fwygon

fwygon , 20 days ago

I stopped using Termux in general because of this inanity where they moved off and stopped supporting the Play Store Version; now this happens where they're unable to keep things from conflicting across the different APK sources?

Yikes. Seems like a good time to continue staying away from Termux and not recommending it.

It's a shame since I really love the concept of the app; but each increment of Android has been rough on it and I can't imagine it being useful with Google being stupid about their policies.

...Unfortunately they're often quick to blame apps they dislike for problems in the ecosystem, and they often directly attack them through nerfing APIs and system calls that the apps tend to use; which I think is absolutely a dogshit thing to do.

Please, stop enshittifying our phones Google.

fwygon , 20 days ago

I'm not being harsh; they bungled that initial transition badly too; despite it being a Google action.

Unfortunately they left a lot of users in the lurch when they left the Play Store as well and that too left a bad taste. It's not exactly easy to migrate across versions and packages and software differ wildly as they allowed both versions to do their own thing without relabeling them so you could run them side-by-side.

I don't blame them for Google's actions; but I do blame them for how they handled it.

You might be confusing my transition into a rant against Google as blaming Termux.

fwygon , 20 days ago

They could certainly "clearly pass the cost" of this on to the user by not offering Audiobooks to users who didn't pay for the "+ # of Audiobooks" tier of Spotify Premium; instead of this horrible enshittified crap where it cuts you off midsentence like a greedy telecomm provider would. Or perhaps their limitation should be on how many titles you can listen to concurrently in a certain time period. (So if you open X books; that's it; you have to shelve one or wait it out)

It certainly means that Spotify did a bad job at negotiating their rights to these audiobooks as well. That matters too; because that makes the product worse; and that should never have been allowed to happen. If they couldn't have offered it nicely, they could've just not offered it at all or added it to a higher service tier so that the cost is diverted better.

fwygon , 24 days ago

13 billion Euro British Franc Moneys?

That's pocket change to Google.

Note: the above message is satirical. Do not reply.

fwygon , 24 days ago

It isn’t AI itself, it’s AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

This. 1000% this. Many of Issac Asimov novels warned about this sort of thing too; as did any number of novels inspired by Asimov.

It's not that we didn't provide the AI with rules. It's not that the AI isn't trying not to harm people. It's that humans, being the clever little things we are, are far more adept at deceiving and tricking AI into saying things and using that to justify actions to gain benefit.

...Understandably this is how that is being done. By selling AI that isn't as intelligent as it is being trumpeted as. As long as these corporate shysters can organize a team to crap out a "Minimally Viable Product" they're hailed as miracle workers and get paid fucking millions.

Ideally all of this should violate the many, many laws of many, many civilized nations...but they've done some black magic with that too; by attacking and weakening laws and institutions that can hold them liable for this and even completely ripping out or neutering laws that could cause them to be held accountable by misusing their influence.

fwygon , 1 month ago

This is pretty clearly a company practiced at "riding the waves" of what's popular to sell absolute bullshit.

They appear to raise millions, develop what looks like a minimally viable product for it's development phase, then pull the rug out and exit with the bag of cash, quickly pivoting away from discovered scams and name changing to avoid too much consumer ire or regulator scrutiny.

It wouldn't surprise me if the CEO or anyone else at the top levels of this company has an entire resume full of these sorts of 'scam and run' operations, the kinds that melt into the background and vanish the moment any real strong consumer or regulatory/legal scrutiny hits it.

Basically this is investment fraud 101; you find something you can trick people into investing into, then spend as little as possible to get a 'minimally viable product' that appears plausible enough to give you time to exit stage left with all the fat cash you can take. Because this sort of operation does produce something; oftentimes they get away cleanly; because they did do something and oftentimes they obscure or obfuscate and hide the evidence of any planned malfeasance; usually the only places with any record of it is in the mind of the CEO or other executive(s), if they're in on the scam too.

Sometimes the CEO gets 'caught' intentionally and then fired...or they just run the company into the ground. That latter case can let them off the hook with a tidy golden parachute as well; depending on the circumstances and what they 'negotiated' when they were 'hired'.

fwygon , 1 month ago

NOPE!

You cannot pay me to use Windows 11.

fwygon , 1 month ago

Censorship like this is one fast track to things like the French Revolution.

fwygon , 1 month ago

The shoe fits on the other foot as well. Both extreme communism and extreme capitalism have tendencies to turn into dystopian nightmares.

