Depends on your jurisdiction.
As far as I know, that's never been tried in court in Canada, and there's reason to suspect that may not be the case here. (Although I'm not a lawyer, so I may be mistaken.)
You can if you own the Mario game...
... but I just downloaded a 1TB Batocera Switch image to run from MicroSD.
Downloading content is almost definitely legal in Canada, and non-commercial digital distribution has never gone to court, so its legality hasn't been established.
I can't find the source, but I recall reading speculation that sharing backup copies between owners of the media is likely legal in Canada but, again, it hasn't been tried by courts, so its legality hasn't been firmly established.
Anyway, with non-commercial digital distribution not having any legal teeth in Canada, it's effectively legal and its literal legality is unknown.
Copyright has completely jumped the shark. There's absolutely no balance between the public benefit of the public domain.
30 years ought to be enough time for anyone to extract any reasonable value from an IP. If you haven't made your profit in 30 years, then let the public benefit from it.
Or at least let preservationists (data hoarders, let's be honest) keep our cultural history alive and accessible for future generations.
This is really exciting to see. Enshittification is generating increasing backlash against incumbent monopolies, and encouraging more movement toward sustainable open source software.
See Blender, too.
I just wanted to say that I feel very strongly that, should it be implement, the community be called WorkReform, not AntiWork.
In the spirit of Beehaw, I think AntiWork goes against the ethos of "Bee Kind" as it sets the entire community up to be adversarial to anyone who enjoys work/finds work meaningful. Work reform is a much more inclusive goal.
I had a hard time with that one since I would not join an anti work community, but I was fairly active on /r/WorkReform.
idk, Allman is very readable. Easy to scan vertically to find the matching open brace. Not quite as vertically-space efficient as the best way, but it's not offensive.
It sounds like this was done without any warning, too. Subs can, and have, changed their rules many times. Users voting to allow NSFW content is already precedented.
Unilaterally removing mods who are in direct compliance with your order to reopen the sub isn't a good look, particularly since one of the biggest drivers of this protest is the lack of communication with mods.
Do they have any other option than to stick to their guns on this one? That's sold the XBox Series S as having feature parity with the Series X. If they go against that now, then they've engaged in false advertising and will immediately get slapped with a huge lawsuit and/or fine, plus all the negative PR that comes from it.
They're stuck until the next console generation, which is a long way out. And I wonder if PS5 will continue to gain ground against XBox for the rest of the generation as a result.
It will be interesting to see if they continue with their two-model tiering next gen, but I'm guessing they won't.
And we're basically entirely dependent on the EU to enact laws to enforce the interoperability required to reduce switching costs to allow for reverse network effects to break up tech/platform monopolies.
Regulatory capture is so deeply entrenched in American politics that it will take decades to unwind.
I'd just email the CEO, media relations, and legal (if you can get all their email addresses), inform them of their non-compliance with the GPL and ask them to resolve this swiftly before it needs to be escalated. Then if you don't hear back in 2 business days, reply all again CCing someone they might care about: local media to their jurisdiction, the FSF, the EFF, etc.
My jaw literally dropped reading that.
I think it's time to go outside.
They mentioned in the article that Google search tends from Brasil don't seem to indicate any uptick in searches related to pirate TV boxes being seized or not working, either. So, this story is looking likely to be entirely fabricated propaganda.
It's funny for a day, but it'll be a graveyard in a week, I'm guessing.
I think this is the best possible response to being essentially forced to reopen.
The problem isn't the number of providers, the problem is exclusive licensing deals.
If it was like music, then (theoretically), more choice is better. AFAIK all the platforms have pretty much all the music, so there is some choice available.
With TV and film, it's so fractured that it's literally easier to just pirate things, even for shows I (potentially) have ad-free paid access to already. With Stremio + Torrentio + a Debrid service, I just launch one app and everything's available in seconds. With paid services, I need to search Netflix, then Prime, then CBC Gem, by which point I'd already be watching.
Plus, torrentio lets me pick the video quality I want, so I can force 4K H265 on my big screen for films or just pop on a 720p H264 on my small underpowered laptop (that can't decode H265 fast enough for smooth playback).
It's not even about price, it's just a better experience to pirate. And that's a Big Problem for the industry.
idk, a debrid service is so cheap, it costs less to pay than to buy the hard drives and server + power. And it has pretty much everything already, so it's more convenient, too.
It's hard to justify dropping a pile of cash on 3 drives for a RAID when it will take about a decade to pay for itself vs. debrid, by which point I'll need to replace the drives. Plus, it takes more time to set up, maintain, and load the desired media.
