[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 day ago

Unfortunately Americans cannot stand being told they don't live in the greatest country on earth. It's a wonder that fascism took this long to win in the US, because it's fundamentally hyper-compatible with American Exceptionalism which every American besides a tiny fraction of far-leftists believe to be inherently and unshakably true.

Where do you go from there when most of your population wouldn't accept a trade alliance that doesn't massively favor the US? Because even if Trump is impeached tomorrow that's what Fox News will be running all day every day to successfully torpedo anyone attempting to rebuild the country.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 78 points 2 months ago

This whole case has collapsed into a handful of choices:

  1. Judge doesn't declare the Trump admin in Contempt of Court (i.e. does nothing). This sets precedent that Trump's administration enjoys full immunity from the judiciary, officially turning the US into a dictatorship. This is what has been happening for weeks and remains by far the most likely scenario.
  2. Judge declares Trump in Contempt of Court, but is unable to enforce it. This is equivalent to scenario 1.
  3. Judge declares the Trump admin in Contempt of Court and deputizes state police to enforce the ruling and arrest, if not Trump, at least some officials. This would be legal and remains the only constitutional solution, but would almost certainly trigger an armed response from the regime. Democracy doesn't go down without a fight, but the end result is uncertain.
  4. Pro-democracy factions use illegal/violent means to force Trump to comply (military coup, sudden Luigi's Mansion remake, etc.). However it would seem that the masks fell off and despite decades of propaganda to the contrary, literally not a single living American is willing to put their life on the line to protect Democracy.
[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 58 points 3 months ago

Running Linux on closed source hardware. Classic.

I bet you aren't even using your own open RISC-V based SBC, with fully open-source peripherals. Is your computer monitor even running an open-source firmware or are you just a FOSS poser?

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 57 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Not a very hot take, only corpo bootlickers pretend that Nintendo isn't squandering the franchise.

It's supremely frustrating that franchises like these get enshittified to hell and there's fuck-all anyone can do about it if they are not willing to work completely for free (i.e. fanfiction writers). Same with the Star Wars content mill which also went to shit while we're forced to sit and watch or give up on the franchise entirely. Or LoTR which in the past 20 years only gave us The Hobbit (🤮) and the Amazon show (🤮🤮).
Human stories were meant to be evolved and expanded on; that's how all of our ancestors built a rich tapestry of myths and folklore over generations, constantly retelling and updating stories. But we aren't allowed to.

I'm Belgian. My grandparents, my parents, my cousins and my cousin's children all grew up reading Belgian comics such as Tintin, Spirou&Fantasio, Lucky Luke, the Smurfs, etc, which were written in the mid-20th century. Yet if any of them publishes anything set in those universes they'll get sued into the ground, so instead these important cultural works are left to rot and wither and be slowly forgotten by each subsequent generation while the Estate shits out a soulless (if not outright racist and sexist which shits on everything that Franquin ever stood for) reboot that no-one cares about every 15 years or so. Such a sad end for such important cultural landmarks that used to be the pride of our country.

Copyright should last 25 years, just like patents. That's more than enough time to recoup your initial investment and doesn't prevent you from making money after then, you'll just have to compete for it on the marketplace of ideas. Isn't that what capitalists should want?

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 70 points 4 months ago

Don't force me to deal with your shiny language of the day,

WE HavE LegItImaTe COnCeRNs

Exact same shit as last time, some cranky old dude with the territorial instinct of a bulldog sabotages anything to do with rust under a very thin layer of so-called technical concerns, yet refuses to partake in constructive discussion. Like, literally, the changeset is just bindings in rust/kernel? What even is there to complain about regarding maintainability of kernel/dma, given that as far as I can tell the rust devs will deal with any future incompatibilities?

Very shameful for the kernel community that this kind of aggressive sabotage is regular and seemingly accepted. The incessant toxicity is not a good look and very discouraging to anyone thinking of contributing.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 66 points 7 months ago

Whether it's 48 or 52 % is an immaterial difference. Every other American who voted, voted for Trump. The rest don't seem to care either way. He has very broad popular assent and is as popular as Harris give or take a margin of error.

Everyone is lasered-focused on the EC because it makes all the difference for the practicalities, but if one is to make a broad judgement of whether Trump won fair and square the answer is "yeah, mostly". Further proof is the fact that the House is probably going to be his as well.

Americans now bear the collective responsibility for the horrors of the next 4(+?) years. Do not make the mistake of blaming the popular will of outright fascism on institutional failures, because institutions didn't force half of Americans to vote for the fascist, again.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 59 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads "hey let's get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible". There's also the CEO tweeting "her" on the day of release.

Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI's reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.

Your comparison is also incorrect. You're not getting a JEJ soundalike, you're getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don't just want "white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess" they have proven beyond doubt that they want "The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson".


