TheTechnician27

Can, but it’s a highly sophisticated attack that hasn’t been reported in the wild. This is Ars Technica’s article that I suspect is higher-quality than TechSpot’s (but TechSpot discusses at least one point Ars doesn’t; it isn’t superfluous.)

Man, am I the only one who sees emojis used in place of bullet points (especially “✨”, whatever the shit that’s supposed to convey; polish?) and thinks “An LLM definitely wrote this”?

Yeah, OP, watch your disgusting fucking mouth.

I like being exposed to new applications, but Elisa should’ve come up in the author’s search as kdePackages.elisa. Especially if you’re using KDE (where the Qt UI blends in well), it plainly meets all four of the criteria for inclusion. It’s such a major oversight given its popularity.

I got perma’d for saying a straight-up sieg-heiling neo-Nazi harassing a Jewish couple in an American suburb should have his nose broken so he can worry about his own for a change.

At first I was kind of bewildered having had used it for nearly 10 years, but it was much better this way. I try to keep Aesop’s famous sour grapes fable in mind when I say things like this, but no: every time I end up on Reddit for some reason, I’m dumbfounded anyone could use it in its current condition. Even beyond the visual vomit that is the UI – before I left, mine was a very “Reddit circa 2015 frozen in time” experience thanks to RiF and RES – it feels like iFunny when I realized it was just backwash from other sites like Reddit and left it.

The content is so painfully insipid. It’s all something from fifteen million variations of “/r/damnthatsinteresting”, a repost bot, a dogshit tabloid discussing US politics, “ChatGPT writes a clear-cut ragebait story and users tell the OP if they’re justified”, screenshots from Twitter on their dozenth round of compression, or TikTok’s backwash in the form of v.reddit.

A lot of that stuff is here too, but at least it’s small enough here that real human interaction happens in the comments regardless, and it’s much worse there. I used to get on Reddit for an hour and feel honest-to-goodness enriched by the experience. I felt like I learned new things and saw new, cogent perspectives. I feel utterly hollow on the rare occasion I check Reddit these days, like I just got out of a soulless spin cycle designed to trap me by shutting off my brain.

Other way around. I left there four years ago having used it actively for effectively a decade. Sorry, that was bad phrasing on my part.

Wow, jesus. When I read this post’s title, I assumed it was being hyperbolic and that they just changed the name of /r/all or something.

Nope. The literal “Front Page of the Internet” that made Reddit what it is is gone. Staggering. What an unrecognizable, catastrophic shithole that place has turned into in the four years since I’ve been I was on it as an active user. (Edit: As in “I left four years ago”; didn’t recognize the dual meaning.)

I clarified this a bit in a follow-up comment, but my first comment was simplifying for the sake of countering:

[it’s not in the public domain] because the actual human work that went into creating it was done by the owner of the AI Model and whatever they trained on.

Their claim that the copyright for AI-generated works belongs to the model creator and the authors of the training material – and is never in the public domain – is patent, easily disprovable nonsense.

Yes, I understand it’s more nuanced than what I said. No, it’s not nuanced in their favor. No, I’m not diving into that with a pathological liar (see their other comments) when it’s immaterial to my rebuttal of their bullshit claim. I guess you just didn’t read the claim I was addressing?

Oh, sorry, I said that totally wrong: I meant that I really appreciate your first comment and that it’s not worth your time to reply to their bad-faith follow-up comment.

The answer is that it’s messy and that I’m not qualified to say where the line is (nor, I think, is anyone yet). The generated parts are not copyrightable, but you can still have a valid copyright by bringing together things that aren’t individually copyrightable. For example, if I make a manga where Snow White fights Steamboat Willie, I’ve taken two public domain elements and used them to create a copyrightable work.

So it’s not like the usage of AI inherently makes a project uncopyrightable unless the entire thing or most of it was just spat out of a machine. Where’s the line on this? Nobody (definitely not me, but probably nobody) really knows.

As for courts ever finding out, how this affects trade secret policy… Dunno? I’m sure a Microsoft employee couldn’t release it publicly, because as you said, it’d probably violate an NDA. If there were some civil case, the source may come out during discovery and could maybe be analysed programmatically or by an expert. You would probably subpoena the employee(s) who wrote the software and ask them to testify. This is just spitballing, though, over something that’s probably inconsequential, because the end product is prooooobably still copyrightable.

This kind of reminds me of the blurry line we have in FOSS, where everyone retains the copyright to their individual work. But if push comes to shove, how much does there need to be for it to be copyrightable? Where does it stop being a boilerplate for loop and start being creative expression?

Just as a sanity check: the person you’re responding to is a serial troll and what I can only describe as intellectually dishonest at best or a pathological liar at worst. They make up whatever they want and will never concede that the fucking nonsense they just dreamed up five seconds ago based on nothing is wrong in the face of conclusive proof otherwise.

