Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

@nearhat@tech.lgbt You get lesser specs for more money, but having S76 engineer the laptop, bootloader, and OS makes it worth it. Everything works.

One typo in an installer script, and I completely wiped out a system directory when uninstalling a program. Didn't realize it until weird things started happening, and a reboot revealed that I had rm'd way more than the program I was trying to delete.

I just rebooted, held the spacebar, clicked "Refresh Pop OS", and I was back in in about 60 seconds.

My wife and I are celebrating our 10 year anniversary today. It's been a wild decade, but we're making it.

Did something stupid as root and completely bricked my laptop. Really seeing the engineering from System76 pay off as I recovered my OS is less than a minute using the recovery wizard.

I've never recovered from this big of a fuck up so fast before on Linux. I'm having to reinstall a few things, but I lost absolutely nothing.

@calicoday Apparently it's a reference to the Kal Kan pet food company, whose president used to eat dog food at shareholder meetings to prove that he stood by it's quality.

Then Microsoft ran with it, which makes sense because their marketing during the 80's and 90's was regularly unhinged.

Disappointed in tech media for not using the term "dogfooding" to describe Apple's Scary Fast keynote event produced entirely with iPhones and Macs.

Important supplemental material: https://web.archive.org/web/20000303145808/http://twinkies.com/splash.html

I don't actually have these, but you could, for $995.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/334281500193

Time to find out how shelf stable they really are.

Complaining about how cold it got so fast, only to remember that I can finally fire up my 3D printer without creating a heat problem in my small apartment.

Printing the BYU One-Piece Compliant Blaster.

https://compliantmechanisms.byu.edu/maker-resources

This screenshot will temporarily teleport your brain back to 2004. Use with caution.

They're selling your data for $2,000/month.

https://app.snowflake.com/marketplace/listing/GZTSZ290BUX40/cybersyn-inc-cybersyn-consumer-spending-dashboard

@mcc I'd like to see it replaced first. The actual user count isn't known, but it is estimated to be in the millions, so I really don't see that project being retired without an alternative available. There aren't any other real FOSS Photoshop alternatives out there.

Though it is unfortunate how few improvements have been made to it over the past decade. It's basically already abandonware, even if it is "maintained".

@mcc They just need to rename that thing to GNUtotshop or something. Anything would be better, I don't care if it's stupid.

Though, and I'm probably saying more about myself than I should, but I always visualize Gimp mask when I see the name, rather than interpreting the name as ableist, but that's not really an argument for keeping the name...

@unixwitch @mcc Krita is excellent imho. I'm lacking in the artistic skill department, but it is cool looking through the source files on https://www.peppercarrot.com/ to see how @davidrevoy makes the sausage.

@Roundcat This is one way to think of it, but my take is that all the arguments people make against leaving Twitter are just proxy arguments. The real arguments people don't want to say out loud are:

"I am attached to my follower count and don't want to rebuild"

and

"I like fighting with people, and this place encourages my brand of toxicity"

On the latter front, Bluesky is booming with bullies and scolds.

Small correction: Stable Diffusion has 2.3B 256x256 images, and 170M 512x512 images that it is trained on.

But still, that comes out to less than one byte of model data per image in the training set. There's literally no way to argue that a 256x256 image got compressed down to less than a byte.

It is worth noting to those who are in opposition to AI that the "models trained on my work contain my work" argument isn't technically or legally sound. Better arguments need to be made. If we could cram 1B+ 512x512 images into a single 2GB model, it would represent the single greatest breakthrough in data compression technology in human history. It turns out, this isn't a compression breakthrough, it's just proof that the original data isn't in the model.

I agree that some degree of mimicry isn't infringement - fair use includes some degree of derivation - but I really don't think that training and using a model to deliberately imitate another artist's work represents fair use, especially if it can be found to harm the artist.

The line shouldn't be drawn at "is it an exact copy?", it should be drawn at "would it confuse a reasonable person into thinking this was original art by another artist?".