@prologic@twtxt.net I understand people falling for “free” software, especially if it’s something you’re almost never using, but subscription services still confuse me.

How can someone be unwilling, to pay for a thing once, but happy to lower their monthly income for the foreseeable future, for it?

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I don’t think there even is an equivalent for other artists, you’d have to get your own team of lawyers with powerful connections. Good luck doing that with (in comparison) next to no income.

What I also find funny, is how music streaming services are a normal thing, most people use theses days. You couldn’t sell people a subscription, to look at all the images. In some cases, you’re even expected to pay, for the privilege of people seeing your art. cough cough Facebook pages cough cough

This interesting video about AI art, just came out: https://youtu.be/nIRbN52PA0o

I already knew, most of what it was talking about, but found it interesting, that no company, developing music generating AI, was ever brave enough to use copyrighted music, for training. They all seen to have no problem, doing it with images.

It’s not surprising, I’ve already expected it to be the case. It just amazes me, how they find a way to incorporate the “music is worth money, images are not” bias into everything.

It’s more so a battle of lawyers, than artists at this point - or perhaps it always has been. With the corporations, using the garbage flat art and “nothing music*” for their interests and letting stupid and underpaid artists, eat the (usually deserved) backlash for it.

*nothing music/corporate music is a whole other chapter itself, if anyone wants to find out more about that, this is a good start: https://youtu.be/AIxY_Y9TGWI

@prologic@twtxt.net Are you doing all your work, on this tiny keyboard? 🥴

I’m starting to notice replies to Tweets, after Elon took over, are now sorted in this way:
1)checkmarks
2)non-checkmark other checkmarks replied to mixed with checkmarks
3)non-checkmarks

We just unlocked the segregation ending, for “our online public square”.

@prologic@twtxt.net At least when it comes to personal use, it also depends on how much data you’re storing, how important it is and how much you’re fine with using dirty tactics.

For a lot of people the free options are enough, or the combination of them, at least. Neither is there anything, preventing you, from using alts on those services (other than the impracticality, of having everything on a different account).

For data you want to share, but don’t mind loosing, there’s also sites, that let you forcefully connect your account to some companys paid Google storage, that you can then use, until they find and kick you, or cancel their subscription - but they can never get your OG Google account banned for doing this.

Lastly there’s also Chinese companies, that let you save upto 1 or 2 TB, in return for most likely mining that data, having it linked to some adware and wanting money for faster download speeds. These services can also be exploited to get those paid speeds and features for free and the ability to use it without the adware, making it usable, if you don’t care if the data is private.

So you can have all the cloud you want, for free. What you pay for is privacy (or the illusion of it), convenience and the peace in mind, that you’re not a “cloud pirate”.

@eaplmx@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I’m still using the relatively old version of the Go/Flutter app and other than the two spaces at the start of a new reply, it being impossible to select text properly (while writing it) and the looping timelines, I don’t see any serious problems with it.

I don’t think it needs all the new features, fixing what’s broken, finishing the rebrand to Yarn and making it easier to download, would be more than enough.

There’s also the fact that while sending this reply, for the first time, the app got stuck in an infinite loading loop. Because text editing is broken, the best I could do was screenshot what I wrote - then OCR it back into text.

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s not an unpopular opinion, it’s one shared by most people with a brain, most likely including the majority of the Apache people - if anyone actually asked them.

The problem is that the minority, interested in censoring the history, speech and opinions allowed always complains louder and is backed by the media, owned by those, that this benefits in some way.

@prologic@twtxt.net DownLoadable Content - usually of the paid kind and sometimes already in the game, but requiring extra money to unlock.

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh god, the Pocket Edition of Minecraft is pretty dreadful these days.

The controls are annoying to get used to at best and useless at worse, also literally everything in that game is monetized now. The last time I tried it, you needed a paid DLC, just to play sky block or similar mods. I know everything has paid DLCs these days, but this is literally paying, for the opportunity to have less blocks in your world, so you might even say, paying for more nothing.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t think Minecraft itself was ever open-source. Also when it comes to burner emails (that I assume can’t be temporary in this case), is there any reason why go through all this, when you can just have an account on something like riseup.net, with a few strange aliases not linked to you?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Same. I enjoy the visuals and not the sound, so I too dislike the kind of people, who use things, that just make a pointlessly loud explosion, without anything nice to look at.

