The year of the Linux desktop I’m thinking of was like 2008. That was then it became perfectly usable on the desktop and I haven’t had to switch back since.

I don’t understand why anyone care’s what Linux’s “market share” is. It’s open source, no one makes money when someone installs Linux.

Of course bitcoin is a scam. It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere. It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren’t art, but that doesn’t mean someone working in photography as a medium can’t be an artist.

In my experience it’s only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they’re comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don’t physically make the marks yourself and it’s the concept and composition that’s important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like “oh, that’s interesting”. They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn’t art depends on the intention not the process.

Looks like they commited a change to Piped bot two hours ago which accidentally removed the functionality to actually change the link. Whoops!

Absolutely. I tried getting back into Usenet a few years ago and it was like Yahoo Answers.

VR porn needs to be at least 4k for immersion and you can only get that quality with a paid account. But that’s a waste of money so you pay for one month and fill a hard drive before you cancel.

It’s a shame the strategy is now failing because software as a service is so popular. Nothing in the GPL forces you to distribute your changes if you don’t distribute the program. So just put the program on a webserver and let users interact through an API and hey presto, steal as much GPL code as you like.

Everyone crucified MongoDB when they tried to create a licence that prevents this, and FSF have declared that the problem can’t be solved with licences and everyone just has to boycott non-free software (good luck!).

End of free software as we know it, IMHO.

I suspect a lot of “breakages” were failed pacman updates due to signing issues, before pacman knew to update arch-keyring first. I know one person who moved to another distro when that happened.

Having tried to do something similar, “Nothing, Forever” must have some pretty serious coding to engineer the prompts and reconstruct tiny snippets of AI generated dialogue into a full meaningful script. I wonder if that’s enough for the creators to claim copyright.

if I take a hoop/window and place it quickly over an object

Then the velocity of the object relative to the “exit” of the hoop would be the same as the velocity of the object relative to the “entrance” of the hoop, which is option B.

In your analogy, option A would mean the object has a relative velocity of entering the hoop but suddenly no relative velocity exiting it, so the object magically starts following the hoop.

Interestingly twitter’s “block” function did originally just mute people. I remember being blocked in around 2010 and it didn’t stop you following or reading their tweets. At first I was confused when people started requesting the true block functionality - what’s the point when tweets are publicly available to logged out users?

When you’ve never been harassed, like me or Musk or twitter’s original engineers, you don’t immediately understand that allowing (muted) interaction feeds the harassment and can still spread it around into a pile-on by non muted users.

Luckily most people get it now, but it looks like Musk wants to turn the clock back on it.

Best simple magic trick I’ve ever seen, blows people’s minds:

Cut out a piece of black paper the shape of the opening of a beer can, lick it and stick it to the lid. From a distance it should look like it’s open. Prick a hole in the side with a pin and drain out a quarter of the beer, enough that you can squeeze the can and bend it. Lay it on its side on a table, with the pinhole pointing up so it doesn’t leak. Now it looks like an open, empty, crushed can. Do all that secretly obviously.

Now ask someone if they want a drink, and point out the “empty” can. Pick it up and cover the pinhole with your finger, then subtly wave the can around as you magically summon more beer. The remaining beer will fizz up and the pressure will cause the can to inflate and uncrush itself. Secretly remove the black paper and hide it. Show them the magically restored lid, crack it open an pour the beer into a glass (so they don’t notice it was partly empty).

What makes it so incredible is you never hid the can from them or did anything tricksy. From their POV, an empty can just refilled itself in front of their eyes.

Edit: Here’s David Blaine doing it for some obvious actors. You will be able to make it more convincing than this. Can’t believe David Blaine was so popular back then lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUTG-MIqU-Q