This is really cool. I love how things like Wikipedia just show how weirdly f’d up our whole society is by doing something without extracting maximum compensation and breaking systems.

Can you prevent someone from setting up local instances of Deepseek? It’s open source. How would this define Chinese models?

Agreed. Avakian is fascinating because he’s so entitled in the article. If someone doesn’t want to buy his product he just rails against how unfair they were to him.

Bro: it’s business. If your product were nearly as good as you claim it is, you wouldn’t need to force people into using it.

Also, the end of the article points out that Walgreens has been terribly mismanaged and is a very low-performing company, and they’re still experimenting with screens, just not with Avakian. Hilarious.

To add to this, I’ve been using GIMP on and off for a decade and I’ve never given any thought to the name. It’s all capitalized. I didn’t think it was a backronym, I thought it was just an acronym.

I’ve used this in professional settings (I used to work in academic molecular bio), and I was very evangelical about it. Especially because we’re not doing high-level artistic work, we just sometimes need something for processing microscope images or making graphics for scientific publications.

I’d say to any and everyone, “You know, you don’t have to pay an annual subscription fee for Photoshop: there’s this free, open-source program called GIMP that does most of what you need and you don’t have to pay a thing! Want me to install it for you?”

I didn’t even think to be embarrassed about the name, and no one ever seemed to care in conversation. As others have said, the bigger impediments are people’s attachment to commercial software and interface challenges. This is just an absolutely silly complaint to make.

This is a great article.

The answer is disappointingly pedestrian, I think: it’s where the clicks are. What’s he supposed to do? Post it on Vimeo and ask people to support him on Patreon?

No conspiracy needed. Lemon doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

Oh! I actually already use Calibre to convert formats. It makes sense I guess that it also strips DRM. Cool!

How do you remove DRM?

I just buy books without DRM. I’ve heard about alternate licenses, but I just don’t buy those ones.

It’s exciting. Decarbonization cement (or replacing it) is going to be essential.

I generally agree. I think there are no great answers, but the expert they interviewed makes good points. The main point that resonates with me is the network effects: if everyone feels pressured to begin using tools because they feel like everyone else is on them, it’s very difficult for any parent to constrain their kid’s use.

Age prohibitions aren’t very restrictive because they’re difficult to enforce. They’re basically just advice and a legal tool to go after the very most flagrant business targeting minors.

As for the positive effects: that’s a great point. I want my kid to have access to explore cyberspace in the same way I want them to have access to explore our city and nearby wildlands. I want them to have as much freedom as possible while teaching them to recognize and avoid danger. I think in all these cases, exposure with supervision before gradually increasing unsupervised access to areas that have become familiar is the only strategy to achieve that that in aware of.

Sadly, it’s another hustle. If you spend enough time on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TIkTok, you may see ads for “business opportunities,” which include a bunch of ways to spend lots of wasted time on things that will supposedly give you “passive income”. A lot of them consist of stringing together crude tools to supposedly run a business without actually running anything. For instance, you can learn how to set up a business on Amazon where someone else manufactures your products and Amazon stores and ships them, and supposedly you’re now a business owner. Obviously, it doesn’t work.

One version of this is becoming a “published author” by having stuff written either by ChatGPT or what are essentially slaves in the global south, and then self-publishing it as ebooks on Amazon.

Again, there’s no real money or sense of accomplishment, but people are desperate, and so people try it.

That sucks. Not surprising, though. I hope the NRLB will fix their broken complain process. Right now, enforcement takes so long it’s a joke.

That’s great news. I’m also glad to hear that Gigi Sohn has found her next project after being unfairly prevented from serving on the FCC.

Ohhhhh the electrons go through the holes! Brilliant!

But will it survive clickbait titles!?!!?

WILL IT?

(Yes, it will survive these).

That’s a sad story. It sounds like a good utility, and the outcome too common.

I don’t think there’s a benefit to trying to convince people to get the way you feel. Instead, make sure people looking for an alternative have one and let people who like Reddit go in peace.

I tried to build one, and the hardest thing was setting up route planning. But it was also way easier than it could’ve been, and if I’d wanted to, I could’ve solved my problem by buying more common, modern sensors.

The field, I think, is moving along really well. There’s always things that could be easier, but I’m loathe to complain when so many people have made such great open source tools.

I was using ROS with a Kinect 1 and an old Roomba, running on a Jetson Nano, btw.

This is crazy. All I can think is how useless Reddit would become if users begin to assume posts on the site are from generative language models. If anyone at reddit IS doing this, that’s like trying to get water out of your boat by drilling a drainage hole in the bottom.

Is there a community for gently abused memes that I can post this to?