• 1 Post
  • 123 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 13th, 2023

help-circle

  • I see your point, but as a counterpoint… I just bought a used Chevy Volt. It qualified for the Used EV Tax Credit because it was under $25k. While shopping around I did notice that most used EVs were right around the $24,999 price regardless of their features and I was fortunate enough to find one that was fully loaded and had very low miles at this price. Without the tax credit this car would probably have been priced closer to $27k but because the tax credit exists if they had priced it that high, it likely wouldn’t have sold.

    I feel very fortunate to have found this particular car, at this price, while we still have the tax credit available.





  • I get the appeal of Bambu printers, I’ve been tempted myself to get one… but the thing that keeps me away is that they are closed source and I don’t want a world with closed source 3D printers because when the company goes evil - and they all eventually do - I don’t want to be held hostage. I’ve fallen in that trap before and don’t want to again.

    Don’t give them backlash, instead stop using their printers. Release your models under a license that requires the printer that prints it to be open source. Let friends and colleagues know the dangers of supporting such a company.


  • Speaking from my experience, I get very overwhelmed with empathy when someone close to me is going through something as difficult as an illness, divorce or job loss. I want to be as supportive as possible, but also know that there’s usually little to nothing that I can do, and then I get overwhelmed by the feelings of helplessness. I will let them know that I’m there for them if they need anything, and I will check in from time to time to see how they are doing, but I always find myself avoiding talking about the ‘real issue’.

    I know that I’m included in the ‘people suck and are incredibly, inherently selfish’ - even knowing that, I have a hard time addressing it. Even when the roles have been reversed, after I lost my job and people stopped reaching out to me, I knew exactly why… I was making them uncomfortable and they just didn’t know how to deal with it. And even then, I had no idea what I wanted from them, other than for things to just be as they had been before.

    Even after my own experience, when a close friend of mine lost his job I dreaded talking with him because of the helplessness that I felt at being able to do anything for him, and the reminder that at any moment I could be in his shoes again. It sucks, it’s a massive character flaw, and it is even worse that I’m aware of it but so far have been unable to change. I still love my family and friends, I just don’t know how to show them that during their times of greatest need.


  • Same. I bought the lifetime pass on sale many years ago, my setup is still working fine without me having to have touched it for at least the past 3 years outside of applying an update from time to time. I don’t stream their free shows or movies and have those setup so that they don’t even show up as an option on my tv.

    Do I wish it was still the same company it was a decade ago? Of course… but so far they haven’t impacted my experience to the point that I feel the need to replace it with something else. The second that happens I will be spinning up Jellyfin.






  • I am aware and I don’t expect that everything on the internet is public domain… I think the models built off of works displayed to the public should be automatically part of the public domain.

    The models are not creating copies of the works they are trained on any more than I am creating a copy of a sculpture I see in a park when I study it. You can’t open the model up and pull out images of everything that it was trained on. The models aren’t ‘stealing’ the works that they use for training data, and you are correct that the works were used without concern for copyright (because the works aren’t being copied through training), licenses (because a provision such as ‘you can’t use this work to influence your ability to create something with any similar elements’ isn’t really an enforceable provision in a license), or permission (because when you put something out for the public to view it’s hard to argue that people need permission to view it).

    Using illegal sources is illegal, and I’m sure if it can be proven in court then Meta will gladly accept a few hundred thousand dollar fine… before they appeal it.

    Putting massive restrictions on AI model creation is only going to make it so that the most wealthy and powerful corporations will have AI models. The best we can do is to fight to keep AI models in the public domain by default. The salt has already been spilled and wishing that it hadn’t isn’t going to change things.