That so called regime is a travesty. Hope the Iranian people can some day be free.

Similarly moving on to a decent issue tracker, Jira’s support for Epic’s/stories/tasks/capabilities and its linking ability is a huge simplifier for long term planning.

Modern ticket system or issue tracker? Yes, absolutely. But Jira? Certainly not, considering Atlassian’s business practices. A project like Linux deserves a system where they can maintain some control and it probably should be open source.

Yeah email is ancient and certainly terrible from a usability perspective if you’re an outsider to the workflows, but at least it can’t be shut off or taken away on a whim. Also it’s universal and therefore accessible.

Tbf Afghanistan defeated a much stronger Russia back in the 80s.

Those were pretty much the Taliban though. No one doubts the will to fight of the Taliban.

How come people are willing to download and install pirated software though?

You can just remove “priated” from that statement and come to the same conclusions. Considering the amount of bugs, backdoors and 0-day exploits distributed via official software I sometimes wonder why people execute proprietary, closed source programs at all.

An no, “reputable” companies mean nothing, just look at Microsoft clowning around with their signing keys.

There are tools that are being used to attempt to detect if a piece of work is AI-generated. If those tools say something was, it’s then on you to prove that you hand-created it.

They don’t work. It’s total bunk.

Even some artists are already having issues because things “look” AI-generated.

Exactly. See above. No one can (confidently) tell which is which. There’s just educated guessing.

What is your take on this particularly in relation to the SAG-AFTRA strike over streaming residuals? Even if you want to pay for a creator’s work, most ways to consume content now mostly does not get to the creators of a work.

On general principal I always support workers rights to strike and applaud them for fighting for a higher wage.

My personal opinion in this particular case: Many writers in this industry very much overvalue their worth, especially considering the low-brow content they create (10 years or more of capeshit), how replaceable they are (barely any original idea in sight), the low general quality of their work (I’m not even watching this shit for free, you’d have to pay me) and the encroaching power of AI. I’ve never seen such a long-string of garbage writing coming from Hollywood (or maybe I’m just lucky having observed a golden age of TV) and I’ve not seen a similar decline in quality from other craftsmen (cinematography, acting, sound and music…) in the industry. Maybe writers can make some short-term gains, but unless they hone their craft to bring it above the level of what ChatGPT can create right now, they are going to lose their power struggle in the long run.

I’m not even sure how renting or buying a title through a digital service like amazon or google is distributed to creators vs how much goes to the platform and copyright holder.

Often there are options. Speaking about music: A spotify subscription is most likely useless for supporting smaller artists, but buying their merch or stuff from bandcamp is a no-brainer if you have the money.

Right now, AI-generated works aren’t copyrightable. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-us-copyright-policy-1234661683/ This means you can not copyright the works produced by AI.

…

So right now, common AI is producing works that are potentially copyright-infringing works and are unable to be copyrighted themselves.

This kind of judgement is pure symbolic politics, because it’s completely unenforceable and I’m confused why you didn’t mention it. No one can prove if a piece of art is AI made and no one has to admit it. So yes, AI art can be copyrighted, just not officially as AI art, but it certainly will be and likely already is as long as there’s a human ‘stand in’.

There’s a huge gulf of difference between a matter of fact and a matter of law.

In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something?

Never pay money for pirated content or ask someone to pay money for pirated content. Donations to keep a site running are borderline and iffy, depending on the implementation and transparency. As soon as you earn any kind of revenue or treat it as your ‘job’ it crosses into the unethical IMO.

Second point related to money: Pirating stuff you could easily pay for is probably bad, if the creator receives $0 from you. There might still be reasons to do so (not wanting to support DRM for example), but if you got the cash you better find a way to support the actual creators (merch, donations…). The smaller the author the heavier the moral responsibility to bring some money their way. This also weighs in the other direction: It’s probably accetpable or even good to not give more money to giant corporations that abuse intellectual property for their own gains and who shit on creators.

Half of a fuck-ton is still a lot. If they scale down their operational costs they can still run a very comfortable business for a long while on these kinds of numbers.

We can totally do it. Let’s work togheter and let’s work hard, there’s nothing more beautiful than to think of possible solutions that would make us all live better.

Maybe we can. But climate preservation is clearly not working: Humanity is not disciplined enough, not capable of working together enough and too focused on short term gains.

I think our only hope for optimism lies in climate engineering and full-on terraforming, it’s more our style. But of course, it’s about just as scary and can go totally wrong.

When you thought things can’t possible get much worse…

Are there any legit organizations that one can support which help women who still want out to escape this shithole country?

Meh, there’s plenty of naturally occurring things, that look ‘artificial’ to the human eye at first glance.

Some metallic spheres after entry of a meteoroid into earths atmosphere are not enough unless you explain how they couldn’t have formed naturally.

While I’m not a fan of nostalgia-mining or the constant remastering and remaking of games

… but in the same sentence has nothing but good things to say about constant tinkering and overhauling:

companies are still keeping some popular older games accessible by relaunching them with better graphics, fine-tuned gameplay, and even added scenes

Dude sounds like he’s just speaking out of two sides of his mouth.

By the way, this is also why they are against game preservation. Artificially making the $thing unavailable is a sure fire way to sell it again ‘remade’.

the dude wrote a kernel, I very much doubt he needs to brag about his ability to write assembly.

transcoding is certianly not ideal, but some releases have obscenely high bitrates and if you’re more concerned about archival than max fidelity reducing size by a factor of 5-10x (h264->av1) is worth it for me.