The point of encrypting something that gets decrypted midway by an organization is that there are worse actors than the organization out there. I’m not really scared of Steam abusing my credit card info, but I am afraid of random internet strangers.

Also remember that https doesn’t just protect your data, it also verifies that you’re actually on the website you think you are. The internet is basically unusable without this guarantee, especially on a network you share with others.

For someone to work it out, they would have to be targeting you specifically. I would imagine that is not as common as, eg, using a database of leaked passwords to automatically try as many username-password combinations as possible. I don’t think it’s a great pattern either, but it’s probably better than what most people would do to get easy-to-remember passwords. If you string it with other patterns that are easy for you to memorize you could get a password that is decently safe in total.

Don’t complicate it. Use a password manager. I know none of my passwords and that’s how it should be.

A password manager isn’t really any less complicated. You’ve just out-sourced the complexity to someone else. How have you actually vetted your password manager and what’s your backup plan for when they fuck up?

Actually a lot of people don’t drive most of the time. If that’s news to you then you probably live in a shitty place that’s never going to be viable no matter what type of vehicle you use.

Right, air pollution is terrible. So let’s do the thing that minimizes it, which is not driving all the time.

EVs can be better than ICEs and still a terrible industry though. You phrase it as if it’s one or the other.

Regardless of abuse allegations, EVs are just not the big improvement we need to fight climate change and save the millions of people that will die because of it. We need fundamental changes like lives built around public transport, biking, and walking, not slightly better vehicles in an enormously wasteful model.

This has nothing to do with centralization. AI companies are already scraping the web for everything useful. If you took the content from SO and split it into 1000 federated sites, it would still end up in a AI model. Decentralization would only help if we ever manage to hold the AI companies accountable for the en masse copyright violations they base their industry on.

I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.

This can’t be right. Was it maybe a particular workflow you used that required root access? I know I’ve used wine as part of Steam’s Proton as well as via Lutris and neither app has ever requested privilege escalation. I’ve also run wine manually from the terminal also without being root.

Both su and sudo originally meant “superuser” because that was their only use. They have retroactively been changed to “switch user” because this functionality was added later.

It’s not just Batman. This is a common trope in the superhero genre. Pop Culture Detective has a great video on the subject: https://youtu.be/LpitmEnaYeU

No, the intent and the consequences of an action are generally taken into consideration in discussions of ethins and in legislation. Additionally, this is not just a matter of ToS. What OpenAI does is create and distribute illegitimate derivative works. They are relying on the argument that what they do is transformative use, which is not really congruent with what “transformative use” has meant historically. We will see in time what the courts have to say about this. But in any case, it will not be judged the same way as a person using a tool just to skip ads. And Revanced is different to both the above because it is a non-commercial service.

According to The Guardian he got $60M in stock and pension for being fired. Also it seems that stock price didn’t fall much after the crashes and the grounding. It is only after COVID hit that Boeing’s price plummeted. So it might be only by pure luck that he lost anything of value at all.

Humans are not generally allowed to do what AI is doing! You talk about copying someone else’s “style” because you know that “style” is not protected by copyright, but that is a false equivalence. An AI is not copying “style”, but rather every discernible pattern of its input. It is just as likely to copy Walt Disney’s drawing style as it is to copy the design of Mickey Mouse. We’ve seen countless examples of AI’s copying characters, verbatim passages of texts and snippets of code. Imagine if a person copied Mickey Mouse’s character design and they got sued for copyright infringement. Then they go to court and their defense was that they downloaded copies of the original works without permission and studied them for the sole purpose of imitating them. They would be admitting that every perceived similarity is intentional. Do you think they would not be found guilty of copyright infringement? And AI is this example taken to the extreme. It’s not just creating something similar, it is by design trying to maximize the similarity of its output to its training data. It is being the least creative that is mathematically possible. The AI’s only trick is that it threw so many stuff into its mixer of training data that you can’t generally trace the output to a specific input. But the math is clear. And while its obvious that no sane person will use a copy of Mickey Mouse just because an AI produced it, the same cannot be said for characters of lesser known works, passages from obscure books, and code snippets from small free software projects.

