I don’t exactly consider Drew Devault a reliable or unbiased judge of character

Copying is not theft. Letting only massive and notoriously untransparent corporations control an emerging technology is.

I don’t think it’s quite as simple as someone just forking it. Realistically, a browser is an extremely complex piece of software that requires a lot of organizational effort to maintain, deal with security issues, etc. Pretty much every other piece of software on a similar scale I can think of (the kernel, KDE, Blender, Libreoffice) has some sort of organization behind it with at least some amount of officially paid work. All the major forks of Firefox or chromium follow quite closely to upstream for this reason (which is also why I’m skeptical of Brave’s ability to maintain manifest v2 long term, despite their probably genuine best efforts to do so).

I do wish that Firefox were developed and funded by an organization specifically dedicated to developing it. This could of course happen if Mozilla dies. But that’s going to require someone starting it, which is not at all a small or cheap task.

I could also see a future where Oracle or IBM buys it 😂🤡

A year ago, the majority of Lemmy was vehemently in support of banning porn

When Amazon thinks “sub” means “submissive” rather than “subscriber”

They’ve been using opus for probably around a decade at this point, and in fact YouTube was a pretty early adopter of it and had a large role in popularizing it

I have a 5900x (zen3), and apparently I got a bit unlucky with the silicon and ended up with a CPU that’s slightly unstable at its stock voltages and stock boost clock. The system would freeze and reboot randomly, and the bios would report an MCE error. This crash could be reproduced with near 100% success by doing sha1 hashing specifically for some odd reason. This is not a Linux issue, it’s a hardware defect.

It may be an Asus motherboard specific thing, but I found a workaround by going to the bios settings, precision boost overdrive, and increasing the voltage scalar to like 7. Now it’s been two years and I have only ever had it happen once since I changed that, so I’m happy.

I already force Wayland global for SDL games because the xwayland one has a horrible stutter while the native Wayland works flawlessly. Making it the default sounds reasonable to me. If specific programs don’t work with it, they can override it

Just use silica gel packets

How is this relevant to the technology community?

I’m not really sure what to think of this. On one hand, the way I see it, AI deep fakes are essentially a form of defamation, and can harm people by in a way being a false rumour about their sexual life. However, public figures are subject to a much higher standard for defamation, and for a very good reason, else there would be a strong chilling effect on satire, parody, and criticism.

In general I think that deepfakes are only wrong (defamatory) if a reasonable person couldn’t easily distinguish them from reality, so obvious fake stuff doesn’t count. But for those that are, where is the line drawn for public figures? It is unfortunate that many people can’t choose whether to become a public figure, but it is essential to a functional society that freedom of the press and free expression be lenient when it comes to satirical, critical, creative, and even indecent works related to them. But this is of course not absolute.

I agree with you in instances where it’s not generating a real person. But there are cases where people use tools like this to generate realistic-looking but fake images of actual, specific real-life children. This is of course abusive to that child. And it’s still bad when it’s done to adults too, it’s sort of a form of defamation.

I really do hope legislation around this issue is narrowly tailored to actual abuse similar to what I described above, but given the “protect the children” nonsense they constantly moan about just about every technology including end to end encryption I’m not very optimistic.

Another thing I wonder about, is if AI could get so realistic that it becomes impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone with actual CSAM (where the image/victim isn’t known so they can’t prove it that way) is guilty, since any image could plausibly be fake. This of course is an issue far beyond just child abuse. It would probably discredit video footage for robberies and that sort of thing too. We really are venturing into the unknown and government isn’t exactly know for adapting to technology…

But I think you’re mostly correct, because the moral outrage on social media seems to be about the entire concept of fake sexual depictions of minors existing at all, rather than only about abusive ones

How is this relevant to the technology community?

When it was brand new there were some edge case bugs that broke on certain workflows and hardware, but that’s pretty much entirely fixed now and I’m guessing for a long time now it’s been more universally stable than pulseaudio was.

Also, some people just pointlessly dislike anything that’s new, or because it breaks their spacebar heating

I’ve been using Wayland on Nvidia with plasma for about a year and it’s been mostly fine. Only a few minor issues like night color not working or some Xwayland apps flickering, but the system feels far more responsive on Wayland so it’s well worth it to me

Exactly that has already been tried, and struck down by the supreme Court in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition. It turns out, porn of people over 18 very often looks the same as porn of people under 18, therefore such a law bans a considerable amount of legal adult content.

Both slower and worse at compression at all its levels.

It’s a 30 year old format, and large amounts of research and innovation in lossy audio compression have occurred since then. Opus can achieve better quality in like 40% the bitrate. Also, the format is, much like zip, a mess of partially broken implementations in the early days (although now everyone uses LAME so not as big of a deal). Its container/stream format is very messy too. Also no native tag format so it needs ID3 tags which don’t enforce any standardized text encoding.

Zip has terrible compression ratio compared to modern formats, it’s also a mess of different partially incompatible implementations by different software, and also doesn’t enforce utf8 or any standard for that matter for filenames, leading to garbled names when extracting old files. Its encryption is vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack and its key-derivation function is very easy to brute force.

Rar is proprietary. That alone is reason enough not to use it. It’s also very slow.

Ogg Opus for all lossy audio compression (mp3 needs to die)

7z or tar.zst for general purpose compression (zip and rar need to die)