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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I used to agree until I saw corporations starting to fork open source projects to run them internally like the “I made this” meme.

    If I spend months or years of my life toiling over a project and license it permissively with MIT or such, they can just swoop in one day and take it for free and be like “thanks, we’re going to make mega bucks off your code and give you nothing” (and yes this does happen https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws).

    No, screw that! I’m gonna make my stuff AGPL and those guys can damn well pay me for my time of they want to use my stuff or more cynically, do it anyway or go and reimplement it themselves in-house knowing damn well I can’t afford an army of lawyers to actually do anything about it.


  • Counter counterpoint: Often frontend js code is minified so that it is smaller and more efficient to transfer to the browser. For FOSS projects you should still be able to get access to that code, unminified, from the project git repo. In the same way desktop apps often ship as binary executables but you can still see the code that was compiled to build them if you find the source repo.

    It does make things harder to debug for an average user but it makes it faster/more efficient to run for most end users (in the case of the desktop or phone app it makes it possible to run without needing compiler toolchains that mom and pop likely wouldn’t be able to grasp).

    The key thing isn’t that what the end user’s computer runs is readable and editable but whether the code used to build that artifact is available easily and what restrictions there are on editing and redistributing that code.


  • TL;DR The new method still requires his art.

    LoRA is a way to add additional layers to a neural network that effectively allow you to fine tune it’s behaviour. Think of it like a “plugin” or a “mod”

    LoRas require examples of the thing you are targeting. Lots of people in the SD community build them for particular celebrities or art styles by collecting examples of the that celebrity or whatever from online.

    So in this case Greg has asked Stable to remove his artwork which they have done but some third party has created an unofficial LoRA that does use his artwork to mod the functionality back in.

    In the traditional world the rights holder would presumably DMCA the plugin but the lines are much blurrier with LoRA models.



  • You can’t boycott the businesses that aren’t doing their part given that most businesses aren’t doing their part and the ones that are produce stuff that’s more expensive and/or less convenient.

    Supply chains are also super complex these days and even the companies themselves don’t always report on them properly out of either incompetence or simple denial. That’s why every few years we get stories blowing up about tech firms using slave labour to build phones or food corporates ripping off third world farmers.

    Working people are tired and worn down and poor and don’t have the mental capacity or even the capital to be able to micro evaluate every single purchase decision they make and think “hmm does this company or one of is hundreds of suppliers do their part for the climate?”

    For some people it’s “I can afford to feed my kids if I use this cheap product from a company that does bad things or I can go without dinner this week if I only buy from ethical companies”

    Strong top down regulation is the only practical way to make big companies behave.




  • API calls are almost always private between the caller and the endpoint (think telegram bots or mobile apps). There isn’t really a technically feasible way for a crawler to somehow “infer” any kind of knowledge of how api calls are being used unless the result has some kind of publically visible side effect (E. G. The program using the api is generating a web page and uploading it somewhere crawlable). Google et Al go by how many links from other pages to the page of interest exist (inbound links) and multiply by a smattering of other things like quality of keywords, length of content etc.

    That said, if you’re implying that the api changes mean that:

    • people are less likely to use reddit because they can’t access it via RIF/Apollo
    • less useful content is added to the site to be indexed,
    • fewer inbound links will be generated that point to existing posts
    • pages stagnate and drop in ranking

    That is a plausible concern.