon.com)
‘It’s too powerful a technology’
Your wake-up juice defines you (lemmy.world)
I like napping
Just +[--->++<]>+.+++[->++++<]>+.+++++++..+++[->++++<]>++ (lemdro.id)
Lemmy is losing users (programming.dev)
How can we make it more popular?
Every Single Freaking Time (lemmy.world)
You heard of Eevee, but get ready for this: (lemmy.world)
Mayim Bialik Declines to Host ‘Celebrity Jeopardy!’ Amid Strikes, Replaced by Ken Jennings (variety.com)
Mayim Bialik will not be hosting Season 2 of “Celebrity Jeopardy!” as she continues to support the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, Variety has learned from sources....