You shouldn’t waste your time responding to this cretin.

You’re just making shit up. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has affirmed that AI-generated work is in the public domain. Put up or shut up.

Edit: Additionally, the US Copyright Office writes:

As the agency overseeing the copyright registration system, the [Copyright] Office has extensive experience in evaluating works submitted for registration that contain human authorship combined with uncopyrightable material, including material generated by or with the assistance of technology.

A Data breach?

(Go read [The Conversation’s] article if you want to know more – it is a very good read)

Thanks for the recommendation, Joachim. It sure would’ve been nice if you’d linked to it.

This article seems to try to take The Conversation’s compelling comparison of anti-AI to Ludditism and then shoehorn it into FOSS. I can agree it’s related as left-libertarian, but this article’s idea feels like it came about after they read The Conversation’s and just did it worse for a less relevant connection.

If [Take Back CTRL] isn’t in line with the philosophy of the Luddites, I don’t know what is. Dignity, self-determination, agency. That’s what it’s always been about.

Okay, no, Luddites weren’t just generically anti-every-bad-thing-about-tech (and two of those things listed are the same thing); they destroyed machines as high-value targets to get early industrial manufacturers to stop abusing labor.

I’m not trying to convince you of anything with this article; I am not looking for converts. I am just trying to point out that the FOSS movement is not anything new, not really.

So you’re trying to convince us that the FOSS movement is not anything new; did you ever learn what a persuasive essay is? Also, the headline and subheader is: “[…] I Use Linux; And Maybe You Should Too”. Trying to convince someone of something isn’t nefarious, and it’s staggering that someone would write this in a published opinion piece.

I like the ideals of this author, but their piece is poorly argued, meandering, and generally feels stream-of-conciousness.

Does ChatGPT apparently need to be brought up in literally every conversation about schizophrenic people now regardless of direct relevance?

Anyway, if you’re interested diving deeper, Fredrik Knudsen (Down the Rabbit Hole) made a great video on Davis and TempleOS back in 2018.

Technically the numerical code still gives you a precise search key to find other people discussing the same issue.

… You know, as would be useful for a serious operating system where online support doesn’t mean trawling the bowels of Reddit praying somebody’s had the same issue and found a reproducible solution.

American Megatrends flashbacks

I would honestly recommend against Ubuntu. I had the same issue: tried Ubuntu because it’s “the beginner distro”, and it turns out it wasn’t that at all. Ubuntu for me was a cobbled-together piece of shit with a terrible UI, corporate enshittification, and a major breakage around every corner. After a while dual-booting on my laptop, it started taking ~4 minutes to boot into it. Windows, meanwhile, was taking about 30 seconds. It also nuked my config twice, so everything I’d set up to mitigate Ubuntu’s default “person who designed this just had their eyes dilated” trash was undone. I quit Linux for years before giving it another try, because if this broken trainwreck was the “beginner” experience, why would I want to go further?

If you want KDE (which I think is the best DE and it’s not even a little close), I think you’ll find a nicer experience in something like Fedora. Fuck, I think you’d experience less maintenance burden with something like CachyOS, although please don’t treat that as a recommendation. I use EndeavourOS now, and I would genuinely go out and buy a macOS device if my only Linux distro option were Ubuntu (that’s not high praise of macOS) on the grounds that it’s such a poorly designed hunk of dogshit.

efforts to extend Xorg’s life or replace it with similar alternatives continue.

This is 100% true, but the efforts are negligible and not even worth consideration.

• Xorg maintainers are doing just that: maintaining it (and, for the most part, begrudgingly). It will continue to exist for a long time, but that’s the only remarkable thing about it.
• XLibre is made by some anti-vaxx conspiracy dipshit who thinks ^ is an exponentiation operator in C and who got kicked off Xorg for being a moron who did functionally nothing of any importance while carelessly breaking things like the ABI. Enormous quantity but zero quality to speak of. It will go nowhere and only has any crumb of relevance because of the maintainer’s virtue signaling.
• Phoenix basically just started, yet Linux outlets are tripping over themselves to report on it, showing there’s very little real work to speak of in this space. It’s a nothingburger of a story. It doesn’t even do basically the only thing X11 is even good for anymore, which is support legacy applications.

As GNOME and KDE drop X11 and DEs like Cinnamon adopt Wayland, more and more actively maintained applications will stop giving a shit about X11. Even if they don’t explicitly not support it, none of the developers will be using it, and most of the userbase won’t either; thus, applications’ support for X11 will just rot away if it isn’t outright deprecated. Obviously X11 will always have a base of legacy applications, but you’re going to be seriously hard-pressed even two years from now to find someone who would use X11 over Wayland – except for specific and severely outdated hardware, conspiracy nutjobs, and the rare case where XWayland doesn’t properly support a legacy application.