Exactly this. I can't believe how many comments I've read accusing the AI critics of holding back progress with regressive copyright ideas. No, the regressive ideas are already there, codified as law, holding the rest of us back. Holding AI companies accountable for their copyright violations will force them to either push to reform the copyright system completely, or to change their practices for the better (free software, free datasets, non-commercial uses, real non-profit orgs for the advancement of the technology). Either way we have a lot to gain by forcing them to improve the situation. Giving AI companies a free pass on the copyright system will waste what is probably the best opportunity we have ever had to improve the copyright system.

I have my own backup of the git repo and I downloaded this to compare and make sure it's not some modified (potentially malicious) copy. The most recent commit on my copy of master was dc94882c9062ab88d3d5de35dcb8731111baaea2 (4 commits behind OP's copy). I can verify:

• that the history up to that commit is identical in both copies
• after that commit, OP's copy only has changes to translation files which are functionally insignificant

So this does look to be a legitimate copy of the source code as it appeared on github!

Clarifications:

• This was just a random check, I do not have any reason to be suspicious of OP personally
• I did not check branches other than master (yet?)
• I did not (and cannot) check the validity of anything beyond the git repo
• You don't have a reason to trust me more than you trust OP... It would be nice if more people independently checked and verified against their own copies.

I will be seeding this for the foreseeable future.

So help me out here, what am I missing?

You're forgetting that not all outcomes are equal. You're just comparing the probability of winning vs the probability of losing. But when you lose you lose much bigger. If you calculate the expected outcome you will find that it is negative by design. Intuitively, that means that if you do this strategy, the one time you will lose will cost you more than the money you made all the other times where you won.

I'll give you a short example so that we can calculate the probabilities relatively easily. We make the following assumptions:

• You have $13, which means you can only make 3 bets: $1, $3, $9
• The roulette has a single 0. This is the best case scenario. So there are 37 numbers and only 18 of them are red This gives red a 18/37 to win. The zero is why the math always works out in the casino's favor
• You will play until you win once or until you lose all your money.

So how do we calculate the expected outcome? These outcomes are mutually exclusive, so if we can define the (expected gain * probability) of each one, we can sum them together. So let's see what the outcomes are:

• You win on the first bet. Gain: $1. Probability: 18/37.
• You win on the second bet. Gain: $2. Probability: 19/37 * 18/37 (lose once, then win once).
• You win on the third bet. Gain: $4. Probability: (19/37) ^ 2 * 18/37 (lose twice, then win once).
• You lose all three bets. Gain: -$13. Probability: (19/37) ^ 3 (lose three times).

So the expected outcome for you is:

$1 * (18/37) + 2 * (19/37 * 18/37) + ... = -$0.1328...

So you lose a bit more than $0.13 on average. Notice how the probabilities of winning $1 or $2 are much higher than the probability of losing $13, but the amount you lose is much bigger.

Others have mentioned betting limits as a reason you can't do this. That's wrong. There is no winning strategy. The casino always wins given enough bets. Betting limits just keep the short-term losses under control, making the business more predictable.

"Enshitification" does not mean "I don't like it". It is specifically about platforms that start out looking too good to be true and turn to shit when the user base is locked in. The term is generally used for cases where the decline in quality was pre-planned and not due to external factors. Using the same term each time is, in my opinion, an appropriate way to point out just how common this pattern is.

Well, realistically there is a good chance that this will turn out just fine business-wise. They don't care if they lose some engagement or if the quality goes to shit. It's all good, as long as it makes some money.

In my opinion, this sort of model should be considered anti-competitive. It has become apparent that these services operate on a model where they offer a service that is too good to be true in order to kill the competition, and then they switch to their actual profitable business plan. If you think about it, peertube is a much more sensible economical model with its federation and p2p streaming. But nobody has ever cared about it because huge tech giants offer hosting & bandwith "for free". The evil part of youtube is not the ads, its the fact that it allowed us to bypass them long enough for the entire planet to become dependent on it.

