If the developer wants to fight this and Rossman wants to back them, then more power to them both. Obviously Bambu shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this. But it does seem unfortunate that the best case scenario would be the developer winning the right to continue doing unpaid work to make their aggressor’s products better. Perhaps an alternative would be for a more FOSS friendly printer company to offer a free replacement for the developer’s Bambu machine so that they can instead contribute to a platform where their work will actually be valued.

Letterboxd isn’t a 1-to-1 replacement for imdb, but it does have user submitted reviews and ratings out of 5 stars. I would suggest giving it a shot if that’s primarily what you’re after.

Inb4 Hank Green does a video about this.

Even in the wide world of dubiously useful AI chatbots, Copilot really stands out for just how incompetent it is. The other day I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and one of the slides included a photo with a kind of cluttered looking background. Now, I can probably count the number of things that AI is genuinely good at on one hand, and context aware image editing trends to be one of them, so I decided to click the Copilot button that Microsoft now has built directly into PowerPoint and see what happens. A chat window popped up and I concisely explained what I wanted it to do: “please remove the background from the photo on slide 5.” It responded on that infuriating obseqious tone that they all have and assured me that it would be happy to help with my request just as soon as I uploaded my presentation.

What?

The chatbot running inside an instance of PowerPoint with my presentation open is asking me to “upload” my presentation? I explained this to it, and it came back with some BS about being unable to access the presentation because a “token expired” before requesting again that I upload my presentation. I tried a little longer to convince it otherwise, but it just kept very politely insisting that it was unable to do what I was asking for until I uploaded my presentation.

Eventually I gave up. The photo wasn’t that bad anyway.

You don’t even need to ban it. You just need to open up the marketplace to alternatives. Cory Doctrow has been pushing the idea that the best retaliation is to simply repeal anti-circumvention laws and allow companies to begin chipping away at the walled gardens of the tech giants. For example, John Deere famously puts software locks on its tractors so that even simple repairs require the owner to pay for a technician to come out and “authorize” the newly installed part or else the machine will refuse to start. This system could almost certainly be bypassed, but right now the law not only allows manufacturers to lock their tractors, it also forbids anyone else from unlocking them. If the EU simply repealed the law that bans circumvention then some clever EU citizen could legally reverse engineer the software running on those tractors and start a business selling unlocking software. They could make it a one-time purchase at 10x the cost of an official tech visit and make money hand over fist while still saving their customers time and money in the long term.
And of course it’s not just tractors. Make a third party app store for the iphone that charges half the commission of Apple. Make a tool that allows seamless account migration from Google to the independent cloud provider of your choice. A huge amount of corporate rent seeking is enabled by anti-circumvention laws.

In case you’re wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me https://www.javathinking.com/blog/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-apps-on-android-device-using-terminal/

I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.

Time to once again pitch my idea for a Super Smash Bros style fighting game with all public domain characters and a new DLC released every January 1st.

An excellent talk from Doctrow as always. A lot of it I’ve hard before, but this part was new to me.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it’s a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That’s a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down. …
Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That’s why they’re so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That’s why they think it’s good that they’ve got a chatbot that “produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer.”
Producing code that isn’t designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.

Every time I see a headline like this I’m reminded of the time I heard someone describe the modern state of AI research as equivalent to the practice of alchemy.

Long before anyone knew about atoms, molecules, atomic weights, or electron bonds, there were dudes who would just mix random chemicals together in an attempt to turn lead to gold, or create the elixir of life or whatever. Their methods were haphazard, their objectives impossible, and most probably poisoned themselves in the process, but those early stumbling steps eventually gave rise to the modern science of chemistry and all that came with it.

AI researchers are modern alchemists. They have no idea how anything really works and their experiments result in disaster as often as not. There’s great potential but no clear path to it. We can only hope that we’ll make it out of the alchemy phase before society succumbs to the digital equivalent of mercury poisoning because it’s just so fun to play with.

TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.

I’ve been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who’s interested in RSS but thinks it’s a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That’s all it takes to get started.

Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace “crypto” with “AI” and it’s still 100% relevant:

When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem … is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.

From the incomparable line goes up

I’ve wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.

I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.

All the Bardcore covers by Hildegard Von Blingin are amazing.

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

I’m aware that pine64 sells a smart watch that they encourage flashing your own OS onto. I wonder how hard it’d be to just port the pebble code onto that hardware (a lot harder than I just made it sound, no doubt.) It could be a good way to get a pebble-like experience for people who prefer not to support this guys new company.

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn’t really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I’m already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it’s easy to learn and use.

I’ve also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet because I’m still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti’s. It’s also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

I’m just gonna leave this right here: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-dial-esp32-s3-smart-rotary-knob-w-1-28-round-touch-screen

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.