I just don’t watch many shows and a lot of the stuff coming out I don’t find that great anyway so I’d rather do something else with my time than pay more for worse service.

That’s OK. I’ve already removed Netflix

Don’t be biased except for these biases.

Yup! Also languages in the ML family and others I’m sure.

Nope. In Rust, a semicolon denotes a statement while a lack of semicolon is an expression so you can’t just omit them at will. This does lead to cool things though like if/else blocks being able to produce values if they end in an expression. But the expression type is checked so you’re less likely to make a mistake. You can see an example here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/flow_control/if_else.html

In JavaScript I never skip semicolons because I’ve seen those subtle bugs.

Yeah, semicolons are ugly anyway and they’d ruin the beautiful expression of your code.

Lol, after both steal every image on the internet.

No wonder the images look similar.

It doesn’t really bother me, but like you I am bored of it and I generally ignore it, or block communities if I’m seeing too much of it.

It is really cool that the models can generate fairly detailed images, but they’re all so similar and… boring. I once saw someone describe it like corporate art. It just tries to imitate something popular in a very mediocre way. You can keep re-training it, but it can still only imitate.

Still, if people are into it then that’s ok too. I have used it at work on occasion to create stupid little icons for internal tools I’ve built, so I guess there’s some little bit of utility.

My guess is that it’ll be used for a while for cheap and low effort branding, but soon companies will want to hire real artists again to differentiate themselves from the ML spam.

I just can’t take anything seriously that puts such an emphasis on “free speech”.

The blog has a post about “Web 3”, so that’s a bit of a red flag as well.

I love how the top of the page mentions to ditch Facebook and twitter, but then there are links to them at the bottom. I get wanting to spread the word, but it just looks bad.

Also, no source code?

This whole thing just feels sketchy.

Sorry, but that’s a bit of a rude conclusion to come to considering you know nothing about me or the fact that I’ve been writing software for over 20 years.

Anyway, I think we’ve both said our piece and I’m happy to just disagree. You seem like a cool person and I’d rather not have us get upset over semantics.

Take care! :)

So is the Linux kernel not open because code has to go through review and may be rejected?

Is Gnu software not open because you have to sign over copyright or may have code rejected for ideological reasons?

Guido van Rossum was BDFL of Python until recently and had pretty much final say on anything that went into the langauge. So I guess Python isn’t open?

Hopefully the XMPP Standards Foundation doesn’t just blindly merge in every pull request that comes their way! I’m sure there have been plenty of people that had to beg and still had their proposal rejected.

You may not agree with the decisions being made about Matrix, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an open protocol or an open process. In fact it’s extremely transparent as another commenter linked to their proposal pull requests on GitHub.

There’s plenty to criticize about Matrix. It may be overly complicated and over-engineered. If there is significant VC involvement, then the threat of enshittification is very real. Element is also quite slow in larger rooms and the search is pretty terrible at the moment.

But, it’s dishonest to say it’s not open. I just don’t want other readers to think it’s somehow closed, when it isn’t. Discord is closed. Slack is closed. Matrix is not.

Also, while being open is a good thing, it’s not a virtue unto itself. Visual Studio Code is an open editor but I stay away from it because I don’t trust Microsoft to not fuck it up. Likewise Chromium is open but I stay away from it because I trust Google even less.

Sorry, but nothing you mentioned has anything to do with Matrix not being an open protocol. I don’t know what you mean by “truly open”. It sounds like a “no true Scotsman” argument.

The spec is absolutely open, and you can see it in what I linked. There are also several servers and several clients if you don’t like one written by the Matrix or Element folks. Heck, there’s even a client for emacs! Now there are compatibility issues since not every server and client implements the entire protocol yet, but that’s not an issue of openness. I used to run into problems all the time with XMPP way back when for similar reasons. I even recall something about Google breaking the XMPP protocol in some ways and causing problems.

I’m not even sure your claim of VC funding is true, since the faq mentions several non VC sources of funding. I couldn’t find anything about VC at element.io, so maybe it’s hidden there, or something has changed a matrix.org?

Still, discussion about not liking their business model is orthogonal to whether the protocol is open or not. Maybe we run the risk of them pulling a HashiCorp and changing some licensing down the road, which would be terrible. But I think it’s dishonest to say it’s not open.

Can you elaborate on what you mean that Matrix is a closed protocol? The spec is open and there are several server and clients to choose from.

“Products are priced based on their cost/value, not the companies overall profit margins”

It doesn’t take much to observe that this is just incorrect.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, and they teach that in your Intro to Economics course, but in reality it just doesn’t work that way.

Came here to say exactly this.

I’d trust the piracy sites more actually. We don’t voluntarily give them our credit card and address.

The dangerous part is that it sounds like the ad is generated by Spotify.

In the “tech already exists” scenario, an advertising firm will have to guess at the voice people want to hear and submit their own audio files to advertise.

If this works the way it sounds, the ad firm sends in some text and Spotify generates a voice ad based on who you listen to. Less effort on the advertising firm and far more targeted.

Both are bad. The second is worse!

And frankly, it’s another reason not to support Spotify. You are supposed to be paying to listen to music, not support research into this bullshit advertising.

So… this is a joke?

I’ve managed to remove several Google services from my normal use pretty easily. I actually pay for email now. I have to get back into using Open Street Maps, so if anyone knows a good client that would be appreciated!

Sadly, I’m still stuck on an Android phone. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the phone I bought isn’t supported by LineageOS and the like, so I’m kind of stuck for now.