Personally I don't care so much about the things that Linux does better but rather the abusive things it doesn't do. No ads, surveillance, forced updates etc. And it's not that linux happens to not do that stuff. It's that the decentralized nature of free software acts as a preventative measure against those malicious practices. On the other side, your best interests always conflict with those of a multi-billion company, practically guaranteeing that the software doesn't behave as you. So windows are as unlikely to become better in this regard as linux is to become worse.

Also the ability to build things from the ground up. If you want to customize windows you're always trying to replace or override or remove stuff. Good luck figuring out if you have left something in the background adding overhead at best and conflicting with what you actually want to use at worst. This isn't just some hypothetical. For example I've had windows make an HDD-era PC completely unusable because a background telemetry process would 100% the C: drive. It was a nightmarish experience to debug and fix this because even opening the task manager wouldn't work most of the time.

Having gotten the important stuff out of the way, I will add that even for stuff that you technically can do on both platforms, it is worth considering if they are equally likely to foster thriving communities. Sure I can replace the windows shell, but am I really given options of the same quality and longevity as the most popular linux shells? When a proprietary windows component takes an ugly turn is it as likely that someone will develop an alternative if it means they have to build it from the ground up, compared to the linux world where you would start by forking an existing project, eg how people who didn't like gnome 3 forked gnome 2? The situation is nuanced and answers like "there exists a way to do X on Y" or "it is technically possible for someone to solve this" don't fully cover it.

This is great. Proton is getting a lot of testing just based on Steam's userbase and it is backed by Valve. We also have a lot of data on proton's performance and potential game-specific fixes in the form of protondb. Making sure that non-Steam launchers can use all that work and information is crucial to guaranteeing the long-term health of linux gaming. Otherwise it is easy to imagine a future where proton is doing great but the other launchers are keep running into problems and are eventually abandoned.

One thing that I am curious is how this handles the AppId. If this AppId is used to figure out which game-specific fixes are needed, then it will have to be known. Do we have a tool/database that figures out the AppId from the game you are launching outside of Steam?

This is very common among big tech companies and we should start treating it as what it is, a scam.

It is copyright infringement. Nvidia (and everyone writing kernel modules) has to choose between:

• using the GPL-covered parts of the kernel interface and sharing their own source code under the GPL (a free software license)
• not using the GPL-covered parts of the kernel interface

Remember that the kernel is maintained by volunteers and by engineers funded by/working for many companies, including Nvidia's direct competitors, and Nvidia is worth billions of dollars. Nvidia is incredibly obnoxious to infringe on the kernel's copyright. To me it is 100% the appropriate response to show them zero tolerance for their copyright infringement.

I see several comments talking about this being a wrong decision, or Beehaw needing to change its attitude etc. I think these opinions come from a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of federation. Federation is not about all the instances coming together to cater to our needs. It's about each instance doing its own thing, and communities will form around the ones that cater to them. In other words, we don't need Beehaw to budge on its decision, we need to build the community we want without Beehaw, while Beehaw caters to the users who aren't in this with us.

This has nothing to do with centralization. AI companies are already scraping the web for everything useful. If you took the content from SO and split it into 1000 federated sites, it would still end up in a AI model. Decentralization would only help if we ever manage to hold the AI companies accountable for the en masse copyright violations they base their industry on.