If '1984' alarms you; so too should current works like 'Ready, Player One' or 'Ender's Game' and it's associated sequels.

Extremism in general tends to not work. I don't pretend to know what the exact right balance is; but it does exist.

fwygon , 1 month ago

Even a progression from "Closed Source" to "Source Available" is nice progress I think.

If we assume that the License is not restrictive we may be able to fork Winamp into a codebase that might actually be Fully Open Source Software and track changes of the upstream as we need.

fwygon , 1 month ago

This kind of website sounds kind of problematic and useless. The ability to follow a specific person's post is highly useful, and highly necessary oftentimes. If you want to reduce the friction that "Following" induces; you simply need to not disclose to the users how many people are following them, nor do you need to disclose how many followers a user has. Problems solved.

The same goes for Likes. Nobody but the sender of the like should know about that like. Instead of keeping counts for the recipients to obsess over; calculate a reasonable percentage of people who we can guess "like" the post algorithmically based on views of the post and clicked likes. I get that the feedback mechanism is necessary; but it should be a gentle one that simply encourages people to post what people like and will view. This percentage should not be used to rank a post above or below other posts, unless the user viewing the list asks for the list to be sorted or ranked as such.

fwygon , 1 month ago

Minimum SDK also does get bumped in Android in general at a snails pace. Given that we're basically coming up on Android 15; it's not unfair to assume that, eventually, we will simply see Android intentionally and permanently REFUSE to run the app because it's Minimum SDK value is considered to be too low and thus Android must assume that the application is completely insecure.

fwygon , 1 month ago

The largest barrier for me in FLOSS and FOSS applications is simply a lack of GUI tools for what is considered to be "Advanced" functions.

Just because I can do it on linux doesn't mean it's easy or intuitive. Unfortunately a lot of FOSS and FLOSS applications are, of necessity, extremely limited in what tasks they are targeting. Frequently you cannot rely on the "alternative" to have a relied upon function or feature until deep in it's lifecycle; when finally enough people have complained and the feature is implemented.

Sometimes a feature is never implemented due to an entirely shifted paradigm in the way the program is implemented and the feature is "impossible" or "inconsistent with xyz".

One example of this is the number of GUIs and frontends written for ffmpeg; many of which simply are lazy GUI implementations of what the ffmpeg CLI binary itself will helpfully print out in the console when you ask it for help with the correct switch(es). Many are even less thought out than this and will often unhelpfully provide an obtuse box at the bottom for custom commands you wish to feed to the program....which is great if you know the command(s); but make using the GUI unhelpful when compared to just firing up a CLI and reading the output and figuring out the correct command for exactly what you want it to do.

Keep in mind; I am not at all uncomfortable with using CLI interfaces; I just expect that a GUI doesn't force me to fallback, or become so unusable that I am forced to fall back on an original CLI tool because I cannot possibly discern why it failed to work

Frequently things that would be simply be an option buried deeply in the GUI menus only and are otherwise fairly simple are relegated as being only possible within a CLI interface; and I find that reality quite infuriating most often...as the limitations of a CLI oftentimes make the task I am trying to complete far less simple than it really should have been.

fwygon , 2 months ago

I can do everything Kagi does for free...using SearXNG.

fwygon , 2 months ago

I pay nothing for running SearXNG locally on my machine.

fwygon , 2 months ago

The nice thing is that I can customize it however I like too; change weights, choose which engines to pull from always, or even from search to search; so I'm not getting cruft.

SearXNG always rearranges the crap most engines serve to the bottom without fail.

fwygon , 2 months ago

I genuinely won't even use Brave indexes on my SearXNG instance; I have the engines disabled. My search quality has not suffered; as most of my results end up being DDG or Yahoo anyways; and Brave was only ever duplicating results from other engines anyways.

fwygon , 2 months ago

To be honest the "Privacy" aspect can be taken care of in other ways; like using a VPN for query dilution, for example. You don't have to recruit 100 mechanical turks to do junk searches for you; although there are browser addons that can in fact do this automated searching for you...I've run them before.

SearXNG is a front-end that protects your privacy still. Hosting it locally dilutes it some; but provides maximal control; as you can use VPNs and control things much more tightly than you could if you hosted it elsewhere.

fwygon , 2 months ago

Your argument clearly shows that you fail to see the benefits of doing it yourself. I get quality results from my local instance due to my persistence and work put in to adjust the settings necessary. I've balanced the privacy and functionality of the instance to fit my needs and it costs me nothing but a few minutes of my time each week to do so.