At that point you’re just buying ear drum pain and the opportunity to annoy your neighbors and all the animals around.

@prologic@twtxt.net Idk, when it comes to art, I don’t really hate it tbh. Mostly out of spite, because I think most of art has been on a downward spiral for quite some time. There’s also the fact, that it can provide some inspiration or concept art, when needed.

Then again, I’m not effected by it much, as machine learning algorithms are having problems with pixel art. Combining a lot of pixelart images produces strange results, as it uses pixels of inconsistent sizes and distorts them further by blending.

When it comes to code, the arguments are a bit similar. The code optimalization on most projects these days, leaves a lot to be desired. I’m not saying I’m the one to talk, I’m definitely responsible for some spaghetti coed myself, but maybe that’s something the AI could help us with, in the future.

Sadly I can also see there being companies, who might try to use it to replace their developers, as soon as they think they can get away with it and that code will probably be way more of a mess, than the code the worst of us can turn out today.

@prologic@twtxt.net Me neither, that’s one of the reasons, why I don’t post pixelart more oftern.

Even when I somehow convince myself not to be lazy and find time to start trying, sometimes I just place a few pixels and realize that “today’s not the day”, or end up with something I don’t like the look of and decide to delete.

The art AI also further encourages my laziness, as I’m more so a shitposter, than I am an artist. Before the days of AI, I’d have to draw meme posts in MS Paint or somehow convert them to pixels, but now I can get almost all of that painted a hundred different ways by a few different programs and choose what works the best, for what I’m trying to accomplish.

@justamoment@twtxt.net I also have ears sensitive to earplugs and some headphones, but getting a big pack of cotton wool and shaping a bit of it to fit in there always works for me.

I’m somewhat of a fireworks fan, especially if they’re bought and launched by others, more willing to waste their money, but I get it being annoying, if it’s still going on a second night and preventing you form sleeping.

@justamoment@twtxt.net Thanks. The face readability is a fair critique. I was trying to keep the ears and “hair” similar, to the previous one, just down-scaled.

That limited me, on how to do the rest, working with a canvass of this size. The result somewhat reminds me of some animals from the animated shows of previous two decades, or the artstyle they inspired, just in a very pixelated form.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 11 pixels in both length and height, but over 70 pixels in total - a lot more than the other tiny ones.

New pixelart. Hope it works well as a profile picture.

@eaplmx@twtxt.net depends on what what side I happen to start peeling it and how close to a trash can I’m standing, while doing so.

I thought, he’d use the poll to determine, if he should find some puppet to put “in charge” of the company, or stay the public face himself. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net it’s obvious, he bought a very shitty website, only valuable, because it has a lot of users, for like ten times what it was worth and many of those users hate him and/or are actively trying to flee into any other community, willing to accept them.

This policy doesn’t have any higher goal in mind, it’s just the “let’s tie everyone to this sinking ship, that might make it sink slower somehow” kind of policy.

@bender@twtxt.net but he said the dreaded m-word and that people can find him there. That’s what broke that stupid rule, not the fact it was linked on the site.

To 100% comply, with how that rule is written, you’d have to just link the site, without directly saying what is on it.

It’s pretty clear and somewhat funny, these people were never before on the dark side and have no idea, how to ban-evade.

Glad I left Twitter years ago, so I don’t have to find ways around this garbage. If I had to, I’d probably end up making some indirect redirect site (with other things on it, as well) and put it on some really offensive, but technically still within the ToS sub domain - something along the lines of “elon-sucks-off-aids-infested-crackheads.coolsite.co”.

@marado@tilde.pt This is pretty pathetic, but it might at least force the more “follow-worthy” people, to create a simple unique website, with links to all their socials, for them to link on their Twitter instead.

@prologic@twtxt.net Sad to hear that, hope you get better soon.

