That so called regime is a travesty. Hope the Iranian people can some day be free.

or substituted its own SSH host keys,

why would the backdoor do that? It would immediately expose itself because every ssh client on the planet warns about changed host keys when connecting.

Uncompressed WAV files, lol I’ll never get over that

It doesn’t even make sense. Simple compression algorithms like in use by FLAC or AAC are pretty much free to decompress on CPUs from this century and the cpu cycles you save by not doing wasteful IO of huge files from storage easily makes up for that.

I’m sure game devs can make some argument to not use ‘expensive’ compression, but not using any is just wasteful.

or maybe western society as a whole got shittier and people are dumber

does it support foobar2000 plugins?

probably not, since those are windows dlls. So here’s a short list of what I’d want from a fb2k replacement:

• a UI plugin with the power and flexibility of Facets/Refacets
• browse library by folder structure OR tags (most only do one or the other)
• powerful query language to actually find what I’m looking for
• binaural stereo for headphones plugin
• convolver
• convert to opus and replaygain scanning
• DR Meter
• handle my >100k tracks library without constantly crashing or being incredibly slow

Most alternatives I’ve tried can’t even deliver on half of those.

Similarly moving on to a decent issue tracker, Jira’s support for Epic’s/stories/tasks/capabilities and its linking ability is a huge simplifier for long term planning.

Modern ticket system or issue tracker? Yes, absolutely. But Jira? Certainly not, considering Atlassian’s business practices. A project like Linux deserves a system where they can maintain some control and it probably should be open source.

Yeah email is ancient and certainly terrible from a usability perspective if you’re an outsider to the workflows, but at least it can’t be shut off or taken away on a whim. Also it’s universal and therefore accessible.

Tbf Afghanistan defeated a much stronger Russia back in the 80s.

Those were pretty much the Taliban though. No one doubts the will to fight of the Taliban.

Do you really think OpenRC or runit or any of the other init systems people are using have any similarity to SysV init?

Yes? OpenRC is certainly much closer to sysvinit than systemd and in many ways just expands upon it.

I’d recommend sway and waybar. Waybar offers some cool customizable templates. Currently I also use bemenu as a launcher and dunst/poweralertd for notifications. I make heavy use of stacked or tabbed layout during general use.

sway has pretty decent mouse support, but for optimal productivity try to get used to the keyboard shortcuts. As soon as moving/resizing windows and changing desktops becomes muscle memory it’s a whole different ball game.

How come people are willing to download and install pirated software though?

You can just remove “priated” from that statement and come to the same conclusions. Considering the amount of bugs, backdoors and 0-day exploits distributed via official software I sometimes wonder why people execute proprietary, closed source programs at all.

An no, “reputable” companies mean nothing, just look at Microsoft clowning around with their signing keys.

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It seems like that design is made with the idea of removing the screen from the controller, which isn’t bad

Yes, but what’s the point? What’s going to power the screen once it’s out? Pixie dust? What’s going to drive the display? Whoever made this is unaware that a tablet is more than just a screen?

Since when does Denuvo block mods?

The whole point of Denuvo (and any DRM in games) is to prevent modifying the running code. Unless there’s some kind of official modding system, there will be no way to inject DLLs or do anything else invasive to the running game.

There are tools that are being used to attempt to detect if a piece of work is AI-generated. If those tools say something was, it’s then on you to prove that you hand-created it.

They don’t work. It’s total bunk.

Even some artists are already having issues because things “look” AI-generated.

Exactly. See above. No one can (confidently) tell which is which. There’s just educated guessing.

What is your take on this particularly in relation to the SAG-AFTRA strike over streaming residuals? Even if you want to pay for a creator’s work, most ways to consume content now mostly does not get to the creators of a work.

On general principal I always support workers rights to strike and applaud them for fighting for a higher wage.

My personal opinion in this particular case: Many writers in this industry very much overvalue their worth, especially considering the low-brow content they create (10 years or more of capeshit), how replaceable they are (barely any original idea in sight), the low general quality of their work (I’m not even watching this shit for free, you’d have to pay me) and the encroaching power of AI. I’ve never seen such a long-string of garbage writing coming from Hollywood (or maybe I’m just lucky having observed a golden age of TV) and I’ve not seen a similar decline in quality from other craftsmen (cinematography, acting, sound and music…) in the industry. Maybe writers can make some short-term gains, but unless they hone their craft to bring it above the level of what ChatGPT can create right now, they are going to lose their power struggle in the long run.

I’m not even sure how renting or buying a title through a digital service like amazon or google is distributed to creators vs how much goes to the platform and copyright holder.

Often there are options. Speaking about music: A spotify subscription is most likely useless for supporting smaller artists, but buying their merch or stuff from bandcamp is a no-brainer if you have the money.

Right now, AI-generated works aren’t copyrightable. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-us-copyright-policy-1234661683/ This means you can not copyright the works produced by AI.

…

So right now, common AI is producing works that are potentially copyright-infringing works and are unable to be copyrighted themselves.

This kind of judgement is pure symbolic politics, because it’s completely unenforceable and I’m confused why you didn’t mention it. No one can prove if a piece of art is AI made and no one has to admit it. So yes, AI art can be copyrighted, just not officially as AI art, but it certainly will be and likely already is as long as there’s a human ‘stand in’.

There’s a huge gulf of difference between a matter of fact and a matter of law.

In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something?

Never pay money for pirated content or ask someone to pay money for pirated content. Donations to keep a site running are borderline and iffy, depending on the implementation and transparency. As soon as you earn any kind of revenue or treat it as your ‘job’ it crosses into the unethical IMO.

Second point related to money: Pirating stuff you could easily pay for is probably bad, if the creator receives $0 from you. There might still be reasons to do so (not wanting to support DRM for example), but if you got the cash you better find a way to support the actual creators (merch, donations…). The smaller the author the heavier the moral responsibility to bring some money their way. This also weighs in the other direction: It’s probably accetpable or even good to not give more money to giant corporations that abuse intellectual property for their own gains and who shit on creators.

Half of a fuck-ton is still a lot. If they scale down their operational costs they can still run a very comfortable business for a long while on these kinds of numbers.

We can totally do it. Let’s work togheter and let’s work hard, there’s nothing more beautiful than to think of possible solutions that would make us all live better.

Maybe we can. But climate preservation is clearly not working: Humanity is not disciplined enough, not capable of working together enough and too focused on short term gains.

I think our only hope for optimism lies in climate engineering and full-on terraforming, it’s more our style. But of course, it’s about just as scary and can go totally wrong.

When you thought things can’t possible get much worse…

Are there any legit organizations that one can support which help women who still want out to escape this shithole country?