Humans are not generally allowed to do what AI is doing! You talk about copying someone else's "style" because you know that "style" is not protected by copyright, but that is a false equivalence. An AI is not copying "style", but rather every discernible pattern of its input. It is just as likely to copy Walt Disney's drawing style as it is to copy the design of Mickey Mouse. We've seen countless examples of AI's copying characters, verbatim passages of texts and snippets of code. Imagine if a person copied Mickey Mouse's character design and they got sued for copyright infringement. Then they go to court and their defense was that they downloaded copies of the original works without permission and studied them for the sole purpose of imitating them. They would be admitting that every perceived similarity is intentional. Do you think they would not be found guilty of copyright infringement? And AI is this example taken to the extreme. It's not just creating something similar, it is by design trying to maximize the similarity of its output to its training data. It is being the least creative that is mathematically possible. The AI's only trick is that it threw so many stuff into its mixer of training data that you can't generally trace the output to a specific input. But the math is clear. And while its obvious that no sane person will use a copy of Mickey Mouse just because an AI produced it, the same cannot be said for characters of lesser known works, passages from obscure books, and code snippets from small free software projects.

In addition to the above, we allow humans to engage in potentially harmful behavior for various reasons that do not apply to AIs.

• "Innocent until proven guilty" is fundamental to our justice systems. The same does not apply to inanimate objects. Eg a firearm is restricted because of the danger it poses even if it has not been used to shoot someone. A person is only liable for the damage they have caused, never their potential to cause it.
• We care about peoples' well-being. We would not ban people from enjoying art just because they might copy it because that would be sacrificing too much. However, no harm is done to an AI when it is prevented from being trained, because an AI is not a person with feelings.
• Human behavior is complex and hard to control. A person might unintentionally copy protected elements of works when being influenced by them, but that's hard to tell in most cases. An AI has the sole purpose of copying patterns with no other input.

For all of the above reasons, we choose to err on the side of caution when restricting human behavior, but we have no reason to do the same for AIs, or anything inanimate.

In summary, we do not allow humans to do what AIs are doing now and even if we did, that would not be a good argument against AI regulation.

AI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That's what they're trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they'll get away with it.

The general public doesn't have to understand anything about how it works as long as they get a clear "verified by ..." statement in the UI.

systemd is insecure, bloated, etc

[Citation needed]

If a distro that doesn't use systemd ends up booting much faster or being much easier to configure, maybe those are features you care about. But switching away from systemd in this case is merely an implementation detail. What you're really doing is moving from a distro to another one that serves you better.

Otherwise, the choice of init system has very little impact to the average user. Maybe it's worth it to switch init systems if you hate the syntax of unit files and/or the interface of systemctl/journalctl and you use them often enough to warrant the effort. The people who want to use alternatives to systemd without having such a practical issue with it are doing so for philosophical reasons.

Already seeing people come in to defend these suits. I just see it like this: AI is a tool, much like a computer or a pencil are tools. You can use a computer to copyright infringe all day, just like a pencil can. To me, an AI is only going to be plagiarizing or infringing if you tell it to. How often does AI plagiarize without a user purposefully trying to get it to do so? That’s a genuine question.

You are misrepresenting the issue. The issue here is not if a tool just happens to be able to be used for copyright infringement in the hands of a malicious entity. The issue here is whether LLM outputs are just derivative works of their training data. This is something you cannot compare to tools like pencils and pcs which are much more general purpose and which are not built on stole copyright works. Notice also how AI companies bring up "fair use" in their arguments. This means that they are not arguing that they are not using copryighted works without permission nor that the output of the LLM does not contain any copyrighted part of its training data (they can't do that because you can't trace the flow of data through an LLM), but rather that their use of the works is novel enough to be an exception. And that is a really shaky argument when their services are actually not novel at all. In fact they are designing services that are as close as possible to the services provided by the original work creators.

From the naming it's clear that GE wants this to be the new standard, but it's not really a new standard. This is porting Steam's launcher, which already exists, to non-Steam clients.

I'm not sure federation is that important on sites that aren't built around socializing. I think it is sufficient for a wiki to provide a good export mechanism so that it can be archived or mirrored by others.

Im not 100% comfortable with AI gfs and the direction society could potentially be heading. I don’t like that some people have given up on human interaction and the struggle for companionship, and feel the need to resort to a poor artificial substitute for genuine connection.

