Yeah, it’s really just a way to access streams. I think of it similar to torrents in that way. There are legitimate, legal streams, and there are piracy/illegal streams. I don’t actually use IPTV and have no idea if these guys have channels that people care about, but they provide IPTV streams and appear to have licenses from all content owners to do so: https://nomadiptv.com/

IPTV stations. There are basically URLs that host streams that are 24/7 content, like a normal TV channel. You need some interface to properly read the stream, hence the app. Most of the good stuff is behind pay walls, but there’s some decent free stuff out there as well. Here’s an example site that aggregates some providers: https://www.theiptvguide.com/

I’m not entirely familiar with the process, but I think Goldberg uses steam architecture, but replaces calls to steam servers with locally emulated ones. And I think Steamless emulates the DRM check locally, to spoof the call to steam servers. Neither tool requires internet or active steam servers to run. If the internet disappeared tomorrow, as long as I had my game library downloaded, and the latest version of those two tools installed, I could play all my games forever. Of course, I still prefer to buy my games as physical copies or offline installers from GoG, but you kinda have to go where the games are.

You aren’t wrong, that’s why I use Goldberg/steamless to keep my library of steam games safe, even if steam shits the bed

I recently switched from 320kbps to lossless, and there are very few moments where I can tell a difference. The biggest one is in the cover of “Tom’s Diner” by AnnenMayKantereit. There’s a section of the song at 320kbps where it goes almost silent, other than faint whispers of the band counting out the silence, but in lossless you can hear them actually singing the song quietly

Yup. All my IoT devices are on a network that doesn’t have access to the internet. To control remotely, I use a VPN. Even though I don’t think it’s technically necessary, I take the precaution of blocking connections to the big company’s APIs/websites for all my IoT devices, just in case.

I wish this were easier for the layman to do. Some companies like Unifi make it pretty painless, but they are expensive and it’s really hard for the non-networking-savvy folks to know exactly which devices you need from them to have a working setup.

The original (presented) heart of the visas were to pull in some of the best and brightest of other countries to fast track them to become Americans, thus bolstering the output of America. This actually resembles the current American brain drain, where other countries are taking advantage of the mistreatment of scientists and other high-intelligence fields in the US to help their country have an even better output. In theory, the original plan makes a lot of sense. Improve the compensation of some of the smartest people around the world, and improve America. But in practice, it is being sorely misused.

I’ve priced it out for myself, and I couldn’t get a build that’s as good at that price, not on new hardware at least. Not sure how they worked out their numbers

You are also missing the huge advances they’ve made in their contributions to FOSS, like proton, FEX, arch, etc. Steam has done an insane amount of legwork to get Linux gaming off the ground. They are the one company that made migrating off of Windows and onto Linux a valid option for me, and a bunch of other folks. Linux was ~0.89% of their userbase in 2020, and since their contributions to these FOSS projects, it has gone up to 3.05%. That’s crazy, considering it had been at or below that 0.89% since 2016.

As someone with a little insider baseball knowledge, it was just a few hours down of DynamoDB and DNS. However, that caused EC2 to go down for ~1 day, which causes pretty much 1/3 of the internet to go down. Once EC2 sorts themselves out, then teams/companies (almost all amazon services use EC2 in the back end) that use EC2 have to get their ducks back in a row, and that can take any span of time, depending on how well their code was written to handle failures + how many people they are willing to pay oncall/overtime.

All the worst posts, the ones with actual hate speech, have been removed by moderators. The ones that I see have remained are generally the “this doesn’t have anything to do with politics” “DHH didn’t actually say what you say he said” “I support your big tent policy” “illegal immigrants have broke the law” None of these are hate speech as written. I don’t like them supporting Omarchy, and I don’t agree with what the posts in support of Framework’s stance, but I would say Framework has moderated where necessary in that post

I love the idea of smart glasses, and would happily buy them. However, it’d 1. Need to have 3rd party app support and 2. Be able to work without connecting to any tech company’s servers. I’ve gotten used to my android phone that doesn’t have google play services, and I’ll never go back to having a device that phones home without my permission. In a perfect world I’d like to have some FOSS firmware and OS to run on them, but I’d be willing to go without as long as I could disable traffic to all major tech company servers.