Kagi doing it for $10 a month sounds like they're turning a neat profit off of you; and you're refusing to accept that I have achieved levels of search competence that Kagi has without paying for Kagi or even using their free searches or service.

Whether or not it makes sense to you value-wise to pay or not pay for Kagi does not matter in this discussion. it only matters that none of the things Kagi can do that I find useful are things that cannot be done with SearXNG.

fwygon , 2 months ago

You do have to host it yourself or run your own personal instance to get the power of SearXNG; if you've not tried this, please do not write it off.

If hosting it yourself or even running it locally in a container on your machine at home is too technical for you; nobody is going to bane you for that. In fact there's several guides and videos out there that might help you if you're inclined to learn.

If not; you're also free to continue consuming as you do.

fwygon , 2 months ago

SearXNG has fediverse search functionality too.

fwygon , 2 months ago

Why is this four year old story being reposted?

fwygon , 9 months ago

Why on earth would I pay $10 a month for search when I can get everything I need using SearXNG? For Free.

It costs me exactly $0.00 to run SearXNG locally using Podman and WSL to host the docker image. It Just Works; and I don't have to worry about paying money every month to anyone; nor do I ever have to count my search queries as precious.

Unfortunately this "$10/month = Unlimited" is also likely to be available only for a limited time; and once Kagi feels it has enough users; then you'll be stuck back on some arbitrary number of searches each month.

Worse is logging in. To search. Yuck.

There are so many "Public" SearXNG instances as well for the less-than-technical; https://searx.space/

All of them provide the option(s) to use whatever engines you'd like.

fwygon , 9 months ago

No it doesn't. SearXNG aggregates all engines anyways; and that gets far more helpful results.

fwygon , 10 months ago

AI art is factually not art theft. It is creation of art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it; except computers and AIs do not run on meat-based hardware that has an extraordinary number of features and demands that are hardwired to ensure survival of the meat-based hardware. It doesn't have our limitations; so it can create similar works in various styles very quickly.

Copyright on the other hand is, an entirely different and, a very sticky subject. By default, "All Rights Are Reserved" is something that usually is protected by these laws. These laws however, are not grounded in modern times. They are grounded in the past; before the information age truly began it's upswing.

Fair use generally encompasses all usage of information that is one or more of the following:

• Educational; so long as it is taught as a part of a recognized class and within curriculum.
• Informational; so long as it is being distributed to inform the public about valid, reasonable public interests. This is far broader than some would like; but it is legal.
• Transformative; so long as the content is being modified in a substantial enough manner that it is an entirely new work that is not easily confused for the original. This too, is far broader than some would like; but it still is legal.
• Narrative or Commentary purposes; so long as you're not copying a significant amount of the whole content and passing it off as your own. Short clips with narration and lots of commentary interwoven between them is typically protected. Copyright is not intended to be used to silence free speech. This also tends to include satire; as long as it doesn't tread into defamation territory.
• Reasonable, 'Non-Profit Seeking or Motivated' Personal Use; People are generally allowed to share things amongst themselves and their friends and other acquaintances. Reasonable backup copies, loaning of copies, and even reproduction and presentation of things are generally considered fair use.

In most cases AI art is at least somewhat Transformative. It may be too complex for us to explain it simply; but the AI is basically a virtual brain that can, without error or certain human faults, ingest image information and make decisions based on input given to it in order to give a desired output.

Arguably; if I have license or right to view artwork; or this right is no longer reserved, but is granted to the public through the use of the World Wide Web...then the AI also has those rights. Yes. The AI has license to view, and learn from your artwork. It just so happens to be a little more efficient at learning and remembering than humans can be at times.

This does not stop you from banning AIs from viewing all of your future works. Communicating that fact with all who interact with your works is probably going to make you a pretty unpopular person. However; rightsholders do not hold or reserve the right to revoke rights that they have previously given. Once that genie is out of the bottle; it's out...unless you've got firm enough contract proof to show that someone agreed to otherwise handle the management of rights.

In some cases; that proof exists. Good luck in court. In most cases however; that proof does not exist in a manner that is solid enough to please the court. A lot of the time; we tend to exchange, transfer and reserve rights ephemerally...that is in a manner that is not strictly always 100% recognized by the law.

Gee; Perhaps we should change that; and encourage the reasonable adaptation and growth of Copyright to fairly address the challenges of the information age.