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Cake day: May 14th, 2024

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  • Yeah. The newer versions of Dall-E, GPT-Image, and similar cloud apps seem to have subnetworks specifically for text. They’re worlds better than they were just a year or two ago. Like, you can twist them into generating semi-coherent-looking text logos, or make a cartoon character wearing a T-shirt with some text on it.

    I’ve seen some complex pipelines with open models, where people train loras specifically to fix the things the base models suck at, like hands, text, etc.

    But it’s still a really dumb idea to generate a whole presentation slide or infographic that way, for a wide variety of reasons. If you ever get decent results, just consider yourself lucky. I mean, even the people with the skills to do this well (who are few and far between) would find it way more trouble than just, you know, making slides the normal way.

    The incompetence we keep seeing from Microsoft is staggering. I can only assume this is malicious compliance. I imagine some exec said “everyone needs to use AI for everything” and everyone below them said “okay you dumb fuck, here you go”.






  • Have you ever wondered why we celebrate Richard Stallman as a visionary prophet of digital freedom while simultaneously abandoning every principle he fought for?

    This is the Stallman Paradox: the growing chasm between our intellectual reverence for genuine free software principles and our practical convergence on venture capital-optimized extraction models that merely cosplay as “open source.”

    I’m not entirely sure who “we” refers to, but it sounds like they are either very confused, or they are liars. Perhaps they have been bamboozled by corporate interests trying to undermine and co-opt the free software movement and philosophy, or perhaps they are agents of those corporate interests trying to bamboozle you.

    That’s not new; it’s been happening since the moment free software started picking up steam, decades ago. Consider some of these choice quotes from Stallman himself at his speech at a Web3 conference just last year:

    I’d like to say more about the difference between Free Software and open source because it’s a topic of great confusion. I founded the Free Software movement in 1983 with the announcement. The term Open Source was coined fourteen years later in 1998 when Free Software was becoming widely used and starting to be something people knew about. But not everyone who worked on or used or promoted Free Software agreed with the philosophy of freedom behind it. And the people who didn’t agree wanted to get out of connection with it by and many of them were working for businesses or with businesses that didn’t care about freedom at all. So, they found a new term, Open Source, which they defined differently but it overlapped a lot… But the biggest difference is that the term Open Source has never had any implications about right and wrong. It was, that idea was launched that way by people who didn’t see it as a matter of right and wrong. So that’s why I decided I would not start using that term.

    And what does Stallman think of cryptocurrency?

    I’ve never used cryptocurrency. There were things I found disappointing and worrisome when I learned about BitCoin. And it’s not clear to me that others are much better… I don’t want to do currency speculation myself at all.

    He prefers GNU Taler as a distributed payment system. Taler is not a cryptocurrency, but it solves a lot of the problems that cryptocurrency pretends to solve.

    Now with Taler the payer is anonymous but the payee is always identified, which means that Taler does not help millionaires hide lots of money from taxation. The world has a tremendous problem with wealth that is hidden and cannot be taxed. It’s part of the way that billionaires have been transferring more and more of the world’s wealth to them leaving less and less for everyone else. And this change is on the order of twenty percent of the world’s wealth. It’s an enormous change that impoverishes people who are not rich but even worse it gives the rich people the power of oligarchy, the power to buy governments and that threatens democracy. That threatens the rights of all of us but if we insist on payment systems that don’t permit the hiding of large amounts of wealth, that problem will get less instead of more.

    “How much do you know about Web3?”

    Not a tremendous amount, that’s not my field.

    So again I wonder who this “we” refers to. Who is so confused as to associate Richard Stallman and Free Software with cryptocurrency and web3? I mean, the fact that he was invited to speak at a web3 conference suggests it’s a lot of people in the field, but god damn.




  • IPFS content IDs (CID) are a hash of the tree of chunks. Changes to chunk size can also change the hash!

    I don’t understand why this is a deal-breaker. It seems like you could accomplish what you describe within IPFS simply by committing to a fixed chunk size. That’s valid within IPFS, right?

    Is it important to use any specific hashing algorithm(s)? If not, then isn’t an IPFS CID (with a fixed, predetermined chunk size) a stable hash algorithm in and of itself?








  • Yeah, Matrix is a very, very hard sell. I mean, “normal” people (for lack of a better term) are put off by Mastodon, and Matrix is a hundred times more complicated to join. I’m also not sure what it would look like to use Matrix the way I use Discord. Perhaps there is functionality in Element/Matrix I have never explored since I use it more for messaging and group chat, not for communities with multiple channels like IRC/Discord/Slack.

    In any case, Discord is too entrenched to be replaced by something that is merely technically superior, or even more user-friendly. Realistically, you can’t migrate entire communities if they’re bigger than a tight-knit IRL friend group, and even that is hard. That seems to be the only reason X still exists.


  • Almost, yeah. Certainly the big corps.

    This is why I strongly favor services that use end-to-end encryption or do not store history in the first place.

    There are not many times when I’ve needed to search back through history on a Discord server, and every time I have I thought to myself “this would be much better on any platform besides Discord”. Discord would, IMHO, be a better product if they did not retain history forever.

    Ditto for Slack. Slack has the additional gall to limit access to that data unless you pay for a premium plan, despite the fact that they keep the data forever regardless (as evidenced by their occasional free trials which magically bring all history back, and some search tricks you can use to access old posts regardless).

    Both Slack and Discord have lulled their user base into a false sense of privacy. Nothing you post there should be considered private.


  • It doesn’t really matter if they do or don’t. What matters is that they can change their TOS at any time, they keep an archive of all historical data, and you will have pretty much no recourse no matter what they decide to do with it in the future.

    Who knows what will happen to Discord in five or ten years?

    They might get bought by a narcissistic billionaire.

    They might sell all their data to Google for training AI.

    They might go bankrupt and sell off their assets to the highest bidder.

    They might have an IPO and begin the usual value extraction at the expense of their users.

    I know, I know…crazy ideas, right? When has anything like that ever happened?!


  • My guess is that this is a teenager, and this is probably their first experience with git and version control in general. Just a hunch.

    Anyway, it is reasonable to expect a mainstream GUI app from one of the largest companies in the world to be approachable for people who do not know all the inner workings of the command line tools that are used behind the scenes. And it is reasonable to expect any destructive action to have clear and bold warnings. “Changes will be discarded” is not clear. What changes? From the user’s perspective, the only changes were regarding version control, so “discarding” that should leave them where they started — with their files intact but not in version control.

    Have mercy on the poor noobs. We were all there once.