Skull giver

Damn, they really overfit their music models. With image generation and text prediction it’s very hard to prove a direct connection, but with four or five of those songs it’s unmistakable that the original songs were used to generate the music output

I wonder what the effect will be of fixing the models’ overfitting. I’m guessing it’ll generate worse music, or they would’ve done so already.

Quite sad that it took the music industry to notice before any lawsuits with a chance of succeeding got off the ground.

Now that single window mode is a thing across all platforms, it’s not as bad anymore.

I still don’t know how to draw a circle, though. I think I may need to turn a selection into a path? I just use Photopea for this stuff these days.

Gimp is what you use for image editing if you’re poor or Stallman-like. It’s good at being scripted for programmers that want to automate their image processing workflow.

Krita is what you use for drawing stuff if you don’t want to spend money on software or are Stallman-like.

Photoshop is what you use if you do photo editing or digital art for a living. Paid, proprietary options exist if you don’t do photo editing.

There’s one tool that comes close to competing with Photoshop and it’s Photopea, a subscription based/ad ridden website clone of Photoshop.

Recommending GIMP as a Photoshop alternative is like recommending LaTeX instead of Word. It’ll work for some people, and it’ll do some things much better even, but it’s ridiculous to assume any normal user of the proprietary product is going to be able to use the open source alternative without weeks or months of training.

I’ve got my Mastodon and Lemmy servers hooked up to a postgres server that’s running separately, and the CPU usage between the two is now about the same.

That actually proves that Lemmy is more efficient, because it’s handling a hell of a lot more data. I don’t follow a lot of big accounts, and I’m the only user on my server, so I rarely get more than 40 posts + metadata through Mastodon. On Lemmy, however, each post can easily produce hundreds of events to process because of comments and likes all federating out.

In total, Lemmy seems to be heavier, but only because it does more. Mastodon is super inefficient, especially with things like RAM. I think it has something to do with the framework and language it’s running on; Gitlab seems to be using the same runtime and that eats through RAM like crazy as well.

Is there a database of “this IP belongs to this state” these companies use? Or do they just use GeoIP stuff? I don’t want my Lemmy server to accidentally violate American laws and get in trouble/banned, so I may need to start doing some IP filtering myself.

In theory you get the benefit of them banning your Drive Google account and leaving your email Google account alone. Google will probably link the two, but I don’t think the ban will cross accounts automatically.

These companies typically use AI analyses of uploaded files to prevent people from doing stuff like upload child porn. Unfortunately, they can’t distinguish between “pedo shit” and “picture of naked child with a nasty rash emailed to a doctor”.

Several people have lost years of email because they uploaded pictures like those to OneDrive. By separating accounts, you can keep your files and your email separate.

There have also been instances of people attacking others by inviting them to WhatsApp groups (which still isn’t disabled by default) and spamming a bunch of illegal shit. If you have WhatsApp set to auto backup, you may just end up sending that illegal shit to Google, who in turn detects it and kicks you out of your account.

For this reason, I think it’s a good idea to separate any cloud storage accounts from your email accounts.

Google will typically ask you to add a DNS entry, or an HTML tag to the home page. This will usually prove ownership. If you lose access, I think this mechanism should automatically kick you off at some point.

They used to offer free domain services, I think, or at least very cheap subscriptions. I think they’ve moved away from those since.

Same with Microsoft. I have a Microsoft account for a Gmail address, but Microsoft doesn’t realise that they should disable Outlook, leading to the funny weird situation where you can log in to Outlook.com with a Gmail address and enter a completely useless empty mailbox. I bet Google has the same quirk.

Alright, I guess I could enter IMAP or POP details and use Outlook as some kind of email client by proxy, but that’s an even worse idea.

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I don’t think regulated 18650 cells is a problem, but most users don’t know the difference. With every other laptop, you can pop out a battery and replace it with a model with the same part number, but with 18650 cells that’s a lot harder to accomplish. I’d rather see them “package” a bunch of 18650 cells together with its own part number and lets the people who know how batteries work figure out how to add their own cells (anyone with background knowledge will recognise the pack configuration the moment they take out the screws!)

I don’t know about M4, but with the M3 Apple’s compute-per-watt was already behind some AMD and Intel chips (if you buy hardware from the same business segment, no budget i3 is beating a Macbook any time soon). The problem with AMD and Intel is that they deliver better performance, at the cost of a higher minimum power draw. Apple’s chips can go down to something ridiculous like 1W power consumption, while the competition is at a multiple of that unless you put the chips to sleep. When it comes to amd64 software, their chips are fast enough for most use cases, but they’re nowhere close to native.

A lot of Windows programs run on .NET, which is architecture independent, especially if they target UWP (which is more common than you might realise). The remaining applications will need porting to get decent performance, but the most important applications (browsers and Office) already work.

Re: Windows: Windows on ARM already has a binary translator, developed in part by Qualcom, that comes pretty close to Apple’s Rosetta2 for many types of software. It’s not as complete as qemu-static is, though it is faster for the software it does support. The worst part of the translation layer is that the ARM chips made by Apple’s competitors just aren’t very fast in comparison.

