Luke

I’ve been thinking about this often lately as well. These fucking corporations with multiple billions at their disposal, and all they can produce is shit like Windows or macOS? AND it also costs money to use? AND it has ads in it?

Meanwhile a bunch of nerds working for free on a passion project are giving away software that is faster and easier to use and often more beautiful to look at.

I guess I’ve simply reiterated what the post image said, so ignore me maybe, but fuck this is depressing and disappointing. All these corporate resources and all they can do is barely achieve what other people do for free in their spare time? What a fucking waste of human life and energy is capitalism.

Yeah I realize they are trolling, and my reply isn’t for them. Displaying solidarity for my uterus-having comrades.

since you decided

So glad to hear that you are supportive of people’s autonomy to make decisions, that’s an important value to have. Since you support them making a decision to take action that could result in beginning a pregnancy, you’ll also support that autonomy when they make another decision later to end a pregnancy. Isn’t it great when we have ethical consistency in our views? Congratulations!

Yeah! How dare people object to the symbols of their ideology being coopted by the very forces their ideology opposes. Do you hear yourself? 🙄

Could you elaborate what you mean by “doesn’t have Wayland”?

Krita works fine on Wayland (I just finished using it to scribble out a comic strip, in fact), but is there something specific you’re finding that is broken?

I dunno, Mozilla developers have had 10 releases in the past 4 months alone, with many bug fixes in every release, and 3 of those releases being minor versions each containing multiple new features. I certainly consider bug fixes and new features to be improvements happening to the browser.

Internet Archive to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20240923091701/https://peabee.substack.com/p/whats-inside-the-qr-code-menu-at

Edit: oops, @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org beat me to it!

Right! It’s definitely fulfilling the purpose OP stated here in this post, as long as that’s what you’re using it for. I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t do the other things it claims to do in the readme for the repo, so that’s something to be aware of.

This seems like a valuable utility for concealing writing style, though I feel like the provided example fails to illustrate the rest of the stated goal of the project, which is to “prevent biases, ensuring that the content is judged solely on its merits rather than on preconceived notions about the writer” and “enhance objectivity, allowing ideas to be received more universally”.

The example given is:

You: This is a demo of TextCloak!!!

Model: “Hey, I just wanted to share something cool with you guys. Check out this thing called TextCloak - it’s pretty neat!”

The model here is injecting bias that wasn’t present in the input (claims it is cool and neat) and adds pointlessly gendered words (you guys) and changes the tone drastically (from a more technical tone to a playful social-media style). These kinds of changes and additions are actually increasing the likelihood that a reader will form preconceived notions about the writer. (In this case, the writer ends up sounding socially frivolous and oblivious compared to the already neutral input text.)

This tool would be significantly more useful if it detected and preserved the tone and informational intent of input text.

Next up: Discord!

I think you underestimate how oblivious many users are when it comes to using software.

Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly “very popular” means, though I don’t see how popularity is a useful metric when we’re talking about free software which doesn’t rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.

However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I’m not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I’ll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:

• Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation together have roughly 840 employees as of 2020 (the latest numbers available on Wikipedia). I’m not sure how they split up who does what for developing the software, but I seriously doubt the vast majority of those 840 employees are developers.
• Blender Foundation has a team of 31 people (as of 2022). Most of them are developers/engineers/designers directly involved with improving the software.

For purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can’t have 0.8 of a person).

In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it’s funding strategy.

Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender’s funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla’s at paying developers to work on their software.

Again, I don’t agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it’s clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.

it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation

Please don’t excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it’s unavoidable.

There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards… it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.

It’s better than Season 8, which is of course just about the lowest bar in existence, but worth noting when talking GoT.

The plot was kind of just a borderline uninteresting version of Downton Abbey with way more blood and incest, but the characters felt correct for the world and the acting and production was on point. Definitely worth a watch, but just don’t expect it to be anything on the level of Seasons 1-4 of the original show.

You got all that when you didn’t even finish the first episode? Damn, you are a tough audience.

I thought the show was pretty decent. It wasn’t literally perfect, but it was entertaining and beautifully shot. Some of the acting was kinda underwhelming, but some others did a great job IMO.

Especially Morfydd Clark, Joseph Mawle, and Ismael Cruz Córdova as Galadriel, Adar, and Arondir, respectively. Sophia Nomvete as Disa gave one of my favorite performances yet of a Dwarven character, and I enjoyed her scenes immensely.

I’ll probably rewatch that show more often than I will the Hobbit movies, which makes it a solid entry by my reckoning, and it’s okay that it wasn’t perfect.

Wasn’t that the Loki show, where all of time is run by a boring dystopian corporate bureaucracy?

Now that I think of it, I guess you’re right, that show probably did do better than Black Adam.

Putting everyone into these little boxes and arbitrarily pitting them against each other

Just because you apparently don’t have any strong political opinions and the status quo works fine for you, doesn’t mean that everyone else’s opinions are “arbitrary”. What an ignorant thing to suggest.

can we stop with the divisions and no true Scotsman bullshit on the left

No, because (A) liberals are by definition not leftists regardless of how little they know about their own right-wing political advocacy, and (B) ignoring the fact that there are differences among leftists (and liberals and leftists) is both wholly unproductive and furthers political alienation of the people whose opinions you want to be able to conveniently pretend don’t exist.

Additionally, just because you don’t understand leftists when they tell you that liberals are not leftists, doesn’t mean they are engaging in a No True Scotsman fallacy. It means you haven’t engaged enough with them to understand.

I use it intentionally all the time to distance myself from liberals, especially when talking to liberals (it’s a pointless distinction to conservatives). It breaks liberal brains a little less often lately than it used to, but while the repetitive conversation about the distinction is annoying, it also usually results in some wheels turning a tiny bit inside them.

No idea if this is a useful suggestion, but I saw it spoken of in another thread about CAD software: there’s a free and open source plugin called BlenderBIM that is apparently a decent option.