Aaron

Chant it with me, friends!

Stop 👏 using 👏 Chrome 👏!!

Louis Rossmann is a bit of a provocateur, but what he's saying in this video is the bare and unvarnished truth. If Reddit cared about its users and its moderators, the CEO's internal messaging would be less like "this will blow over" and more like "what should we do to meet these people in the middle?"

There is no meeting in the middle when you're up against institutional investors who have put literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to fund your operation. I almost feel bad for Steve, he really has no choice, it's just a shame to see him falling into line and reciting exactly what the board wants him to say.

And by the way, this is why Beehaw has so much promise. The incentives of the operators and the users are aligned. There is no third party with outsized power waiting for the chance to pull the rip cord and enshittify the whole thing.

It feels like realizing that WhatsApp is a terrible Meta privacy nightmare, but you can't wake up because you can't convince your whole family to use Signal.

I wonder if these battles will shake loose the circuit split on de minimis exceptions to music samples (see https://lawreview.richmond.edu/2022/06/10/a-music-industry-circuit-split-the-de-minimis-exception-in-digital-sampling/).

Currently, it is absolutely not "cut and dried" whether the use of any given sample should be permitted. Most musicians are erring on the side of "clear everything," but does an AI-generated "simulacrum" qualify as "sampling"?

What's on trial here is basically "what characteristic(s) of an artist's work do they own?" If you write a song, you can "own" whatever is written down (melody, lyrics, etc.) If you perform a song, you can own the performance (recordings thereof, etc.) Things start to get pretty vague when we start talking about "I own the sound of my voice."

I think it's accepted that it's legal for an impersonator to make a living doing TikToks pretending to be Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise can't really sue them saying "he sounds like me." But is it different if a computer does it? It may very well be.

It's going to be a pretty rough few years in copyright litigation. Buckle up.

Bram was notoriously possessive of the Vim project and consistently avoided bringing in other lead maintainers or adding widely demanded features (like async processing). Maybe that changed while I wasn't paying attention, but it had a lot to do with the very successful neovim fork. Bram eventually added an async feature but not before neovim exploded in popularity.

It's tragic to hear of Bram's passing, and at such a young age. I will be interested to see what happens to the Vim project now, in his absence.

That’s only true when you use a generally accepted definition of the word “improving.”

When you use the capitalist robber baron definition, he’s spot on!

It's a three ton steel knife that does zero to sixty in three seconds, it's literally designed to shred human bodies.

I support Pocket Casts because it's made by Automattic, the makers of WordPress, Tumblr, and WooCommerce. Their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, is someone who seems to really care about the freedom and diversity of the internet. As far as players go, it's got all the features you'd want for an Android app.

I seldom listen on my PC, but if I want to I can usually find the stream on whatever service the podcast has chosen (their own site, or whichever embedded player they elect to use).

I'm happy to see Inkscape continue to get big updates!

I recently got a pen plotter and Inkscape is the main way anyone feeds drawings into these things so it's good to know it's being looked after.

Developers all have their pet frameworks they want to use. Why contribute to a Kotlin app when I can finally learn Dart and Flutter??

Nobody has mentioned one of the top purely technical reasons companies are reluctant to open source things: support.

I worked for a company that opened a UI design framework and people loved it, but the moment you have an outside audience, you can't just make breaking changes or pivot the direction. You have to be sure your thing is completely stable before you open it up.

They felt they couldn't move fast enough while supporting the open one, so they forked it and just maintained the public one so the private one could change faster.

There are costs to support. I'm not saying companies shouldn't do it (Google does, all the time), bit smaller companies may not be able to afford it.

Here in the States the Toyota Camry is the only car that made the top ten most sold vehicle list for 2022. Everything else is either a crossover/SUV (Honda CR-V, Tesla Model Y), or a truck (#1 is the Chevy Silverado, #2 is the Ford F-series).

We're already deeply screwed.

I see no plans anywhere here, only some software that presumably controls it, and a list of parts. That's hardly enough information from which to build a functioning system.

Throughout history, people have always been driven to create, and others have always sought out creative works. For that reason, I don't think we'll necessarily "stagnate culturally" in a broad sense.

However, at least in the US, we're already standing at the precipice of making creative work practically impossible. Our extremely weak (by peer nation standards) labor protection laws and social support systems tends to strip life of everything but the obligation to work.

Our last bastion of hope for structural protection for creativity is the possibility that anyone could both create, and profit from it. Copyright law was, originally, intended to amplify that potential.

I usually point to stock photography as an area where people used to be able to make at least modest money, but nowadays you'd be lucky to make poverty wages. The market was flooded by cheap, high-quality cameras, and thus cheap, high-quality images. AI will do the same thing for many other mediums.

