Captain Beyond

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.

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.

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.

Little Kitty Tables

This

I’ve been very outspoken about my non-belief in intellectual property; I don’t think reading information or making a copy of it is stealing it. On the flipside, these bots are effectively performing a denial-of-service attack on public infrastructure, wasting computing resources, bandwidth, and time that is finite. The internet is for humans first and bots second; I don’t care about bots so much as long as they are well-behaved, which these are not.

My own instance went under several weeks back, then I installed Anubis and suddenly it’s usable again.

Intellectual property is imaginary and making a copy of something isn’t stealing it. In contrast, Disney actually has contributed to something which could more easily be likened to theft - namely, strangling of the public domain (after helping itself generously to public domain stories and characters).

I don’t like Midjourney as it’s a proprietary service-as-a-software-substitute, but Disney actually is the greater evil here. It’s probably worth noting that Disney didn’t actually create the vast majority of characters at issue here.

Pidgin is still around, and you can even use discord with it (no voice, mind you).

I would like to bring the multi-platform client back.

This doesn’t even make sense. If the spell falls apart without Kier’s symbol, then Kier’s symbol absolutely is “actually necessary.”

Proprietary software in general, Discord and Twitter in specific

open source, but not free

Free here means free-as-in-freedom. The free software definition and open source definition are almost identical, there are very few apps that are only one or the other.

It’s the free software movement, though - the four freedoms are literally the cornerstone of the movement. They’re not simply a “nice to have” they’re the bare minimum of what we should ask for. If we promote non-free “alternatives” we are saying that these basic freedoms are not an expectation, but are optional and negotiable - we are moving the message away from the four freedoms and towards “evil” proprietary applications, while making exceptions for the “lesser evil” ones.

When I say Obsidian is non-free I am not saying Obsidian is evil or you are not allowed to use it. As non-free apps go Obsidian is probably one of the least-worst, as you and many others point out it is just a markdown editor so there is no vendor lock in or weird proprietary format. I am simply saying, this is a movement focused on “the four freedoms” and Obsidian does not meet those four very basic criteria.

Proprietary software is proprietary no matter how “nice” it is. It should not be advertised in FOSS communities and falsely presenting it as “FOSS adjacent” is harmful to the movement IMO.

There are many places so called “good proprietary apps” can be promoted and discussed.

This article is clearly about beans, not onions.

I run my instance so I am perfectly happy with the level of censorship.

Said instance is narrowly focused on free software and free culture issues, so unrelated politics would be off-topic. That said there is a fairly bog standard code of conduct prohibiting bigotry, nazism and the like.

But they told me I can just not connect it to the internet and it’ll be just like any dumb device.

Eventually these things will come with modems built in so you can’t even do that.

Apple intentionally makes iPhone-Android interoperability crap in order to sell iPhones. That’s not conspiracy theorizing, Tim Apple blatantly admitted to it.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility

Unironically one of the greatest people in the technology space of the last 40 years, in the sense of accomplishments and impact on the world. I’m talking specifically about the free software movement, copyleft, and the GNU GPL. The world would be a much worse place without those accomplishments. The fact that a lot of his life’s work is erroneously attributed to the kernel guy doesn’t change that.

As a thinker, absolutely brilliant and unfortunately misunderstood. He espouses radical ideas about the relation of users to the technology they use that are still relevant to issues of today (e.g. enshittification, planned obsolescence, surveillance capitalism, and so on). It goes far beyond “you can look at source code to see if there’s bugs or spyware in it.” There’s a reason “Stallman was right” is a meme.

As a leader and a figurehead I’m not convinced he’s as effective. Regardless of the coordinated smear campaign from a few years ago (in which it was erroneously said “he defended Jeffrey Epstein” or “he blamed Epstein’s victim” or some such), he has demonstrated behaviors that alienate people and people who have worked for/with him (e.g. FSF employees and GNU maintainers) have said he is not a good boss. His comment about “voluntary pedophilia” is inexcusable, even though he has said he no longer stands by it. The Epstein association was fabricated from a quote taken out of context, but I don’t think it was wise to even join that discussion. The glibc manual abort() joke incident from 2018 is probably what convinced me of this - not so much that the joke is bad (humor is subjective) but that multiple developers objected to it and said it made them uncomfortable, yet he “pulled rank” and insisted it be left in (although as of now it seems to be absent). I believe his intentions were good (the “joke” isn’t actually about abortion as such, but rather the US government “global gag rule” suppressing discussions of such) but forcing it in against the protests of the community was inappropriate in my opinion.

Overall despite the above I feel he’s done more good than harm to the world, however, I’m not sure how much more good he can do in his position. I feel like the term “Stallmanism” would be an apt term for his thought but because of the above I feel leery associating myself with the guy.

Vivaldi’s target audience is people who don’t mind proprietary blobs as long as they are “good” or make things “work better.” Given that Vivaldi itself is essentially a proprietary blob combined with a Chromium backend this makes sense.