Captain Beyond

They stole our brain? Wasn’t that a Star Trek episode?

Brain and brain, what is brain 🧠?

You wouldn’t download a car

Anyone with an Android device is level 1 by default.

I guess being in this community puts me at least at level 3 by definition. I contributed a package to GNU Guix but I’m not quite a “maintainer” or even a regular contributor to it yet. Maybe I can claim level 5 just by virtue of having contributed to an “advanced” distro.

In “the real world” my mild-mannered alter ego would be level 4 because I use GNU/Linux at my day job.

CC non-commercial is not a free license. FSF lists it under documentation licenses because it doesn’t recommend any CC license for software but the concerns are still valid.

Note that selling copies of free software is explicitly encouraged; free refers to freedom (specifically the “four freedoms”) and not to price. Commercial usage restrictions conflict with freedom zero (although it’s unclear how this applies in the case of a game) and commercial distribution restrictions conflict with freedoms two and three.

Being proprietary is enough of a reason to refuse it. On top of that, being owned by Facebook is another good reason.

With proprietary software the developer is in control, and in this case the developer is known evil.

I would say not running Windows is itself a practical benefit. I would also say the four freedoms constitute a very practical benefit (even if the software you’re running on top of the OS is proprietary).

This particular project is under the MIT license, so it is okay

https://github.com/futo-org/fcast/blob/master/LICENSE

ETA: I think it’s open source.

It is: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/blob/master/COPYING

This is an ad

No but you see Linux is good and holy and Google is evil, so anything it touches becomes evil and corrupt. Android and ChromeOS cannot be Real Linux because they are corrupted by evil Google cooties.

There should be a law that any time someone uses the word slam in a news context it should be about someone literally being slammed.

This is proprietary (and running in a web browser does not make it less so)

The problem is the works they didn’t pay for. “Copyright infringement” is quite the anodyne term for “theft.”

Other way around. Copyright infringement is the alleged crime. “Theft” is the entertainment industry’s spin term for it. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft It is best to call things what they are and not buy into this silly narrative.

Aaah so a backtick is for strings? WRONG!!! IT EXECUTES THE FUCKING COMMAND!!!

To be fair this is what they do in Perl and shell scripts (and in PHP too), so it’s not unexpected behavior in that world.

This

I go out of my way to look for Linux-libre compatible hardware and everything “just works.” Sure it’s not a gaming rig but I don’t expect it to be. Expecting some random “Linux” to be a drop in replacement for Windows is going to disappoint.

I will preface this with my usual disclaimer on such topics: I do not believe in intellectual property (that is, the likening of thought to physical possessions). I do not think remixing is a sin and I largely agree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s take that “AI training” may largely be fair use. So, I don’t think so-called “generative AI” is inherently evil, however in practice I think it is very often used for evil today.

The most obvious example is, of course, the threat to the work force. “AI” is pitched as a tool that can replace human workers and “wipe out entire categories of human jobs.” Ethical issues aside, “AI” as it exists today is not capable of doing what its evangelists sell it as. “AI chat bots” do not know, but they can give off a very convincing impression of knowledge.

“AI” is also used as a tool to pollute the web with worse-than-worthless garbage. At best it is meaningless and at worst it is actively harmful. I would actually say machine generated text is worse than imagery here, because it feels almost impossible to do a web search without running into some LLM generated blog spam.

Creators of “AI” systems use scraper bots to collect data for training. I do not necessarily believe this is evil per se, but again - these bots are not well behaved. They cause real problems for real human users, far beyond “stealing jpegs.” There is a sense of Silicon Valley entitlement here - we can do whatever we want and deal with the consequences later, or never.

I have long held that a tool, like any human creation, is imbued with the values and will of its creators, and thus must serve both the creator and the user as its masters (The software freedom movement is largely an attempt at reconciling these interests, by empowering users with the ability to change their tools to do their bidding). In the case of “Generative AI” it is very often the case that both the creators and users of these tools intend them for evil. We often make the mistake of attributing agency to these computer programs, so as to minimize the human element (perhaps, in order to create a “man vs machine” narrative). We speak of “AI” as if it just woke up one day, a la Skynet, in order to steal our jpegs and put us out of work and generate mountains of webslurry. Make no mistake, however - the problems with “AI” are human problems. Humans created these systems in order for other humans to use, in order to inflict harm to other humans. “AI slop” was created specifically for an environment in which human-generated slop already ran amok, because the web as it existed then (as it exists today) rewards the generation of slop.

Intellectual property is made up bullshit. You can’t “steal” a jpeg by making a copy of it, and the idea that creating something based on or inspired by something else is somehow “stealing” it is quite frankly preposterous.

The sooner we as a society disabuse ourselves of this brainworm the better.

Edit: I have very mixed feelings about so-called generative AI, so please do not take this as a blanket endorsement of the technology - but rather a challenge on the concept of “stealing intellectual property,” which I unequivocally do not believe in.

This

I use Guix as my “default” distro because I value software-freedom and reproducibility. It fits my needs very well, and I make sure to buy hardware that works with it instead of expecting it to work with whatever I throw at it. For my Windows gaming machine I use PopOS as the replacement OS instead of trying to beat Guix into serving that purpose, because PopOS is better suited for that role, and I have different expectations for it.

It’s okay if something doesn’t meet your needs, that doesn’t make it bad, just means it’s not the right thing for you. There’s like hundreds of distros for Windows gamers, let us free software zealots have ours too please.

The point (as I see it) is not so much to stop scraping as it is to prevent bots from effectively DDOS-ing web services. As others have said ActivityPub content is public and there are ways to get it without slamming instances with scraper bots.

Not a fan for a few reasons. Flathub (as far as I know) works on the app store model where developers offer their own builds to users, which is probably appealing to people coming from the Windows world who view distros as unnecessary middlemen, but in the GNU/Linux world the distro serves an important role as a sort of union of users; they make sure the software works in the distro environment, resolve breakages, and remove any anti-features placed in there by the upstream developers.

The sandboxing is annoying too, but understandable.

Despite this I will resort to a flatpak if I’m too lazy to figure out how to package something myself.