I use Real Debrid with Stremio + Torrentio. I just need to figure out how to add the manual torrent search & download plugin for Real Debrid since I watch a lot of obscure British TV, not everything is hosted already.
For mainstream stuff, it just works. For obscure stuff, it's about 50-50 if it's on there.
Manually downloading torrents is just for stuff I'll be transferring to a mobile device, like audiobooks. And cracked software, I suppose. I needed Adobe Acrobat for something and torrented it.
She didn't even "go to Dubai". It was a layover.
I like that they included the mental health component. Long-term steady payments are best for mental health and can fairly easily be converted into lump sums by pooling payments and rotating payouts with others receiving UBI.
This is important because lump sums are most likely to spur entrepreneurship since they have the capital to invest, immediately, in a new venture. (But the unpredictability of starting a new business also means they are less happy.)
It's nice having some hard data to support how we should go about UBI. Now we just need to revert taxation to what it was like a century ago to pay for it.
Related, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov is a fantastic, timeless science fiction short story.
I'm not sure how this one could be problematic; you just decline to consent to your browser being identified when you click into the site, or not decline if you want that feature for whatever service needs it.
It's not saying it's illegal to collect at all, it's just illegal to collect without consent.
This shouldn't need to be the case; emulation is legal and has been tried by the courts in several jurisdictions.
Sucks that laws like the DMCA make it illegal to bypass encryption for the sake of emulation or other fair use, so the legality of emulation isn't really "enough" in the face of even rudimentary protections.
The nice thing about loving on a global society is that this can still be legally pursued elsewhere and we can all benefit. (Or coordinated/shared on the dark web, which can be untraceable even for those living in justifications where it might be illegal.)
In this case, they'll be fine. They made a LLC and didn't take any personal liability in the settlement. They can just declare bankruptcy and fold.
This article is almost entirely non-news. ES6 is a long ways off, was likely announced prematurely, and they have nothing new to say.
The only nugget in the article that seemed relevant to me was that in the engine work for Starfield, Bethesda was mindful of including future engine requirements from ES6.
The rest was just what you'd expect the ES6 project lead to say: "We want it to be amazing, of course!"
Alt text:
Changing the names would be easier, but if you're not comfortable lying, try only making friends with people named Alice, Bob, Carol, etc.
XKCD isn't complete without the alt text.
$30 cosmetic microtransactions are reasonable in Path of Exile, imho. But it's free-to-play, and most of their MTX are purely cosmetic.
To get the "full" experience, I suppose you'll want to drop a retail-box-price on a supporter pack to get some stash tabs, but you can reasonably play the game to end game content (30+ hours of play time for the first time for a new player, I'd guess?) without spending a cent.
But MTX in a game that's over $100CAD on release? ಠ_ಠ
I think the article does raise some interesting points, particularly around the disconnect in non-technical people having absolutely no understanding of open source software and the lack of funding (including government tax incentives) to creating and maintaining open source software.
There are some projects that are doing well, completely unfunded by corporations, but they're definitely in the minority. And most of the successful ones have a freemium model or are related to piracy or ad blocking or some other philosophically- or economically-motivated project.
That's not how LLMs work.
Super short version is that LLMs probabilistically determine the next word most likely to occur in a sequence. They do this using Statistical Models (like what your cell phone's auto complete uses); Transformers (rating the importance of preceding words, so the model can "focus" on the most important words); and Relatedness (a measure of how closely linked different words/phrases are to reach other in meaning).
With increasingly large models, LLMs can build a more accurate representation of Relatedness across a wider range of topics. With enough examples, LLMs can infinitely generate content that is closely Related to a query.
So a small LLM can make sentences that follow writing conventions but are nonsense. A larger LLM can write intelligibly about topics that are frequently included in the training materials. Huge LLMs can do increasingly nuanced things like "explain" jokes.
LLMs are not capable of evaluating truth or facts. It's not part of the algorithm. And it doesn't matter how big they get. At best, with enough examples to build a stronger Relatedness dataset, they are more likely to "stay on topic" and return results that are actually similar to what is being asked.
Love it. Trust is also why I'm using Logseq for note taking and "Building a Second Brain". I'm putting lots of sensitive personal and work information into it, so having plain text files stored locally in a standardized format is critical. My data is completely safe and future-proof.
Ironically, the lack of vendor lock-in is likely going to lead to me sticking with Logseq for a very long time.
I also pay/donate $5/mo to get access to their fully-encrypted cloud sync (and to support the project). I really like the idea of nobody having access to the content of my notes, as would be the case if I used Google Drive or OneDrive to sync plaintext files.
As the article says, in cases where trust is important, open source has a significant advantage.
