I’m with you 100% from the privacy and cybersecurity perspectives. That said, if they can be solved (e.g. at some point there will simply be no need for any more training data, and computers will be fast enough to do all the fancy stuff locally), I’d vastly prefer having an appliance do my housekeeping chores than a cleaning service.

Use the Meta defense: as long as you don’t seed then it’s fine.

A global FOSS day would be awesome. In addition to giving gifts to the authors and maintainers (and maybe Paterson and others would agree to no fees for one-time donations on that day or something), think of all the other new holiday traditions we could start…

• cookies in the shape of Linus or RMS
• decorations made from “that box” we all have of extra parts and cables
• rhyming flame wars on every listserv
• riveting games of (token) ring-around-the-rosie

What else?

Maybe it’s time for a FOSS general strike.

Lots of sites offload payment directly to stripe, PayPal, etc. many even let you choose the provider. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work the same way.

Yes! Slip the sound board guy your discman and $20 and get a perfect recording. I remember a few times where there were a stack of discmans and walkmans (Walkman?) recording.

The main findings from the Economic Index’s first paper are:

• Today, usage is concentrated in software development and technical writing tasks. Over one-third of occupations (roughly 36%) see AI use in at least a quarter of their associated tasks, while approximately 4% of occupations use it across three-quarters of their associated tasks.
• AI use leans more toward augmentation (57%), where AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities, compared to automation (43%), where AI directly performs tasks.
• AI use is more prevalent for tasks associated with mid-to-high wage occupations like computer programmers and data scientists, but is lower for both the lowest- and highest-paid roles. This likely reflects both the limits of current AI capabilities, as well as practical barriers to using the technology.

Interesting, not really surprising, and nowhere near as entertaining as when Pornhub does it’s annual introspection.

The “innovation” in the article is passive tech for fiber to the room (FTTR), specifically made to be low cost and easier to implement. It’s also how your computer might get that 50Gbit - it’ll have to be wired in with a fiber connection. It’s not happening over WiFi (or even Ethernet)

Kinda funny how when mega corps can benefit from the millions upon millions of developer hours that they’re not paying for they’re all for open source. But when the mega corps have to ante up (with massive hardware purchases out of reach of any of said developers) they’re suddenly less excited about sharing their work.

No need to limit it to only people on social media…

Could even be his twin - that joke is from 2007, if little Bobby was in kindergarten then he’d be around 22 by now and could be trying to land his first job out of college!

😂

Wordpress has an ActivityPub plugin to federate your content with Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey, and others, and will push their comments back to you.

Yeah, the company that made the article is plugging their own AI-detection service, which I’m sure needs a couple of paragraphs to be at all accurate. For something in the range of just a sentence or two it’s usually not going to be possible to detect an LLM.

I have a hard time understanding facebook’s end game plan here - if they just have a bunch of AI readers reading AI posts, how do they monetize that? Why on earth is the stock market so bullish on them?

The scenario you describe with ISPs is pretty US-centric, as are the various copyright laws and companies backing it, which is (one of the reasons) why many of the most successful VPN companies are either not based in the US (and most have server nodes that are not too).

Mullvad is from Sweden, for example, and Proton is from Switzerland, so if a content company can even figure out which endpoint nodes are hosting/routing the pirate content they then also have to figure out (a) who owns the node and (b) then send them an angrygram which will just immediately be torn up by the VPN provider as they’re not subject to US law.

Finally, an operating principle of these companies is to keep no logs, so even if a US-based VPN company got an angry letter, they’d probably be unable to do anything since they would have no record of the activity.

Correct but there are really only 2 parts (3 if you’re adding a front-facing proxy which it sounds like you know how to do). If you’re using something like truenas or proxmox there are prebuilt containers for both iCloudpd and immich/photoprosm/whatever and even if not both have generic Docker containers or can be run out of their own repo checkout. So you just need:

1. iCloud <—> local folder via icloudpd
2. local folder <—> local web front end with immich
3. local web <—> public web with your proxy or cloudflare setup

Good luck!

Right, this is for the “hard” part of getting your content out of iCloud in an automated fashion. You’d then put the content in storage locally and use photoprism or immich or a similar self hosted gallery to be able to access them

icloudpd can be run in a container or just your host machine. It’s a little finnicky to get logins set up (and honestly I haven’t done it in a few months), but once that is working you can automate a job to pull down a backup every day/week/month and delete files from icloud.

I had a much funnier image in my head, but you’re probably right.