That's not even the scary part. What we really shouldn't be uncomfortable with is this very closed technology having so much power over people. There's going to be a handful of gargantuan immoral companies controlling a service that the most emotionally vulnerable people will become addicted to.

Selectively breaking copyright laws specifically to allow AI models also favors the rich, unfortunately. These models will make a very small group of rich people even richer while putting out of work the millions of creators whose works wore stolen to train the models.

Imagine you were asked to start speaking a new language, eg Chinese. Your brain happens to work quite differently to the rest of us. You have immense capabilities for memorization and computation but not much else. You can't really learn Chinese with this kind of mind, but you have an idea that plays right into your strengths. You will listen to millions of conversations by real Chinese speakers and mimic their patterns. You make notes like "when one person says A, the most common response by the other person is B", or "most often after someone says X, they follow it up with Y". So you go into conversations with Chinese speakers and just perform these patterns. It's all just sounds to you. You don't recognize words and you can't even tell from context what's happening. If you do that well enough you are technically speaking Chinese but you will never have any intent or understanding behind what you say. That's basically LLMs.

Linux 6.1 will be maintained for another 10 years by the CIP. The hardware in question will be almost 40 years old at that point. I don't have a violin small enough for users losing free support after 40 years from maintainers who most likely don't even own the same hardware to test on...

No, the intent and the consequences of an action are generally taken into consideration in discussions of ethins and in legislation. Additionally, this is not just a matter of ToS. What OpenAI does is create and distribute illegitimate derivative works. They are relying on the argument that what they do is transformative use, which is not really congruent with what "transformative use" has meant historically. We will see in time what the courts have to say about this. But in any case, it will not be judged the same way as a person using a tool just to skip ads. And Revanced is different to both the above because it is a non-commercial service.

Wow. Moving the windows that don't fit in the current workspace to a new one is such a simple idea that might turn out to be incredibly effective. I love that Gnome exists to challenge the established design patterns and try to replace them, even though I'm not actively using it.

Essentially ULWGL will allow you to run your non-steam games using Proton, Proton-GE, or other Proton forks using the same pressure vessel containerization and runtime that Valve use to run games with Proton

This is the crucial piece of information. In less technical terms: Proton is designed to run in a very specific environment and it might be incompatible with your system. Steam runs Proton inside a bubble so that it interacts less with your system and so the incompatibilities don't become a problem. ULWGL aims to create the same bubble so it's the correct way to run proton.

"Transformative" in this context does not mean simply not identical to the source material. It has to serve a different purpose and to provide additional value that cannot be derived from the original.

The summary that they talk about in the article is a bad example for a lawsuit because it is indeed transformative. A summary provides a different sort of value than the original work. However if the same LLM writes a book based on the books used as training data, then it is definitely not an open and shut case whether this is transformative.

I don't think Linux literally waits for you to unmount the drive before it decides to write to it. It looks like that because the buffering is completely hidden from the user.

For example say you want to transfer a few GB from your SSD to a slow USB drive. Let's say:

• it takes about half a minute to read the data from the SSD
• it takes ten minutes to write it to the USB
• the data fits in the spare room you have in RAM at the moment

In this scenario, the kernel will take half a minute to read the data into the RAM and then report that the file transfer is complete. Whatever program is being used will also report to the user that the transfer is complete. The kernel should have already started writing to the drive as soon as the data started being read into the RAM, so it should take another nine and a half minutes to complete the transfer in the background.

So if you unmount at that point, you will have to wait nine and a half minutes. But if you leave it running and try to unmount ten minutes later it should be close to instant. That's because the kernel kept on writing in the background and was not waiting for you to unmount the drive in order to commit the writes.

I'm not sure but I think on Windows the file manager is aware of the buffering so this doesn't happen, at least not for so long. But I think you can still end up with corrupted files if you don't safely remove it.

Ok, but what would the reputation score be based on that can't be manipulated or faked?

The same people saying that this is good are also mocking X and threads for losing users.