@prologic@twtxt.net We can all find some joy, in the fact that while still in the Bahamas, he’s been dragged out of his luxury villa, and thrown into one of those rat infested jails there, where you’re forced to shit into buckets, while crying about “muh vegan diet”.

He might start begging to get extradited real soon. 😏
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-14/rats-tiny-cells-no-vegan-food-ftx-bankman-frieds-bahamas-jail-could-shift-extradition-stance

@prologic@twtxt.net Google support? There exists an alternative to finding the e-mail address of the most important Google employee you can find and spamming them until moral improves?

Well if the new option is awful, you can always return to the original one I just described - no need to thank me.

Might as well also tell them, to shove their whole browser authentication/OAUTH2/secure browser detection team far up someones ass. They’ve just had it set to check user agents for years, while pretending they’re actively working on actually making that thing be of any use.

@xuu Now you just have to find seven more and a sled. 🙃

@prologic@twtxt.net Sure, go for it and get him here. I’m still waiting for him to apologize for crippling the original Twitter API or letting it happen.

That an a very detailed explanation, of what happened to project Bluesky. I’m not blaming him for that not being finished, it not going well, was one of the reasons he “left”.

There were other things, that I hated him for in the past, but most of that is forgiven. I’d still make fun of him, for being the kind of basic bitch, who puts “#bitcoin” and nothing else, in his bio and a profile picture, looking to the side, focused on his ear hole.

@eaplmx@twtxt.net I assume we’re using the dictionary definition:

an environment in which the same opinions are repeatedly voiced and promoted, so that people are not exposed to opposing views:
an online echo chamber;
We need to move beyond the echo chamber of our network to understand diverse perspectives

Even then it’s not obvious, at what point something becomes an echo chamber, or rather, it’s left subjective. Still I find it bizarre, arguing that it’s not a thing at all.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci You can’t say that it’s been deboooonked, but follow it with evidence, finding that it doesn’t happen as often, as people assume.

We can argue about the details, but the fact is, that on most social media recomendaitions are based on what you like, rather than providing you all opinions on what you’re frequently looking at.

Most sites also show some bias in their moderation, on top of that, so people often end up on the sites, where finding opposing opinions is harder, than those they agree with.

This isn’t enough to create an echo chamber in most cases, but just look around social media and see how many people are subscribed to blocklists, designed to filter out the rest, or just block those, who try to have a discussion, about specific topics.

@prologic@twtxt.net Despite not liking Elon all that much, as well as hating Twitter in almost every way, I’d still give Elon some credit for at least tying to fix that excuse of a site, even if so far it’s mostly just the CEO equivalent, of throwing shit at the wall and seeing if any of it sticks and slows the collapse of the house.

It’s still better than the previous strategy, of looking away and pretending they don’t see the holes in the walls and pedophiles inside of the falling house.

Obviously the best solution in my opinion, would be to bulldoze this poor excuse of a house/site completely and build a better one from scratch, but I can see how that’s hard to do, when it cost you 40 billion dollars.

@eaplmx@twtxt.net I’m all for less restrictions. The land ownership is a good example. When people in this country buy a piece of forest land, they don’t put fences around it and let people and animals use it freely. In contrast, this obviously wouldn’t work for all land. You wouldn’t want strangers and wildlife randomly walking through your house - or at least i wouldn’t.

Back to the ownership of art. I value my pixelart somewhat and part of why I started making it, was to stand out of the crowd, that is social media and have something unique and memorable, that people can recognize me by. I’m not crazy, so if someone randomly finds it somewhere and starts using it as their profile picture, I’ll politely ask them not to, rather than throwing a law book at them and claiming non-existent damages.

With NFTs, the situation is different. People usually know it’s wrong, but still felt entitled to just steal art and keep all of the profits for themselves, while the artist who did all the work gets nothing at best and a damaged reputation at worse. Even if the license the art is under allows it, I still see it as misuse of the art and the license, that was most likely intended for the art being used for some nice website illustrations or to help people express themselves online, rather than for someones pyramid scheme.

@prologic@twtxt.net The rights to perform the play, would be what’s most valuable. A printed copy would probably be worth more, than the digital one, because of the price of paper and printing ink.