I use AdAway to modify the host file on my Android phone. I literally can't load ad content; sometimes it gets in the way since the ad is the easiest way to get to what I want to click occasionally, lol.
Also, the Vanced app can modify apps to eliminate ads. Or X-Manager for Spotify does a similar thing.
Then there are alternative front-end apps, like NewPipe/LibreTube for YouTube, Xtra for Twitch, and others.
Or there is just straight piracy to avoid the ads, but in their own apps. Stremio + Torrentio + a Debrid service is basically a pirate Netflix app with full control of your stream quality.
Regardless, I think his point mostly stands; it's a very small percentage of users modifying apps to avoid ads or telemetry.
I think that might have been a thread I called someone out for being unkind. They jumped to ad hominem in response to a really innocuous comment
Someone I called out recently for being unkind replied essentially saying that all of Beehaw are snowflakes for wanting to eliminate vitriol. That comment was deleted, I assume by a mod/admin, very quickly, so kudos to whoever was watching that thread/report!
I am very thankful to the volunteers trying to keep Beehaw true to its mandate. Hence why I'm trying to do my part by calling people out when they break the only rule here.
TL;DR:
Maybe that's what will move the needle? If we, as non-mods, normalize calling out unkind behaviour then it derails the "performance snark" and ruins the "fun" of trolling.
I'm not American, so maybe I shouldn't comment, but I think Americans wanting change should pursue Single Transferable Vote (STV).
It's basically a ranked ballot in multi-seat ridings. This is the most surefire way to dismantle a two-party system, give roughly proportional representation, maintain geographical representation, keep extreme fringe parties from gaining wedge power, and allow for choice within a party to eliminate "safe" seats.
I really wish Canada would adopt this system to prevent our descent into American political tribalism.
The idea is also that a compromised system will remains compromised after all storage drives are removed.
Which only affects companies doing business in the EU. Granted, that's most of the big players.
Very grateful for the EU to unfuck most of the world from a lot of American regulatory capture.
Maybe it's just my ADHD, but I can't even imagine managing that many tabs.
In my workflow, I start a project, then keep opening new tabs as I need to look things up, frequently moving tabs between multiple browsers spanning my 32" monitor. So long as I'm working on that problem, I just keep opening new tabs.
Then, when I've finally squared away the section of the project I was working on, I usually just close the browser entirely and start fresh.
Needing to manually sift through the 80+ tabs I chaotically opened in the last hour or so to figure out what's worth keeping? Hell no. That's what browser history is for. It's Etch-a-Sketch time! Shake it clean and start fresh.
Yeah, agreed. I've learned a lot about gender minorities and issues affecting the 2SLGBTQ+ population in the last decade.
This can only work in contexts where the LLM already has a strong Relatedness database for the topic. LLMs are incapable of assessing the accuracy of any information they weren't trained on with sufficient examples to build that database.
This paper, if I'm understanding it correctly, is saying the same thing: LLMs will always hallucinate and are incapable of identifying hallucinations in certain contexts.
The problem we face is that it's hard to identify hallucinations in the exact context when LLMs are most likely to make them: in content that's not widely known and understood with many examples in the training data.
Or maybe I'm off base and I need to read the full study.
Was anyone else floored that Half-Life came out 25 years ago? I mean, of course I can do the math, but it hit me hard how long ago that was.
I remember reading a preview article in PC Gamer about the revolutionary AI in the game, how enemies would follow you if they could hear you and set up ambushes.
Then the first time I played it, having the story told right in the game with characters doing actions that you can look around and see and interact with ... It was clear to everyone at the time that this was the future of storytelling in first-person games.
I'm definitely going to need to try this on my Deck when it arrives and see if the gameplay holds up.
Since they target ads demographically and ads change frequently, that would be a mess... The encoding, storage, and tracking would be a Big problem.
If they go this route, it would only make sense if they build a new video codec that allows for linearly splitting content at key frames so they can concatenate the ads with the video in a single file at runtime.
But then couldn't ad detectors just start playback at the key frames?
Even if it works, it would still be a Big Deal since re-encoding all of YouTube would be Hard. I guess they could just use the codec for all newly added material. Playback might suck on older devices, too; idk if they use h264 (that has dedicated hardware decoders)?
This is the best explanation for the disconnect between progressivism and conservatism that I've ever heard. It makes total sense. I sort of knew this already, since it's clear from their racism that they think helping minorities hurts them somehow, but this video wraps that idea up into a nice, simple explanation.
I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.
Maybe a nice neutral woman's name... Like, Anna?
And it's more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.
Yeah, Anna's Archive. Great name. Let's go with that one.