These are not comparable. X and threads are businesses which maximize their profits by making their platform as big as possible. That is not true for Lemmy and even if it were, the average user does not care about the platform's profits. So you can in fact make fun of the failures of big companies while being happy being part of a much smaller platform.

Well, not really, because television broadcast standards do not specify integer framerates. Eg North America uses ~59.94fps. It will take insanely high refresh rates to be able to play all common video formats including TV broadcasts. Variable refresh rate can fix this only for a single fullscreen app.

If you have a large enough bank roll and continuously double your bet after a loss, you can never lose without a table limit.

Unless your bank roll is infinite, you always lose in the average case. My math was just an example to show the point with concrete numbers.

In truth it is trivial to prove that there is no winning strategy in roulette. If a strategy is just a series of bets, then the expected value is the sum of the expected value of the bets. Every bet in roulette has a negative expected value. Therefore, every strategy has a negative expected value as well. I'm not saying anything ground-breaking, you can read a better write-up of this idea in the wikipedia article.

If you don't think that's true, you are welcome to show your math which proves a positive expected value. Otherwise, saying I'm "completely wrong" means nothing.

Both su and sudo originally meant "superuser" because that was their only use. They have retroactively been changed to "switch user" because this functionality was added later.

I'm assuming this is a joke based on the Futurama references you used, but just to be clear for everyone: this won't work because it simply moves the problem one step further. How do you prevent bots from upvoting other bots to build a reputation?

You are treating publicly available information as free from copyright, which is not the case. Wikipedia content is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0. Images might be covered by different licenses. Online articles about the book are also covered by copyright unless explicitly stated otherwise.

First time I've heard of Mojeek. Why should I trust it more than any other company? Is there anything particular about its economic model or governance that makes it less likely to decide to be unethical?

I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.

This can't be right. Was it maybe a particular workflow you used that required root access? I know I've used wine as part of Steam's Proton as well as via Lutris and neither app has ever requested privilege escalation. I've also run wine manually from the terminal also without being root.

It's not just you. The DEs themselves generally don't mess with each other much, beyond possibly messing with each other's settings. But I've seen the the package post installation scripts cause issues. So it depends on the distro I guess.

You can argue that "open source" can mean other things that what the OSI defined it to mean, but the truth of the matter is that almost everyone thinks of the OSI or similar definition when they talk about "open source". Insisting on using the term this way is deliberately misleading. Even your own links don't support your argument.

A bit further down in the Wikipedia page is this:

Main article: Open-source software

Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use for any (including commercial) purpose, or modification from its original design.

And if you go to the main article, it is apparent that the OSI definition is treated as the de fact definition of open source. I'm not going to quote everything, but here are examples of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Definitions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-source_versus_source-available

And from Red Hat, literally the first sentence

Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

...

What makes software open source?

And if we follow that link:

In actuality, neither free software nor open source software denote anything about cost—both kinds of software can be legally sold or given away.

But the Red Hat page is a bad source anyway because it is written like a short intro and not a formal definition of the concept. Taking a random sentence from it and arguing that it doesn't mention distribution makes no sense.

Here is a more comprehensive page from Red Hat, that clearly states that they evaluate whether a license is open source based on OSI and the FSF definitions.

If this isn't violating the DMA then the DMA is stupid. Legislation should limit the company's control, not force it into a specific action while allowing it to maintain as much control as possible.

In other words the DMA should effectively say "you don't get to choose how your platform is used", not "you get to make the rules, but just don't be the only one who can develop for your platform".

Disabling screen tearing for two or more monitors with different refresh rates is as far as I know impossible within the X11 protocol. This is especially annoying for high-refresh rate VRR monitors which could be tearfree with negligible cost in responsiveness.

You also can't prevent processes from manipulating each others inputs/outputs. An X11 system can never have meaningful sandboxing because of this. Maybe you could run a new tweaked and sandboxed X server for every process but at that point you're working against the protocol's fundamental design.