Count me as a fervent critic of Hollywood, but the world isn’t binary and (unfortunately) Hollywood hating it doesn’t automatically make it a good thing for the rest of us. Essentially OpenAI, Google and the rest of the pack of thieves are lobbying to establish themselves as the rulers of a lawless world, and everything you already hate about Hollywood (its inordinate amount of power, the bullying of the weaker that ensue, the corruption and politics around it, …) is meant to get back to us, in worse, with new names at the top.

Indeed that would be the end of the copyright law, but only for the oligarchs.

That is exactly the point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if soon there is more money to be made “certifying works made without AI” than there is selling API tokens for LLMs, i.e. the OpenAI business model (although I have no idea of what the technical implementation would look like, perhaps a mix of secure enclave computing offering only a predefined set of capabilities barred from AI, combined with a blockchain to persist and distribute the reference and hash of the works done? More to the tally of GenAI being a net loss for humanity).

That’s why it should be made compulsory to indicate when something was produced, even partially, by an AI. This time of your life you spent reading some low-effort no-value bullshit you will never get back, and neither will the hundreds/thousands others who read it. This is a net loss for humanity.

Matrix has gone open core, XMPP is safer

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, open standards with similar or better capabilities already exist. Don’t create another silo, contribute to making e.g. XMPP clients better.

but it taught us that you always want more than one method of contact, as a a rugpull can happen at any time off any whim.

Being on the internet long enough taught me instead (by having seen countless providers rise and fall since the early 00’s) to self-host my comms and prefer open federated protocols. I switched to XMPP, I have no regret, everyone that matters made the move painlessly a decade ago or so.

As someone who’s been using ttrss for decades but would be open to trying something new, what would you say is FreshRSS’ killer feature (and missing killer feature) compared to ttrss?

(Not trying to start a flame war, ttrss feels like a finished project, which is not a bad thing, but I think it’s healthy to wish for more innovation in this space)

How about nextcloud with the draw.io app/excalidraw integration?

leftist activism like tiktok

Lol, you might have missed a few news cycles if that’s your take. Tiktok has been well documented as a vector of foreign interference while propping up right wing populist movements.

One of them, for a 50% premium and worse finishing/less robust

Not in the way of ThinkPads being one of the last bastions of laptop durability and upgradeability, though

I’ve compared the two a while ago, seems to me like slightly different takes around the same core ideas. It’s true that a couple of things in Ansel feel more natural, but it’s not much, and it’s probably not worth the risk (AFAICT the bus factor is one, compat with DT isn’t a goal).

Darktable developers pride themselves for their non-destructive processing pipeline and use it as an excuse for how quirky and inflexible their UX is. I believe they are highly competent on the highly technical bits that ultimately very few people see or understand. Personally I can use it to an extent if I unlearn what other software have taught me over decades of UX conventions.

Isn’t that the essence of the issue, that those models are loaded with biases, that might or might not overlap with dominant ones in inscrutable ways, hence producing new levels of confusion and indirection?

I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.

I’m sure many did, but I’m also pretty sure it’s easy to draw a line between code assistance and LLM-infused code generation.

Telegram never was private, group chats never were encrypted (and that’s not an opinion: the feature simply is missing). If anything, they are just removing their false and deceiving claims. That they remained there for so long is something I can’t wrap my head around.

I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.

That is true, but it’s never been a problem in my relatively long experience with XMPP: some server software can be used as a cluster and distributed, making it highly available (basically, the whole of WhatsApp runs on a fork of ejabberd), and the comparatively tiny resource usage of XMPP contributes to its stability.

XMPP does have a spec for F-MUC (distributed rooms somewhat like Matrix, many years before Matrix) and my rationale as to why it never picked up despite a whole decade of “competition” from Matrix is that it’s a problem that just doesn’t need solving. The price to pay for it is hefty: Matrix resource usage (bandwidth, CPU, RAM) is insane, its protocol complexity makes it a single-vendor implementation (which is risky on very practical grounds), and it’s not even bulletproof for the niche use-case it set to tackle: in the end, your identity server on Matrix remains centralized.

You can tell that I’m partial to XMPP, but that’s only after having been a service operator for years, with my original expectations largely favouring Matrix.

I think you should give Trilium(Next) Notes a try:

• it has the hierarchical notes structure that you are familiar with in obsidian

• it has better ways of keeping things organized (attributes can be values or references, can be shared and inherited, which provides a flexible framework for having notes “types” as templates that can be extended, e.g. people vs. colleagues, businesses vs. companies, etc)

• it has the concept of note hoisting (which lets you focus on a note and its sub-notes, so other projects/spaces don’t come in the way of autocomplete and placing references), and workspaces that builds further on top of that

• it can be used standalone (local client/offline-only, like obsidian) but coupling it with a remote-server opens more interesting use-cases (synching, sharing notes with others by public URLs, one-user/multi-client editing) which gives the best of both worlds (local-first/online-first) and lets you access your personal notes on devices you don’t necessarily own (which obsidian doesn’t). The mobile app story isn’t great (it’s a PWA with limited offline capabilities at the moment), but isn’t worse than the alternatives either (I can’t really work and think long form on a handheld, no matter the editor experience, but perhaps that’s just me).

You need to list out your requirements. What do you want to do? Where do you need your data? Do you care about open source? Self-hosting? Do you have an idea how your content will be organized? Will you ever need to tap into it as data? Etc

Have you tried trilium notes? Not as hyped and polished, but does extraordinarily well IME.