hagar

the claimants were set back because they’ve been asked to prove the connection between AI output and their specific inputs

I mean, how do you do that for a closed-source model with secretive training data? As far as I know, OpenAI has admitted to using large amounts of copyrighted content, numberless books, newspaper material, all on the basis of fair use claims. Guess it would take a government entity actively going after them at this point.

Yeah, their assumption though is you don't? Neither attribution nor sharealike, not even full-on all-rights-reserved copyright is being respected. Anything public goes and if questions are asked it's "fair use". If the user retains CC BY-SA over their content, why is giving a bunch of money to StackOverflow entitling OpenAI to use it all under whatever terms they settled on? Boggles me.

Now, say, Reddit Terms of Service state clearly that by submitting content you are giving them the right to "a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness (...) in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world." Speaks volumes on why alternatives (like Lemmy) to these platforms matter.

StackOverflow: *grabs money on monetizing massive amounts of user-contributed content without consulting or compensating the users in any way*

Users: *try to delete it all to prevent it*

StackOverflow: *your contributions belong to the community, you can't do that*

Pretty fucked-up laws. A lot of lawsuits going on right now against AI companies for similar issues. In this case, StackOverflow is entitled to be compensated for its partnership, and because the answers are all CC BY-SA 3.0, no one can complain. Now, that SA? Whatever.

Recently did something similar and yeah it seems Mint, specially LMDE in my case, is a great fit for such cases. It's on that sweet spot between being too bare and too bloated.

Perhaps Firefly? It is meant for personal finances but considerably complex still. I am not sure if it does invoicing though.

Edit: This should give you a more precise idea of how fitting it might be: https://docs.firefly-iii.org/explanation/more-information/what-its-not/#business-finances-small-business-accounting-payroll-management

I'm not the biggest fan of VBox either, it's just very popular and full of sequential "wizards" to guide the user along the process of creating VMs, so it might be one way to get started. I'd much rather work with QEMU though.

That might be fun then.

QEMU can be as simple as this:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 mydisk.qcow2 20G

Here you are first creating a disk image with the format qcow2 and maximum 20G capacity. This is a QEMU disk image format that will take up very little space and grow as you use up the VM disk.

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256M -cdrom alpine.iso mydisk.qcow2

This will start a VM with 256MB of RAM, the alpine.iso image in its virtual CD/DVD slot, and the disk image you just created as a virtual drive. This will come with networking enabled by default, so you'll have internet access from within the VM.

It should now drop you into the Alpine installation. Alpine is very lightweight so it's great for experimenting, but you could do virtually the exact same for most other flavors of Linux and BSD images out there.

Once you are done installing, you can power off the VM and then start it with this:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G mydisk.qcow2

That's basically the same without the -cdrom argument, this time with 2GB of RAM. I find QEMU a delight to play with because it has sane defaults like that. Hope you have fun too!

I think you might like DIstroSea. If you'd like to persist your experiments, then likely learning how to emulate systems with QEMU or VirtualBox (the latter if you'd like a friendlier GUI-led experience, the former if you want to go full-CLI virtualization). QEMU is great in how lightweight and easy to create and discard self-contained VM disk images can be.

have a principled objection to a service financed by public money forcing people to install and execute proprietary non-free software on their own hardware

You are on spot there, but sadly even legislators are far from understanding the reasons why this matters so much, let alone the general public.

Whatever security policy they have, it shouldn't require you installing a random executable to your system. And it was flawed enough that it didn't care to give your device access.

And by the way, it's so awesome you carry an ethernet cable around!!

What I mean is that no one will stop you. When you ascertain your own right to do it, it doesn't mean much that I don't believe you are entitled to it. It's pretty much common practice. That is more a semantic matter at this point, but yes I stand by that being messed up for a project the size of Nix.

I don’t think that being a dictator for your project is necessarily “toxic”

Yeah, it is not necessarily toxic. It is at a lot more risk of being, though. Even a collectively managed project will mess up and upset the community, but then there is a sense of shared responsibility and more deliberation on what to do. With a BDFL, it's just whatever. After your project reaches a certain size, that risk keeps increasing... exponentially.

I have projects that take contributions and I work on others that do not

Precisely. You see, if we take this into the context of a smaller project, specially one managed by a single person as you seem to be coming back to, that is a very different context. I don't think an OSS maintainer should be laboring physically and emotionally to meet the demands of users. That is a well-known problem there. If this person doesn't even want to have contact with the community and just ship code once an year, fine. They are just sharing things with the world at no cost. In this context, "suck it up and just fork it" is indeed the way to go.

When you take something as big as NixOS though, that can really be inverted. Now you have a very large number of people who are laboring physically and emotionally to sustain a very large project, and the original creator shifts to a very different place to. It's another discussion entirely.

If pursuing your own vision is the sole purpose intended, it would not be limited at all.

I guess you can, yeah.

My point is not that you can't. You clearly can. And many do. The thing is, when you create your foundation that "you fill with whoever you see fit", when you faithfully believe that the BDFL will "stop them doing stupid things", or that you get to choose your board members arbitrarily and tell everyone it's not a democracy like you are proud of running it as a dictatorship, that's just a incredibly narrow and toxic culture you have set up. It's not impossible. The ethic you are posing is actually quite widespread in the world I live in, anyone arguing for it will get many around to agree, it's very assertive and rightful. Still, a shitty choice the way I see it. And from this bleak outset of things, I suppose forking is indeed the only option you have.