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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2024

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  • Further, “Whether another user actually downloaded the content that Meta made available” through torrenting “is irrelevant,” the authors alleged. “Meta ‘reproduced’ the works as soon as it made them available to other peers.”

    A “peer” in bittorrent is someone else who is downloading the same file as you. This is opposed to a “seeder” which is also a peer but is only sending data, no longer receiving.

    You don’t have to finish the file to share it though, that’s a major part of bittorrent. Each peer shares parts of the files that they’ve partially downloaded already. So Meta didn’t need to finish and share the whole file to have technically shared some parts of copyrighted works. Unless they just had uploading completely disabled, but they still “reproduced” those works by vectorizing them into an LLM. If Gemini can reproduce a copyrighted work “from memory” then that still counts.

    Now, to be clear, fuck Meta but also fuck this argument. By the same logic, almost any computer on the internet is guilty of copyright infringement. Proxy servers, VPNs, basically any compute that routed those packets temporarily had (or still has for caches, logs, etc) copies of that protected data.

    I don’t think copyrights and open global networks are compatible concepts in the long run. I wonder which the ruling class will destroy first? (Spoilers, how “open” is the internet anymore?)


  • When you play a “brass” style instrument (trumpet, tuba, trombone, didgeridoo, vuvuzela, etc) you don’t just blow into it, you press your lips together like for a kiss, and then buzz them. If you do a small, very fast and tight buzz, you get high pitched notes. If you do a looser, flappier buzz, you get low notes. Most people can get about 3 to 5 notes this way, which is why most brass instruments have slides or valves to adjust the airflow and change the note further.

    Funny enough for calling this a sax-hybrid, saxophones and other woodwind instruments use a small piece of flat wood called a reed to create the vibrations needed for notes. These mostly only make one note though, which is why sax, flute, clarinet, and so on need so many buttons.





  • I used to work in a computer lab, open plan, where we all had CRTs. I sat across from the main DB admin, who had TWO monitors for all the work he was doing (wild stuff to have dual CRTs back in those days.) Due to the layout, my monitor sat in-between his, facing the opposite way of course. I loved degaussing my monitor because:

    1. It would degauss both of his and
    2. The EM fields were so strong between them that my monitor’s image would flip entirely upside down before snapping back into frame while making just the craziest electronic noises, colors dancing all over the screen. Gorgeous stuff! I wonder if anyone has tried to recreate a degaussing effect using shaders to simulate the process?



  • If by more learning you mean learning

    ollama run deepseek-r1:7b

    Then yeah, it’s a pretty steep curve!

    If you’re a developer then you can also search “$MyFavDevEnv use local ai ollama” to find guides on setting up. I’m using Continue extension for VS Codium (or Code) but there’s easy to use modules for Vim and Emacs and probably everything else as well.

    The main problem is leveling your expectations. The full Deepseek is a 671b (that’s billions of parameters) and the model weights (the thing you download when you pull an AI) are 404GB in size. You need so much RAM available to run one of those.

    They make distilled models though, which are much smaller but still useful. The 14b is 9GB and runs fine with only 16GB of ram. They obviously aren’t as impressive as the cloud hosted big versions though.



  • What if I told you that there are roughly 4 million steamdecks in existence. Ref

    And that this is about 1\3 of the Steam Linux market. Ref and about half of the entire handheld PC market. Ref

    Of course, we dont know how many MAU GOG has so maybe 4 million new customers is baby numbers, but Steam seems enamored enough of that market segment to commit huge new UI and store features (deck verification, “Runs on Deck” filters, other deck specific stuff) including the game controller mappings which do help with non-deck also but were clearly a necessary element for handhelds. Maybe deck users, it being a committed gaming platform, spend more on games?

    Anyway, trying to get subscribers (always a teeny fraction of your free users) ahead of converting new non-customers into customers, seems like bad econ to me.

    If GOG is so hot for game preservation why not see if they can score an emulation deal to bring lost handheld titles to PC\deck? Sega might be down, NeoGeo is owned by the Saudi’s, I’m sure they’d love some free money for their back catalog. That’s in line with Lutris’ mission of being the one game launcher for your entire library. A few strategic investments and partnerships could open up GOG as the gateway to classic gaming across devices, but that would require some vision to carry through.










  • It’s an untenable situation because its so much bigger than the tech world and open source. FOSS fundamentally works on a communal model: everyone needs lots of software, no one can hope to write it all themselves, so what if we distributed the labor out among the community so that everyone can work on some things important to them and the whole community benefits.

    Then, capitalist businesses entered the picture and began using more and more open software as backbone for their enterprises. Government entanglements further complicate the picture, but fundamentally the capitalist mindset is incapable of building or maintaining our current technological base. It isn’t capable of maintaining or building our infrastructure either: almost all of that was built on government subsidies, socialism.

    And now that vulture capitalism is the law of the land, everything is falling apart because there’s no more “slack” in the system where people can engage in personal socialism on projects like FLOSS, every bit of our time is being stolen to pad the numbers of capitalists.

    This bleeds over into attitude as well. Every entitled user who thinks their personal issue is more important than any other concern is a trump or musk in miniature, believing that the the blowhard bravado of our current government is a model for forcing work to get done rather than a death spiral there’s no pulling out of.

    You want FLOSS software that’s good? You want less burden on maintainers? You want a safer, saner, more human-centric technology base? You want a better tech world?

    Eat. The. Rich.




  • Obviously they want to make an example. They’ll drag him through the mud in court, reveal that he was sexually deviant, claim he cheated on tests in school, played video games, played d&d, worshipped Satan, on and on. Then, when they’ve dragged the court out long enough to bore people, they’ll execute him publicly and call it justice.

    They won’t epstein him, too obvious and likely to generate martyrdom. Killing him like a “common murderer” shows that “the system works” and that the machinery of the state’s actions are natural and inevitable.

    Or maybe they’ll try to just lock him away forever and get him to write some books to make the prisons a little more money. Works for serial killers, and sales of “How to murder a CEO” will help to defuse revolutionary sentiment by recuperating the murder as an exotic one-off situation. He’s gonna get simple-ricked.