In addition to the above, we allow humans to engage in potentially harmful behavior for various reasons that do not apply to AIs.

• “Innocent until proven guilty” is fundamental to our justice systems. The same does not apply to inanimate objects. Eg a firearm is restricted because of the danger it poses even if it has not been used to shoot someone. A person is only liable for the damage they have caused, never their potential to cause it.
• We care about peoples’ well-being. We would not ban people from enjoying art just because they might copy it because that would be sacrificing too much. However, no harm is done to an AI when it is prevented from being trained, because an AI is not a person with feelings.
• Human behavior is complex and hard to control. A person might unintentionally copy protected elements of works when being influenced by them, but that’s hard to tell in most cases. An AI has the sole purpose of copying patterns with no other input.

For all of the above reasons, we choose to err on the side of caution when restricting human behavior, but we have no reason to do the same for AIs, or anything inanimate.

In summary, we do not allow humans to do what AIs are doing now and even if we did, that would not be a good argument against AI regulation.

The source code in this torrent is a clone of the git repo. I don’t know if there are missing branches but it should have the entirety of the master branch history at least.

I have my own backup of the git repo and I downloaded this to compare and make sure it’s not some modified (potentially malicious) copy. The most recent commit on my copy of master was dc94882c9062ab88d3d5de35dcb8731111baaea2 (4 commits behind OP’s copy). I can verify:

• that the history up to that commit is identical in both copies
• after that commit, OP’s copy only has changes to translation files which are functionally insignificant

So this does look to be a legitimate copy of the source code as it appeared on github!

Clarifications:

• This was just a random check, I do not have any reason to be suspicious of OP personally
• I did not check branches other than master (yet?)
• I did not (and cannot) check the validity of anything beyond the git repo
• You don’t have a reason to trust me more than you trust OP… It would be nice if more people independently checked and verified against their own copies.

I will be seeding this for the foreseeable future.

First time I’ve heard of Mojeek. Why should I trust it more than any other company? Is there anything particular about its economic model or governance that makes it less likely to decide to be unethical?

The general public doesn’t have to understand anything about how it works as long as they get a clear “verified by …” statement in the UI.

If this isn’t violating the DMA then the DMA is stupid. Legislation should limit the company’s control, not force it into a specific action while allowing it to maintain as much control as possible.

In other words the DMA should effectively say “you don’t get to choose how your platform is used”, not “you get to make the rules, but just don’t be the only one who can develop for your platform”.

Grub can load booster images, the issue is about incorrect grub.cfg generation.

What they’re saying in the issue is that grub-mkconfig will not create a correct “Arch Linux” menu entry for booster, but if you go to “Advanced options” and choose the “booster” menu entry it works. I can confirm this. It happened on the system I’m currently using.

Specifically, the problem is that grub-mkconfig does not add the booster image to the initrd of the default menu entry. You can add it manually. For example I had to change this

initrd  /intel-ucode.img

to this

initrd  /intel-ucode.img /booster-linux-zen.img

If I recall correctly this issue was not present last time I set up a system with booster. It might be a regression or maybe it only happens in specific system configurations.

I use booster and it’s cool. I don’t see any noticeable difference in boot times but the image generation is much faster. mkinitcpio would take several seconds while booster takes about one.

First time I tried it it didn’t boot because of something missing in the generated image. I tried a universal booster image (set universal: True in /etc/booster.yaml) and it worked. Technically this builds a larger image than necessary but it’s still only 34MB and takes a second to build, so I never bothered to troubleshoot what was missing. The universal image even handles luks encrypted root partitions without additional configuration of booster (you still have to configure kernel parameters).

Another issue I noticed is that if you use grub-mkconfig and your only initramfs is booster, it will generate an incorrect main boot entry. It will add booster as an option in “advanced options” so your system is still bootable if this happens to you. The quick fix is to manually add the initrd entry under the main menuentry in grub.cfg.

Aha I see what you’re saying. It’s possible that dr CD considered the second part to be crucial, but it doesn’t seem that people who listened to his message felt the same way, myself included. I probably speak for a lot of people when I say we hadn’t realized just how much these platforms are “subsidized” and how much damage that does to the entire market. So that part ended up being associated in our minds with the term enshittification.