Also legality aside, it's really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don't care if it's legal or not, you shouldn't be able to make an AI replicate someone's voice without their consent.

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Hi!

Kagi had a rough couple months on the PR side, and a comment from another Lemmy user arguing that they aren't using Google's index set me off... because I had just read a couple weeks ago on their own websites that they primarily use Google's search index.

Lo and behold, that user was "right": No mention of Google whatsoever on Kagi's Search Sources page. If that's all you had to go off of, you'd be excused for thinking they are only using their internal index to power their web search since that's what they now strongly imply. The only "reference" to external indexes is this nebulous sentence:

Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information [...]

... Unless one goes to check that pesky Wayback Machine. Here is the same page from March 2024, which I will copy/paste here for posterity:

Search Sources

You can think of Kagi as a "search client," working like an email client that connects to various indexes and sources, including ours, to find relevant results and package them into a superior, secure, and privacy-respecting search experience, all happening automatically and in a split-second for you.

External

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other APIs. Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user.

For example, when you search for images in Kagi, we use 7 different sources of information (including non-typical sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia Commons), trying to surface the very best image results for your query. The same is also the case for Kagi's Video/News/Podcasts results.

Internal

But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic. Kagi's Teclis and TinyGem indexes are both available as an API.

We do not stop there and we are always trying new things to surface relevant, high-quality results. For example, we recently launched the Kagi Small Web initiative which platforms content from personal blogs and discussions around the web. Discovering high quality content written without the motive of financial gain, gives Kagi's search results a unique flavor and makes it feel more humane to use.


Of course, running an index is crazy expensive. By their own admission, Teclis is narrowly focused on "non-commercial websites and 'small web' discussions". Mojeek indexes nowhere near enough things to meaningfully compete with Google, and Yandex specializes in the Russosphere. Bing (Google's only meaningful direct indexing competitor) is not named so I assume they don't use it. So it's not a leap to say that Google powers most of English-speaking web searches, just like Bing powers almost all search alternatives such as DDG.

I don't personally mind that they use Google as an index (it makes the most sense and it's still the highest-quality one out there IMO, and Kagi can't compete with Google's sheer capital on the indexing front). But I do mind a lot that they aren't being transparent about it anymore. This is very shady and misleading, which is a shame because Kagi otherwise provides a valuable and higher quality service than Google's free search does.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 65 points 1 year ago

Unlike here where it's all embittered middle children in their 40s in their mom's basement

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 81 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Real back-end requirements: when x, y goes in (in JSON-as-an-XML-CDATA-block because historical reasons), I want you to output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.

æ will require you yo compile x+y in CSV, email it to Jenny, who will email back the answer. She doesn't quite know how to export excel sheets though so you'd better build a robust validator. No, we don't know what æ is supposed to look like, Rob from Frontend knows but he's on vacation for the next 8 months.

The request must be processed under 100 ms as the frontend team won't be able to prioritize asynchronous loading for another 10 sprints and we don't want the webpage to freeze.

And why does your API return a 400 when I send a picture of my feet? Please fix urgently, these errors are polluting my monitoring dashboard and we have KPIs on monitoring alerts.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 53 points 1 year ago

It's even dumber than you think:

Producers elsewhere in the European Union can continue to sell vegetarian food with meat names in France.

It's so incredibly dumb it's honestly amazing.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 76 points 1 year ago

That's a Japan thing and a legislative failure.

What normally happens in most countries is the law would say something vague like "digital means or devices such as floppy disks or equivalent".
Then the Executive makes and maintains the rules of application of that law according to the Hierarchy of Norms (things probably are organized differently in Common Law countries so I don't know the English term but the principle is the same), which dictates in more detail how the law is to be applied ("please use a web form, or a USB keys for legacy processes").

Sometimes the executive lags behind a bit but typically it's just a ministry making decisions within the margin of the law, so it's not too bad.

[-] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 54 points 2 years ago

Nothing inherently, you can go ahead and eat apples from your apple tree.

The main issue with "organic" foods is that the term is usually very badly regulated. Sometimes there is no difference between "organic" and "non organic"... besides price. Sometimes "organic" foods use very ecologically unfriendly techniques, or are grown/processed in countries where supply chains are not inspected anyway.

Then there's the fact that if something is different, it may not always be an environmental or health win. Growing your food in 30cm of water may be one organic and traditional way to avoid using pesticides (see: rice), but doing that with corn in the middle of Arizona would obviously be a terrible idea!

Anyway, overall I don't think organic foods are worse if you're well off enough that the price is not an issue. But you shouldn't feel personal guilt for buying whatever's cheaper, because quite often the alternative does not justify the price anyway. Eating truly "organic" food unfortunately requires a lot more involvement than picking the green package at a national supermarket chain.

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azertyfun

joined 2 years ago