What features would people expect/want such software to have?

Someone’s gotta stay behind to tell people to check out Lemmy

Would the default instance be run by the app dev? Or in collaboration with some instance? It would maybe be risky to do with an unaffiliated instance because if they didn’t like it they could disallow these types of accounts or signups.

The idea of a “documentation moat” seems really gross to me. Like you’re going to make it more difficult on purpose for people to interact with your software, unless they pay?

Assuming you are in the US, your wife’s fears are totally baseless because lawsuits against people for consumer level piracy pretty much have not been happening at all since like 2010 (with the exception of porn video piracy copyright trolls, which still doesn’t happen that much and maybe your wife would be unhappy with regardless). Even when they were, due to industry group backed lawsuit campaigns, it’s civil law not criminal so nobody went to prison, and the few people who actually got stuck with massive fines eventually just declared bankruptcy to get out of paying them.

This is because said industry groups switched to trying to enforce copyright via ISP, getting ISPs to voluntarily forward people threatening letters, which are mostly empty threats with no associated legal action, so the ISPs are getting sued to try to obligate them to cut off people’s internet access. They want a way of doing it where they don’t have to take consumer level pirates to court, I’d guess because it looks really bad for them and is terrible PR to have regular people who obviously don’t deserve punishment sued for huge amounts of money because they torrented some media.

You are totally safe if you have a VPN and bind it to your torrent client (which prevents torrents from working if the VPN is off or drops connection), but even if you get such emails from your ISP (I got a few myself) likely nothing will happen for now.

Yeah but I sympathize, the way money rules your life and how you’re allowed to live it is brutal and it’s only natural to dream of overcoming that through financial success.

AI as a technology sure, Windows on the other hand I think there’s a real chance people will stop using it as it continues to get worse and alternatives continue to get better.

Things like subscriptions don’t seem like they should take up too much space, so it seems like a flaw that there isn’t more redundancy

If Mastodon is federated, why isn’t this recoverable somehow? I thought federation involved making copies of content on other servers, does that just not happen often enough for it to work as a backup?

I don’t have high resolution monitors so most of that isn’t relevant to me but they are different dimensions and it seems to handle two of them fine.

VR issues are like, the headset speakers not being recognized, viewing the desktop from SteamVR shows a blank screen, and launching VR games does not actually cause the headset to switch to them, they just run in the background. Stuff like that. I guess it would be worth trying another DE just to see if it helps.

What is bad about it? What ‘display features’ are important here? My main problem with Cinnamon was lag spikes every second or so, though that was some years ago and might not be an issue now. Games seem to mostly work fine, except VR stuff still needs more troubleshooting, but I’m skeptical a different DE would fix those issues.

I didn’t want to deal with choosing so I just went with Linux Mint and the default choice (Cinnamon) but it seemed glitchy and I couldn’t configure it the way I wanted, so switched to xfce. Haven’t felt the need to try other stuff since.

So the main complaint is that Pixelfed clients don’t display posts without images even if one has followed the poster? And thinks it incentivizes creation of using multiple accounts/apps when a single one to interact with ActivityPub would be better? That seems like a fair thing to criticize but it seems a little dramatic to paint it as entertainment killing communication.

Bloat is a valid concern but imo a lesser one compared to the potential for centralized data harvesting.

There’s at least some difference between “have been” and “this is currently likely to happen”, since if it’s known then it would have been fixed. I’ve gotten viruses before from just visiting websites but it was decades ago and there’s no way the same method would work now.

Sounds like an additional reason to be doing it in a way where participants can’t be debanked by payments middlemen

Part of the headache here is that this situation inherently props up a few monopolistic platforms, rather than allowing people to use whatever payment system is available in their own countries. Some of this can be worked around using cryptocurrencies – famously, the Mitra project leverages Monero for this very purpose, although I’m told it now can accept other forms of payment as well.

Hell yeah, I didn’t know about Mitra. It sounds like it’s a Patreon esque kind of deal with what the payments part is for.

Quickly and effortlessly get some music playing that can act as a backdrop for your real activity such as working, driving, cooking, hosting friends, etc. Keep it rolling indefinitely.

“Discover” new music by statistical means based on your average tastes.

This is the main thing I want out of music software tbh.

I think maybe they wouldn’t if they are trying to scale their operations to scanning through millions of sites and your site is just one of them

We can’t afford to make any of this. We don’t have the money for the compute required or to pay for the lawyers to make the law work for us

I don’t think this is entirely true; yeah, large foundational models have training costs that are beyond the reach of individuals, but plenty can be done that is not, or can be done by a relatively small organization. I can’t find a direct price estimate for Apertus, and it looks like they used their own hardware, but it’s mentioned they used ten million gpu hours, and GH200 gpus; I found a source online claiming a rental cost of $1.50 per hour for that hardware, so I think the cost of training this could be loosely estimated to be something around 20 million dollars.

That is a lot of money if you are one person, but it’s an order of magnitude smaller than the settlements of billions of dollars being paid so far by the biggest AI companies for their hasty unauthorized use of copyrighted materials. It’s easy to see how copyright and legal costs could potentially be the bottleneck here preventing smaller actors from participating.

It should benefit the people, so it needs to change. It needs to be “expanded” (I wouldn’t call it that, rather “modified” but I’ll use your word) in that it currently only protects the wealthy and binds the poor. It should be the opposite.

How would that even work though? Yes, copyright currently favors the wealthy, but that’s because the whole concept of applying property rights to ideas inherently favors the wealthy. I can’t imagine how it could be the opposite even in theory, but in practice, it seems clear that any legislation codifying limitations on use and compensation for AI training will be drafted by lobbyists of large corporate rightsholders, at the obvious expense of everyone with an interest in free public ownership and use of AI technology.