I believe Steam can distribute different binaries (there were games with x86 and amd64 binaries for a while!), but until ARM laptops with decent GPUs start coming along, I don’t expect any game devs to use features like that. Still, apparently current ARM devices can hit 50-60fps with current gen devices already, and the upcoming Snapdragon chips are supposed to compete with Apple’s CPU, so who knows!

Microsoft already tried (and failed) to make Windows on ARM a thing before with the Surface RT. I hope they don’t go all Windows 8 over their current attempt…

They never claimed to have a problem with the UN resolution, they claimed that the ships and helicopter came closer to their airspace than they needed to to enforce the resolution.

If China wanted to block the UN resolution, they could’ve veto’d the entire thing for any reason.

Your quote doesn’t seem to imply anything about North Korea and Russia. I would say it supports the idea that this is just China bullying people coming close to what they consider to be their territory.

The “you came close to your airspace so we scare you away” response seems like regular old territorial bullying to me. They know no country with a relevant navy or air force is going to risk going to war over just one aircraft, so they can do as they please. At worst they’ll receive complaints in the next UN meeting that nobody is going to really care about.

In my experience, the AE customer support is quite customer friendly in its business. I don’t trust these stores for anything important, but when I need cheap shit, I tend to use AE to buy it from the source rather than spend three times as much on a local drop shipper.

China is known to bully in international waters. They also have their own view of what “international waters” entails in the first place, laying claim to almost the entire South Chinese sea.

I doubt this has much to do with Russia or North Korea. It’s probably just China using armed forces to bully other countries again.

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Novo Nordisk is a major contributor to the Danish economy (like that time it practically saved Denmark from a recession, growing the GDP while the rest of Europe slipped into a recession). This single company makes up about 5% of the entire Danish economy.

I doubt this company has received more public funding than it brought back into the Danish treasury. Its weight loss drug is basically transferring money from the US economy over to the Danish economy.

Of course, this is of no solace to the Americans that are paying these high prices, but the country that this company does most of its research in is more than happy to rake in the dollars.

IRC is text only.

More recent alternatives such as XMPP and Matrix have voice extensions, but their clients aren’t as good as Discord’s.

This may be a good chance for Element to gain popularity, at least if they can release some gamer-targeting features.

However, Discord is not profitable despite their massive amounts of revenue. You can’t use a platform for free and expect it to remain free forever, unless it’s run by volunteers like many Fediverse servers are (and even those risk collapsing if they gain any form of popularity, because they don’t have teams of dedicated network administrators to keep up with growth or optimise for server cost).

Pay for the services you use, especially if those services include high-bandwidth features like streaming or hosting media. If you don’t, these companies will find a way to make a profit out of you, or disappear completely.

Doing manual curl calls is hardly an alternative for proper GUI, but the way the article is written makes it look like there’s nothing you can do when someone uploads an image to your server. That just isn’t true.

Server administrator can delete media, either by extracting the user delete token from the database or by using the privileged API. That’s not an alternative to a proper moderation API but it’s also not the “uploading is a black box that glues the files to your server” that people pretend it is.

And to be honest, if you’re going to run a server like this and don’t know how to do these tasks, I’m not sure if hosting a publicly accessible service is such a good idea. Not because this stuff is common knowledge, but because web services are complex and come with all kinds of ethical and legal implications that you need to know how to handle. We don’t want the Fediverse to become like email, where 99% of IP-addresses are blocked because it was so easy to just leave an ancient piece of software running with no real understanding of the abuse it could cause, whether that’s an SMTP server or an open MissKey server (see: the Japanese spam wave).

In my opinion, Lemmy’s lack of moderator tooling is a serious deficiency that puts it squarely behind Mastodon and a bunch of other Fediverse tools. However, there’s no way you only discover this stuff months later. The sad fact is that Lemmy is one of the better Threadiverse server implementations despite its many glaring issues.

What I’m seeing around Lemmy is a lot of complaining about priorities but not a lot of community action. Mastodon had the Glitch fork, Kbin had Mbin, but nobody bothered to fork Lemmy to fix the issues they care about. Instead, it’s all about “the two lead devs need to focus on what I find important”. Suggestions to work on the project and fix the issues are deflected by things like “I don’t have time/don’t know Rust”, which are perfectly valid reasons not to help, but also don’t make your problem the devs’ problem. There’s a real sense of entitlement coming from these blog posts for a platform whose top 4 contribution statistics look like this:

I too have too little time to fix the issues I have with Lemmy, but I accept that instead of assuming the issues I’m facing need to be prioritised. If Lemmy’s priorities are that starkly different from mine, I’ll need to migrate to something else. I don’t get to decide what does and doesn’t appear on the roadmap for the next release.

Lemmy should have better mod tools, and they’re coming eventually. I’ll just wait for the devs to get around to implementing them.