But on the other hand, sometimes the digital copy has more value to people, because it’s easier to share (both digitally or in making additional prints).

@marado@tilde.pt It’s still a convenient term to use for that category of laws, even if it is more misleading.

In case of art you’re mostly dealing with copyright, or the license to use the art in some way. Patents and some other laws, one might find under the “intellectual property” umbrella are all good example of things that have value, despite not being physical.

Even if somebody wanted to argue against this, it’s weird to draw the line between physical art and the rest of it.
Would printing out the image or script to a theater play, suddenly give it value, that it didn’t have before?

@prologic@twtxt.net Wait, you put the presents under the tree this early, but don’t open them until 24th or 25th?

You’re supposed to wait for Santa, or whoever brings them in Australia, to put them under the tree on the Christmas day.

@prologic@twtxt.net There are things that are valuable, even if you can’t physically own them - for example intellectual property.

The problem with NFTs, is that by buying one, you don’t own the art physically, legally or even digitally - you don’t really own it at all, you just bought some vague digital receipt with a link attached.

So by right clicking and saving the file attached to the NFT, you actually own a copy, unlike the person who bought it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Don’t have one yet. Don’t even know if I will, as I was never that much into Christmas profile pictures.

Advent of code (impossible edition) 6/12/22:

Task of the day:
Fix the Yarn.Socail app, so the timeline doesn’t loop.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Giving Discord*, Slack and Reddit a check for “user-ran instances” is a massive stretch, as those “instances” still run on their server and rely on the mercy of global moderators, to be allowed to exist.

Discord can also be ran on ones hardware, using Fosscord, but than it’s not very connected to the rest. This option is also used by only a handful of people, mostly those directly involved in the development of Fosscord.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci To be fair, the DMs on these sites are never private, now it’s just easier to guess who might be going through them and for what purposes.

This should ironically enough be considered an improvement, as before you couldn’t even guess that, but sometimes knowing more makes these things less comfortable.

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net still find it way easier than digitally drawing lines tbh.

Tried to draw something again… #pixelart

@eaplmx@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I just downloaded it from the first link, installed it and it works perfectly!

I had to uninstall the old version, but that’s because of the signatures, but other than that the app seems to work even better than the previous version did.

Looks like the ancient Android app for this thing broke at last. I can still see the feeds (albeit without any profile pictures), but no user profiles can be loaded, not even my own.

I’m starting to think that neither Twitter being bought by Elon nor it being left alone is the good ending.

I really hope it gets stuck in endless legal hell and bleed money, users and investors, for as long as possible - preferably until becoming MySpace 2.

I hate what that site is now, but I’d hate it even more if it became the “everything app” and the idiots involved in running it now ran our banking and infrastructure. Also WeChat, the app this idea takes inspiration from, is run by the Chinese government to monitor everything about heir citizens and outcast those not enthusiastic enough about it.

With Twitter already taking orders from politicians, I’m sure giving it even more control, would go just fine and definitely not turn into “man-made horrors beyond our comprehension”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Well a lot of the things in IT suck sadly, but it is probably better to also focus on the improving parts from time to time. For example people finally starting to worry about their privacy, or leaving big tech, to try out some alternative community hosted platforms.

Also things sucking is not exclusive to IT, as most things look nice on the outside, but when you get deeper, you find out the much darker reality of that field and in things like art the reality is much darker, than it is in IT.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Luckily for me it was only in the main building, where I only had to stay for one and a half hour today, so hopefully not long enough to catch a cold from it. 🤞

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Manual testing of internal systems and websites along with the bugs reported.

I use XMPP and Matrix myself and was also very skeptical, when it came to the push to add crypto to Signal. Especially as someone who had to jump the Keybase ship years ago, for similar crypto and ties to a dictatorship (in Keybases case China) reasons. 🤔

Russia has some ties to Telegram, but I don’t think they have ways to control Signal.

I don’t use it, so it doesn’t effect me either way, other than peeking my curiousity. Also even if that was somehow the case, there are still Signal forks, with their own servers.