Unfortunately these requirements will likely mean I won’t be getting smart glasses any time soon

I2P is basically this

Do you interact with people outside of audiophile circles? I’m not in any, and I haven’t heard anyone in person complain about a missing headphone jack in many years, not after a few years of airpods being available. Hell, I don’t know anyone who uses wired headphones anymore. I have heard people mention that my phone is too heavy, and I’m using a pixel 9 pro. Before this phone I was using a pixel 5, and I had people telling me my phone was too small/plastic-y. I don’t think you have an understanding of “normal people” They aren’t tech enthusiasts, they aren’t audiophiles, and they are genuinely shocked when I tell them about how egregiously most tech companies are violating their privacy, but are quick to say that they don’t care/don’t want to give up creature comforts to prevent it.

Fellow Thunder user?

It’s not perfect, but I use grayjay. They have an android app and a desktop client, and are usually pretty quick to make updates that will sidestep Google’s anti-adblocking measures (within 1-2 days.) Again, not perfect, but I don’t mind a slightly worse experience to avoid having to see an ad. Plus it has sponsor block support built right in

I’m writing this on GrapheneOS right now

I mean, he’s a retired guy with new hobby, it wouldn’t seem too out of the question that he spent a good chunk of time following tutorials for things that have plenty of tutorials out there.

If it runs on a computer, it’s literally “just logic and RNG”. It’s all transistors, memory, and an RNG.

Sure, but this is a bad faith argument. You can say this about anything. Everything is made up of other stuff, it’s what someone has done to combine or use those elements that matters. You could extend this to anything proprietary. Manufacturing equipment is just a handful of metals, rubbers, and plastics. However, the context in which someone uses those materials is what matters when determining if copyright laws have been broken.

The data used to train an AI model is copyrighted. It’s impossible for something to exist without copyright (in the past 100 years). Even public domain works had copyright at some point.

If the data used to train the model was copyrighted data acquired without explicit permission from the data owners, it itself cannot be copyrighted. You can’t take something copyrighted by someone else, put it in a group of stuff that is also copyrighted by others, and claim you have some form of ownership over that collection of works.

This is not correct. Every artist ever has been trained with copyrighted works, yet they don’t have to recite every single picture they’ve seen or book they’ve ever read whenever they produce something.

You speak confidently, but I don’t think you understand the problem area enough to act as an authority on the topic.

Laws can be different for individuals and companies. Hell, laws of use can be different for two different individuals, and the copyright owner actually gets a say in how their thing can be used by different groups of people. For instance, for a 3d art software, students can use it for free. However, their use agreement is that they cannot profit off of anything they make. Non students have to pay, but can sell their work without consequences. Companies have to pay even more, but often times get bulk discounts if they are buying licenses for their whole team.

Artists have something of value: AI training data. We know this is valuable to AI training companies, because artists are getting reached out to by AI companies, asking to sell them the rights to train their model on their data. If AI companies just use an artist’s AI training data without their permission, it’s stealing the potential revenue they could have made selling it to a different AI company. Taking away revenue potential on someone’s work is the basis for having violated copyright/fair use laws.

I think your understanding of generative AI is incorrect. It’s not just “logic and RNG” It is using training data (read as both copyrighted and uncopyrighted material) to come up with a model of “correctness” or “expectedness”. If you then give it a pattern, (read as question or prompt) it checks its “expectedness” model for whatever should come next. If you ask it “how many cups in a pint” it will check the most common thing it has seen after that exact string of words it in its training data: 2. If you ask for a picture of something “in the style of van gogh”, it will spit out something with thick paint and swirls, as those are the characteristics of the pictures in its training data that have been tagged with “Van Gogh”. These responses are not brand new, they are merely a representation of the training data that would most work as a response to your request. In this case, if any of the training data is copyrighted, then attribution must be given, or at the very least permission to use this data must be given by the current copyright holder.