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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • This was a Discord dumpster fire that was thankfully put out months ago.

    Right, but the original mail from FDO basically said “we know about these examples of bad behavior, we want to notify you that they are definitely unacceptable and we expect to never see something like it again”. And Vaxry had a meltdown over that. Among other things, he doesn’t get why he should be held accountable for behaviors outside FDO. He has also rejected and commented negatively on the idea of any code of conduct at all for his project. Vaxry is making it as clear as possible that he will make zero commitment to oppose toxicity in his community and people took his word for it. The idea that he was punished solely for a couple of comments that happened years ago and are definitely “fixed” is Vaxry’s own misleading interpretation.



  • By the time you’re ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They’ve already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don’t know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.

    Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.

    I’m not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I’ve been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it’s definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.


  • Clarification: In my previous comment I meant that the implementation was antiquated, which is why it was causing many problems.

    Although I do think that desktop icons in general are outdated because they’re designed around a desktop metaphor that is itself outdated. Our use of computers has changed vastly over time and the original metaphors are irrelevant to today’s newcomers. Yet most desktop environments are still replicating the same 30 year old ideas. It’s because we’re used to them (which I understand is a valid reason), not because they are necessarily the most pleasant or the most efficient.



  • Then the site is wrong to tell you that you can use the images in any way you want.

    That’s what I’m saying.

    intentionally violate copyright

    Why is it intentional? Some characters come up even in very generic prompts. I’ve been toying around with it and I’m finding it hard to come up with prompts containing “superhero” that don’t include superman in the outputs. Even asking explicitly for original characters doesn’t work.

    For the most part it hasn’t happened.

    And how do you measure that? You have a way for me to check if my prompt for “Queer guy standing on top of a mountain gazing solemnly into the distance” is strikingly similar to some unknown person’s deviantart uploads, just like my prompt containing “original superhero” was to superman?

    The status quo…

    Irrelevant to the discussion. We’re talking about copyright law here, ie about what rights a creator has on their original work, not whether they decide to exercise them in regards to fan art.

    until they get big enough

    Right, so now that multi-billion dollar companies are taking in the work of everyone under the sun to build services threatening to replace many jobs, are they “big enough” for you? Am I allowed to discuss it now?

    This is an argument-by-comparion.

    It’s not an argument by comparison (or it is a terrible one) because you compared it to something that differs (or you avoided mentioning) all the crucial parts of the issue. The discussion around AI exists specifically because of how the data to train them is sourced, because of the specific mechanisms they implement to produce their output, and because of demonstrated cases of producing output that is very clearly a copy of copyrighted work. By leaving the crucial aspects unspecified, your are trying to paint my argument as being that we should ban every device of any nature that could produce output that might under any circumstances happen to infringe on someone’s copyright, which is much easier for you to argue against without having to touch on any of the real talking points. This is why this is a strawman argument.

    You don’t own a copyright on a pattern

    Wrong. In the context of training AI, I’m taking about any observable pattern in the input data, which does include some forms of patterns that are copyright-able, eg the general likeness of a character rather than a specific drawing of them.

    your idea of how copyright should work here is regressive, harmful

    My ideas on copyright are very progressive actually. But we’re not discussing my ideas, we’re discussing existing copyright law and whether the “transformation” argument used by AI companies is bullshit. We’re discussing if it’s giving them a huge and unearned break from the copyright system that abuses the rest of us for their benefit.

    a description specific enough to produce Micky mouse from a machine that’s never seen it.

    Right, but then you would have to very strictly define Micky Mouse in your prompt. You would be the one providing this information, instead of it being part of the model. That would clearly not be an infringement on the model’s part!

    But then you would have to also solve the copyright infringement of Superman, Obi-Wan, Pikachu, some random person’s deviantart image depicting “Queer guy standing on top of a mountain gazing solemnly into the distance”, … . In the end, the only model that can claim without reasonable objection to have no tendency to illegally copy other peoples’ works is a model that is trained only on data with explicit permission.


  • If AI companies were predominantly advertising themselves as “we make your pictures of Micky mouse” you’d have a valid point.

    Doesn’t matter what it’s advertised as. That picture is, you agree, unusable. But the site I linked to above is selling this service and it’s telling me I can use the images in any way I want. I’m not stupid enough to use Mickey Mouse commercially, but what happens when the output is extremely similar to a character I’ve never heard of? I’m going to use it assuming it is an AI-generated character, and the creator is very unlikely to find out unless my work ends up being very famous. The end result is that the copyright of everything not widely recognizable is practically meaningless if we accept this practice.

    But at this point you’re basically arguing that it should be impossible to sell a magical machine that can draw anything you ask from it because it could be asked to draw copyright images.

    Straw man. This is not a magical device that can “draw anything”, and it doesn’t just happen to be able to draw copyrighted images as a side-effect of being able to create every imaginable thing, as you try to make it sound. This is a mundane device whose sole function is to try to copy patterns from its input set, which unfortunately is pirated. If you want to prove me wrong, make your own model without a single image of Micky Mouse or a tag with his name, then try to get it to draw him like I did before. You will fail because this machine’s ability to draw him is dependent on being trained on images of him.

    There are many ways this could be done ethically, like:

    • build it on open datasets, or on datasets you own, instead of pirating
    • don’t commercialize it
    • allow non-commercial uses, like research or just messing around (which would be a real transformative use)




  • systemd is insecure, bloated, etc

    [Citation needed]

    If a distro that doesn’t use systemd ends up booting much faster or being much easier to configure, maybe those are features you care about. But switching away from systemd in this case is merely an implementation detail. What you’re really doing is moving from a distro to another one that serves you better.

    Otherwise, the choice of init system has very little impact to the average user. Maybe it’s worth it to switch init systems if you hate the syntax of unit files and/or the interface of systemctl/journalctl and you use them often enough to warrant the effort. The people who want to use alternatives to systemd without having such a practical issue with it are doing so for philosophical reasons.