My mom died.

My father taught me to hate myself.

You invite my “billionaires shouldn’t exist” TED talk.

Requires a constitutional amendment, which, in case it isn’t obvious, will not happen, as it will require the yea votes of states that currently wield outsized power under the current system.

Yeah, and folks know “scruples” as a noun which some people have and some don’t, but “scruple” as a verb is a nice archaic version that I really like, which you don’t encounter much outside of, say, a Jane Austen novel.

I would say “meaningful”. Billionaires can have a very noticeable effect with their philanthropy, while making essentially no sacrifice on their part. The Gates Foundation does very noticeable good, but Bill Gates isn’t giving of himself very much.

“scruple” as a verb, meaning “hesitate due to conscience”.

It was coined by Cory Doctorow.

US universities are pro football teams with a sideline in education.

They have ARPU targets (Average Revenue Per User) and UAC targets (User Acquisition Costs). Whales contribute significantly to the game’s bottom line. Non-paying customers are vital, because player population is a game quality, and Whales need a population to notice how awesome they are.

But game companies don’t tend to separate Whales from other players (at least not the ones I’ve worked for), they tend to care about ARPU, which is more stable, and a much easier target to shoot for. And they want to keep UAC down, which lowers the required ARPU for a successful game.

The name holds it back more than you know. No EP or AD wants to put “The GIMP” on their software list for a project. I have to have a conversation with someone ensuring we’re good on all our licenses, and they ask, “What is this GIMP thing?” Answering it makes me sound like an unprofessional jackass. The company would rather just pay Adobe.

I run GrapheneOS. I’m also not a dick about it.

You care too much about this. Let people enjoy things.

Boost is my favorite. Clean UI and attractive icon.

You just described letting developers dictate which OS you use…

Reading this on Boost for Lemmy, which I’m glad exists, since Boost was my Reddit app of choice.

One, let’s accept that there is a public domain, and cribbing freely from the public domain is A-OK. I can reproduce Michaelangelo all I want, and it’s all good. AI can crib from that all it wants.

AI can’t invent. People can invent: i can have a wholly new idea that no one has ever had. AI does nothing but recombine other existing ideas. It must have seed data, and it won’t create anything for which it has no initial input: feed it photographs only, and it can’t create a pencil drawing image. Feed it only black and white images, and it can’t create color images.

People do not require cribbing from sources. Give a toddler supplies, and they will create. So, we have established that there is a fundamental difference between the creation process. One is dependent on previous work, and one is not.

Now, with influences, you can ask, is your new creation dependent on the previous creation directly? If it is so utterly dependent on the prior work, such that your work could not possibly exist without that specific prior art, you might get sued. It will get debated and society’s best approximation of a collective rational mind will determine if you copied or if you created something new that was merely inspired by prior art.

AI can only create by the direct existence of prior art. It fakes invention. Its work has to come from somewhere else.

People have shown how dependent it is on its sources with prompts that say things like, “portrait of a patriotic soldier superhero” and it comes back with a goddamned portrait of Chris Evans. The prompt did not include his name, or Captain or America, and it comes back with an MCU movie poster. AI does not create. People create.

You don’t get to both ignore intellectual property rights of others, and enforce them for yourself. Fuck these guys.

The Other Shoe: the first recipient was Mitch McConnell, and his episodes lately have been during firmware updates.

Using Facebook on a mobile browser is horrible: the scrolling snaps all over the place. They’re awful, which is why i won’t have any Meta software on my phone.

I would chalk most of that up to relative nascence, and mostly volunteer labor. I would expect things to improve. In the meantime, I’m fine with my lemmy and mastodon instances, and don’t feel a lack of much.