What has me really concerned is that the majority of really cool makers and creators I watch on YouTube are Canadian. I've convinced myself that this is because someone living in Canada can take the very real risk of sinking their life's energy into starting a YouTube channel because at least they know that if they get cancer, they have somewhere to go.

Not so here in America. If you aren't working for an established employer, or sitting on quite a bit of cash for independent health insurance, you're taking substantial risk in being unemployed for any length of time (assuming you have the choice). Even if you do "make it," the costs of self-insurance for sole proprietors is no joke!

So the only people taking their life in their own hands to create works of real cultural value are 1) the few percent who manage to get paid for it, 2) the independently wealthy and/or retired, and 3) the poor and desperate who would be just as precarious in either case.

It's not our finest hour here, if I do say so. I hope the rise of AI helps amplify this conversation. I am truly concerned about it.

Also conserve helium, which would be huge.

More old trivia is that the original OK Cupid system was written in C, including the actual web server that served the pages. They wrote it in C so that the matching thing could run real-time, which is super impressive, even if writing your own web server is actually pretty dumb.

I loved the days when people just wanted to make fun, useful, quirky stuff on the internet and not just peddle thirst traps and Chinese merchandise.

It makes me so happy to see Doctorow's smart work referenced around here.

It's wild that even robotic, psychotic Zuck is more in touch with his company than Stevie Huff-Huff.

Like at least Zuck seems to know what he wants. Metaverse is an insane idea but it's an idea. What Steve Huffing-man wants is money. Clearly. Nothing more. It's pathetic.

I'm physically addicted to SwiftKey and it's still very good, but, it is owned by Microsoft now in case that influences anyone's decisions here.

Yessss! Just got a sewing machine and finished my first bag (it took me like two months on and off) and I'm never going to toss torn clothing again.

I ordered this cool graphic t-shirt and it was way too big, so I complained to the retailer and they sent a smaller one and told me to keep it. So I took a stab at taking it in, and, well, it went terribly (I need a walking foot for stretchy fabrics), but it still worked out and it's totally wearable.

Once you start to realize that it's not that hard to mend things... It's like a super power.

I have a couple of really nice REI camp chairs and one of them got several holes burned through it by flying embers around the fire one night, so I patched them. I didn't even try to make it match, I full-on chose a totally different color patch, and bright red heavy duty thread, and it looks badass.

I'm struggling with a conflict here, and I hope we can have an open conversation about it.

I just started a monthly donation to Beehaw via OpenCollective, and I love what Beehaw stands for and the "be(e) nice" policy. It looks like Beehaw is gaining traction, and there are topics and people here that I want to engage with.

At the same time, I see things like this: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379 describing very specific ways in which the creators of the Lemmy platform are perpetuating pretty gross ideas about what the world should be like.

The struggle I have is that Beehaw is independent and aligned with my values, but it uses the Lemmy platform and therefore provides traction to the existence of Lemmy, attention to the Lemmy project, and the downstream benefits derived therefrom to its creators and maintainers.

In general, I think that the creator of something should remain separate from their work. You can appreciate Harry Potter without supporting TERF ideas. But Lemmy creators are taking their contributions and funneling them into running an instance that reads like a tankie troll farm (at best) and that creates real-world harm.

Mainly I'm curious to hear from Beehaw founder(s) how you imagine this could play out? Have we given consideration to how much our efforts here might inadvertently contribute in some very small way to forwarding those negative social agendas? What is to be done?

Thunder is hot! It is making me want to actually try developing in Flutter, which seems to be the "new hotness."

Bram obviously gave so much to the global community, and directly to Uganda through his persistent charity efforts, and no more need be said about what a devoted and generous person he was. We'd all truly be worse off without his contributions and I say that as a devout Emacs user.

Still, it always rubbed me wrong that his stated plan for the project was immortality.

How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future?

Keep me alive.

I'm really new at this so I don't pretend to actually know, but the problem I was having was massive bunching of the fabric that would make it basically either stop or turn, and because it was close to the edge I couldn't pull it through from both sides. Does that sound like something a walking foot will help me with?

I appreciate the response. I don't feel strongly about it at this point, but I did want to make sure that y'all were at least aware of some of what is going on. Fedi.Tips, which seems like a quite popular resource for newcomers, is strongly discouraging Lemmy as a whole for this reason. I don't know how much of a headwind that presents for Beehaw, but it's worth knowing.

Still love Beehaw and the mission and the values!

I don't know if that statistic included used car sales, so it may only reflect those able to buy a new vehicle. It still reflects a pretty substantial shift in preference though, in my view. The list was 9 cars out of 10 just a few decades ago.

Also, used car stock reflects prior new car purchase decisions, so over time we just starve ourselves of reasonably sized vehicles to choose from.

<Duplicate comment which apparently I can't delete>