Notices by Nire Bryce (nirebryce@hachyderm.io)

@foone i love that CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE gets a front label warning but the fact that it's CO is presumably on the back with the other warnings

ok but it WOULD be really funny to class-action DMCA openAI for several billion dollars at 250,000 per infringement

this won't happen though because they aren't the 'small guys' so be careful pushing copyright strengthening without any sort of punishment. I've heard rumors openAI is lobbying for it, for exactly these reasons, and I'm willing to tentatively believe that at this point with how it's suddenly hit the broader media.

what is it, $250,000 per infringement that they hit filesharers with? I figure it's gotta be at least 100k people they've violated the copyright of, minimum, right?

25 billion seems like reasonable damages, but I'm sure they'd find a way to push it higher by lying to the judge

remember that pushing for stronger copyright protections re: "AI" only works if you push for it to apply retroactively, otherwise OpenAI just trained their models on all of this and all of their competitors can't.

shit sucks.

lotta people asking why people use manjaro, not enough people looking at why people use manjaro even tho it's terrible

because there's reasons it's still used, and reasons I still use it (Though I've been wanting to migrate for... a long while)

off the top of my head one of the largest is that package management everywhere else isn't great, bc, well, flatpack-snap-appimage-aur-official_packages has most of everything in one package management interface even if support is, dare i say, random

what's a good open source RSS reader that:
- I can also use on Android and have it sync
- it's fine if that's from a selfhosted webapp
- supports folders
- reasonably documented
- not haskell or lisp

I don't care much about aesthetics

python is also a lisp because i can forget everything but the names of the most base concepts and eventually create any solution I need that only works once, does not generalize, and only technically works cross platform

clarkesworld getting DDoSed by people who dangerously misunderstand the strengths of "AI" is pretty fitting since that's like, 1/4 of good scifi

I'm told software moves too fast, but I think the problem is it moves too slow -- there's so much inertia built into everything that pretty much nothing is able to change with improvements or the times until forced to.

I have no solutions to that, but wow does it feel stark lately

idk. I'm going back to bed I guess. But this is a real problem that everyone just shrugs their shoulders on, says that's the way it is, and then goes on to keep assuming how easy it is to learn the tools we've been exposed to the parts of or at least names of, for decades

I'm gonna end this with:

imo/e the biggest folly of the left groups I was in was we collectively assumed people could just like, Use Slack and Use Discord, and it heavily selected for only people with some level of computer-use to stick around.

Or that everyone knew how to use spreadsheets, or everyone understood how text-banking worked. Or that everyone would look at texts.

otherwise we're still stuck being a priesthood that barely remembers things ten years ago and keep reinventing square wheels.

I'm not angry about this, I'm just like... the last two years I've been thinking a lot about the people I know who've bounced off Computers In General because the people decide everything is easy, and like.

the only way open source stays alive and not eaten by corporate contributors that pull their projects wherever their bosses need is if we start actually giving a shit about new people who ARENT nearly as technical.

I'm technically minded, I've got that ten years of trivia, and I still bounce hard off a lot of projects meant for end-users that make a lot of promises, and then waste two days of my time only for me to realize the lofty ideals aren't met yet.

and *that* is a community issue

I get it takes a lot of work to make good things. So instead I suggest simply not saying how easy things are every single time, because I see it a lot on here, in tech, and in OSS

but instead that like, if we want people to learn these things, we need to be having things where you can peel back the layers, not things where there's a learning cliff if you don't have the prerequisites and ten years of FS/OSS intra-community trivia in your head for why things are named that way

this isn't underestimating people's ability to learn -- I'm coming from the perspective that everyone can learn. The problem is learning takes time and psychological space to stick, and the economics as they currently stand are in opposition to that if you're in most fields other than STEM.

This is different for things that aren't aimed at end users -- I'm not saying everything that can be self hosted or whatever needs to be accessible to someone who doesn't know much.

a computer is an appliance to most people, when it breaks they just sigh and buy a new one if they can even afford to. getting them out of that mindset? doesn't require something to have sharp corners, it requires it to be easier to use than alternatives

Otherwise, they'll just stay there with the appliance mindset. Which doesn't seem to be peoples' goals.

but like.... your goal is enabling people, not getting people to play with their computer.

if it's not, what are we even doing

I'm not annoyed at anyone in particular but this has been like, an overarching vibe in open source since before I was born.

it's doing the infosec thing where we're blaming users instead of that things weren't caught before then

if you use computers for decades as not even a power-user but as someone who like, knows their way around the OS and where things get saved by default, etc, or how to use the Task Manager in windows for more than killing unruly processes, you're like, 90th percentile at worst of people in terms of computer knowledge