DEI has led to anything but viewpoint diversity, fostering ideological conformity via practices such as DEI statements, DEI metrics, mandatory trainings, or cancel culture leading to censorship.
That the current administration is also purging viewpoints it doesn't like, adopting the same authoritarian mindset, but having it enforced by the government (which is worse, IMO), that goes to show horseshoe theory is true.
Just going to point out that this is absolutely not the same thing as rescinding research grants using some lazy grepping of abstracts like the absolute clown show going on now.
> horseshoe theory is true.
Had to look this one up. Apparently the "far left" and "far right" are somehow the exact things we are dealing with here and now.
I have yet to enjoy any of the "creative" slop coming out of LLMs.
Maybe some day I will, but I find it hard to believe it, given a LLM just copies its training material. All the creativity comes from the human input, but even though people can now cheaply copy the style of actual artists, that doesn't mean they can make it work.
Art is interesting because it is created by humans, not despite it. For example, poetry is interesting because it makes you think about what did the author mean. With LLMs there is no author, which makes those generated poems garbage.
I'm not saying that it can't work at all, it can, but not in the way people think. I subscribe to George Orwell's dystopian view from 1984 who already imagined the "versificator".
I don't find that very funny. It's interesting to see what AI can do, but wait a month or two and watch it again.
Compare that to the parodies made by someone like "Weird Al" Yankovic. And I get that these tools will get better, but the best parodies work due to the human performer. They are funny because they aren't fake.
This goes for other art forms. People mention photography a lot, comparing it with painting. Photography works because it captures a real moment in time and space; it works because it's not fake. Painting also works because it shows what human imagination and skill with brushes can do. When it's fake (e.g., not made by a human painting with brushes on canvas, but by a Photoshop filter), it's meaningless.
Seems that you may have a point. As noted in another comment[0], the [rather puerile] lyrics were completely bro-sourced. They used Suno to mimic an old-style band.
The cookie banners aren't worthless. The websites presenting cookie banners either don't know the law, or are engaged in spyware shit. You don't need a cookie banner if you need it to provide a service that the user expects (e.g., saving settings, login).
As an EU citizen, I'm not concerned about your need to observe my behaviour or to prevent ad-click fraud. What I care about is websites sharing my navigation history with Google or the rest of the advertising industry, so yes, I'd like to be informed of it.
Personally, instead of having banners, I'd just ban the practices altogether (e.g., targeted advertising, 3rd party analytics), which would certainly simplify business.
> The websites presenting cookie banners either don't know the law, or are engaged in spyware shit. You don't need a cookie banner if you need it to provide a service that the user expects (e.g., saving settings, login).
There's quite a lot between "engaged in spyware shit" and "service that the user expects".
For example if I want to add first party analytics to my site, the data from which I will use solely internally to try to figure out what pages people like and which they do not like, it is not "spyware shit" if I explain what I'll be using the data for and get permission from the user--and getting that permission needs a cookie banner.
Yes. For example, if you want to track unique users (for the most rudimentary analytics), you'll need to put a uuid in a cookie on their browser, and you'll need to damage your UX with a stupid cookie consent popup, thanks to EU Directives.
This is not nefarious data collection, and it shouldn't need user consent - but it does, because EU lawmakers were overzealous and careless when designing their regulation.
No, you dont! Only if you use third party services to do that or collect data thats not essential to your business. Its just coloquially called a "Cookie Banner", but the laws DONT require you to put up one as soon as you set one cookie!
It does if the cookie contains any uuid that might be linkable to a user's identity (which is obviously necessary if you want to perform rudimentary self-hosted analytics on unique user visits)
In the UK (and broadly under the UK GDPR and PECR – the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations), yes, you generally do need to get consent before setting non-essential cookies, even if it's just for rudimentary analytics like a unique visitor count.
Here's the key distinction:
Strictly necessary cookies: No consent needed. These are required for the site to function properly (e.g., shopping cart cookies, login sessions).
Analytics cookies (including the case with a unique ID for tracking visitors): Not strictly necessary, so consent is required.
Even if the data is anonymous or pseudonymous (like a randomly generated unique ID), if the purpose is analytics and it involves storing or accessing data on the user’s device (like setting a cookie), you must ask for consent.
> if I want to add first party analytics to my site, the data from which I will use solely internally to try to figure out what pages people like and which they do not like,
This is doable entirely on the server side, provided there is no caching or CDNs that get in the way.
What you lose with that method, however, is all the spyware-like shit that analytics tends to gravitate towards.
Cookies aren't spyware. If you want to disable them, disable them in your browser. It is something you send to the server. Not something they do on their end.
The issue is when you want to be able to stay logged in to a site, but do not want Google track you across the internet. Cookies do not differentiate between what they are used for, so sites have to make it clear only if they are going to track you. You do NOT need a cookie banner if you're not tracking your users
I agree partly with the article about entitlement, but you need to define what "open" means, and "access to source code" doesn't cut it due to IP laws. It can't be "open" if it's a legal landmine.
And yes, Open-Source does mean "FOSS", always. The definitions of Open-Source and Free Software being very much equivalent.
Yes, agree with the rest of the article but "open source" most certainly does _not_ include "source-available". This is true regardless of which side of the permissive-vs-copyleft issue you fall on. Being obtuse about things like this dilutes the term, which I suspect is the desired outcome. To be clear, there's nothing particularly wrong with source-available programs; they simply do not rise to the level of benefits offered by open source programs.
I'm personally not even super bent out of shape about some licensing schemes that are technically not OSD-compliant being called "open source" (i.e. ones that have targeted field-of-endeavor restrictions). There's at least a debate to be had. But what this article includes in its definition -- source code tossed over the wall that you're not allowed to do anything with -- is not anywhere close to what anybody has been calling "open source" for decades.
Sorry, this is not true. Free software simply means that the software grants the user 4 fundamental freedoms: the freedom to run, study, redistribute, and modify. It does not require virality, though it is encouraged.
From what I understand, Free Software and Open Source are largely similar, except that the former is political and moral, while the latter is mostly concerned about practical effects.
No, open source and free software are synonyms according to proponents of both terms, including Richard Stallman, the most prominent “free software” crusader. All (or at least virtually all) Free Software Foundation-approved licenses are also OSI-approved, and vice versa.
Your misconception is very common, but you, and other people with the same misconception, are conflating a few different things. Most of the people who prefer the term “free software” also prefer copyleft licenses to permissive licenses. Which is where the misunderstanding that “free software” means copyleft licenses and “open source” means permissive licenses comes from.
Yes, I'm viewing the concept of Free Software and Open Source through the political not legal lens. Sorry for that - I should have been more careful in a thread focusing on the legal parts.
Android is very usable without a Google account or even Play Services. It's not convenient, you may be missing some functionality, but it's usable and alternative app stores exist.
Huawei famously shipped devices without Google Play and many were fine with it. And Samsung's devices, AFAIK the most popular Androids, can have the Google account removed. Play stops working, but you can still use Samsung's own app store.
That may not last, of course, Android could become closed source, but in the meantime I dare say it's strictly more open than Windows. And I hope Microsoft gets slapped by EU's DMA.
GIMP takes some time getting used to, but it's reliable, it will stick around and having used it for the past 20 years, I have issues switching to something else.
Firefox's UI can be easily tweaked with CSS. It's trivial, for example, to get rid of all chrome. The real problem is their ideological stance against PWAs.
That the current administration is also purging viewpoints it doesn't like, adopting the same authoritarian mindset, but having it enforced by the government (which is worse, IMO), that goes to show horseshoe theory is true.