• 9 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I see you totally ignored the entire point of my wall of text ™, and decided to simply insult me and claim I thought I was dunking on someone (more proof you didn’t really read it). You do you!

    Right here, folks, is what happens when people feel threatened by information that does not support a closely held world view. We get argument-less attacks on the person perceived as threat. Even better, I had actually confirmed that the original topic was in fact legit in my own opinion after fact-checking with that “billionaire-owned propaganda factory” - yet here we are.

    How does it feel, “BlameTheAntifa”, to agree with such a propaganda factory? Or, am I misunderstanding you and you feel the story is entirely propaganda?




  • Okay, I haven’t read the article I was just responding to the question about the licensing problem. From what I see in the brief summary here is that this particular item is a rewrite of an existing property, but was given a license incompatible with said property. That is different from whether its license is compatible with Python. I looked up the Python license.

    GPL-compatible doesn’t mean that we’re distributing Python under the GPL. All Python licenses, unlike the GPL, let you distribute a modified version without making your changes open source. The GPL-compatible licenses make it possible to combine Python with other software that is released under the GPL; the others don’t.

    So I see that point as relevant if inclusion renders Python no-longer GPL-compatible. The real issue appears to me to be that AI makes it very easy to write (theoretically clean-room) implementation of a product - in this case chardet.

    The problem here is that what was once something that took real effort and dedicated developer interest to “clone” legally is now easier (perhaps trivial) to do and license differently. This would threaten the GPL model, which is to democratize software and keep it from being entirely owned by entities that could then restrict the software or otherwise destroy the value of competing products.

    I’d say there’s a real problem here, as people’s significant efforts for the greater community could be co-opted and eventually be rendered “pointless” when many people move away from it due to “improved” versions or the “new” versions add features that promote lock-in to their commercialized version. Eventually that open software is no longer viable, and people have to use the proprietary one. I don’t know if that is necessarily how things would actually play out, but it would at least dilute the GPL-based licensing power.


  • I’ll take centuries old sources with a long history of at least reasonably balanced writing over an overtly political source using inflammatory language any day of the week. I also seek multiple sources and points of view. Critical thinking demands it. Just because no source is entirely neutral doesn’t mean you throw up your hands and totally discard all sources except the ones that match your preferred world-view.

    This response is not directed to you alone, I’m including the general population, so I’m not asserting any particular belief about you specifically, but instead am making a point that everyone needs to remember and use based on what you said. That’s my disclaimer that I am not attacking you.

    The LA Times, for example, has a long history, much of it conservative, but it’s more recent history has been both centrist and generally lauded for it’s quality.

    In 2004 the newspaper was awarded five Pulitzer Prizes, the most it had ever won in a single year; by 2015 the Times had received more than 40 Pulitzers. The newspaper also launched a series of new initiatives in the early 21st century, including the online venture TheEnvelope.com (2005), which provided up-to-the-minute coverage of entertainment awards shows, and a partnership with Bloomberg News (2006) to conduct national opinion polls on various political, economic, social, and cultural topics.

    World Socialist Website, on the other hand is unabashedly biased. It does have assessments of being mostly factual, which is good. That’s rarely the case for it’s right-leaning peers. Take note of the fact I am looking for third party information from sources with no (visible, at least) skin in the game or affiliation to the thing it is evaluating.

    I personally tend to read the center to left-leaning side (used to read some AlterNet, DemocracyNow, HuffPost, Daily Kos fairly often), but I didn’t and don’t ignore the center (where I frequently read/watch now) and am very careful when I read on the right. If it smells fishy, and I don’t already know it’s bullshit, I’ll check. If it goes against my belief system, but seems honest, I’ll also check - maybe I’m wrong about something. Even the ones I tend to agree with, I will look around and see who else is saying the same vs saying the opposite, vs pointing out a detail unsaid elsewhere that might change the logical conclusion of the topic.

    And that right there is the key. Never let your sense of identity be bound up with a cause or movement. At best, you instantly become prone to a narrow, rigid world view, and at worst, cultism. When your sense of who you are is threatened, you’re most likely to deny objective truth that counters your world view.

    Hold beliefs and values, but loosely. Always be willing to admit when things change or when you’re wrong. Reevaluate periodically, and let yourself grow. Base your values, beliefs, perceptions of people on as much objective information as possible along with your own self-honest observation. Remember anecdotal evidence is on too small a scale to indicate a large-scale truth.



  • So your take-away from this article about a surveillance tool that seeks patterns of behavior and movement amongst hundreds of random people in a public space is “those privileged men will do anything to remain unaccountable” for… minding their business on in the tube, mall, or sidewalk? This is waaaayyy bigger than that level of bigotry, and in fact pandering to that very bigotry is exactly the tool used to get 51% of the population on board with implementing it without considering the very real consequences for them.



  • Exactly. This is a privacy issue, not a “men’s” issue, otherwise I’d have found a “manosphere” forum for it (don’t know if one actually exists on Lemmy). As you say, this is equivalent to “we must protect the children” as motivation for pretty much everything that takes away liberty, except it’s the women who are the “children” in this version. It’s just a means to getting the controls in place so it can be used freely to everybody’s detriment.


  • Okay, then I think there’s a communication issue because I felt you were talking about serious problems with Linux as an operating system. These examples are unavoidable in a decentralized, volunteer model. FreeTube software is failing because it’s fighting a corporate entity that is protecting it’s revenue - the same will be happening on the Windows version. Unless the script was written as part of Pandas, there’s no reason to expect them to ‘just work’. That’s one independent party doing work that impacts another independent party, and will likely be fixed. That kind problem happens every day in Windows but Windows is not considered unstable because of it.





  • I’ve gone 4 years on my Ubuntu laptop (DELL XPS-13) without any serious problems.

    My one year old Lenovo Gaming laptop with an NVIDIA chip, however… Audio randomly stops working and I have to kick-start ALSA to get it going again - Until it just blows out audio entirely and I have to reboot. My only work-around is to use bluetooth audio.

    So yeah, NVIDIA has some responsibility here. I don’t have any other problems on the Lenovo (also Ubuntu) either. That said, I’ve had few problems with GenAI or Steam video games like Cyberpunk 2077 on NVIDIA (other than audio), so it isn’t all bad.


  • Wow, the Baltimore one I didn’t know about and that’s also beyond dystopian. Jeez, the response by authorities being “sorry, but it did the right thing, move along” reminds me of the movie “Brazil”. If you read the article, you already know that yes, it’s like that one, but in England, and every public place. Worse though, because it’s judgment of where you stand, sit, walk or cast your eyes in relation to any woman in the area.