TootSweet

This guy's one of the few and the brave actually saying publicly that AI is a bubble. I think most other public figures are scared to be proven wrong and made to look foolish. Doctorow's not committing to the idea that AI will never have any use, but at least he's countering a lot of the ridiculous claims the "AI Industry" is making lately.

I've got a pretty severe sensitivity to -- of all things -- sugar. (I know, "sugar" isn't very precise, but I'm pretty sure it's either glucose, fructose, or sucrose.) I virtually never eat anything with added sugar or anything with any significant amount of natural sugar. And I've eaten that way for like 20 years now. I'm practically blind to half the produce department (any "sweet" fruits like apples, pears, cherries, grapes, oranges, etc) at the grocery store, let alone the candy isle.

First off, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not your lawyer, none of this is legal advice. Go get legal advice from a lawyer.

A lot of us know by now a little about how Mickey Mouse being in the public domain (at least in the U.S.) works. You can use the version of Mickey from the animations (Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy) that entered the public domain this year because they were released in 1928. So long as you:

• Don't use them in ways that would make it seem that your work was made by Disney and
• Don't use any elements of Mickey from later works which are still under copyright.

So no Donald Duck. No Goofy. No gloves. You can't make his pants red. Etc. Right?

However, let me present a few movie posters from 1928 which are now in the public domain:

Yellow gloves! Red pants with both yellow and white buttons! Yellow and brown shoes! And a green hat to boot!

I'd imagine all of these posters qualify as creative works that would have gained copyright protections as soon as they were made/published. And the copyright on these poster illustrations have all now expired, leaving these posters in the public domain. (Copyright-wise, at least. Trademark is a whole other kettle of worms.)

So, theoretically, all the elements you see in those posters should be fair game today. Which leads me to believe that theoretically there's no reason why people who use the public domain version of Mickey Mouse in their own works ought to avoid red pants with yellow buttons or yellow shoes. Yellow gloves are probably similar, but the case for white gloves being safe to use is probably weaker given that the only images I could find from 1928 where Mickey's wearing white gloves are black and white illustrations.

I say "theoretically" because of course law is complex and (again) I'm not a lawyer and who knows what legal arguments Disney's legal department could come up with. But I don't see any reason off the top of my head why using red-pants, yellow-shoes, yellow-gloves Mickey in your own works (so long as you don't include other elements that legitimately didn't become a thing until 1929 or later and didn't infringe on Disney's trademarks) wouldn't be virtually just as safe as avoiding colors when using the Mickey Mouse character.

All that said, I'm definitely open to being set straight on this. I just hoped to get a little discussion going about this.

I've been thinking about this for a while now.

Richard Stallman has been practically synonymous with Free Software since its inception. And there are good reasons why. It was his idea, and it was his passion that made the movement what it is today.

I deeply believe in the mission of the Free Software movement. But more and more, it seems that in order to survive, the Free Software movement may need to distance itself from him.

Richard Stallman has said some really disturbingly reprehensible things on multiple occasions (one and two). (He has said he's changed these opinions, but it seems to me the damage is done.)

He's asked that people blame him and not the FSF for these statements, but it seems naive to me to expect that to be enough not to tarnish the FSF's reputation in the eyes of most people.

And Richard Stallman isn't the only problematic figure associated with the Free Software movement.. Eben Moglen (founder, Direct-Council, and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center which is closely associated with the FSF) has been accused of much abusive and anti-LGBTQIA+ behavior over which the Free Software Foundation Europe and Software Freedom Concervancy have cut ties with the SFLC and Moglen (one and two).

Even aside from the public image problems, it seems like the FSF and SFLC have been holding back the Free Software movement strategically. Eben Moglan has long been adamant that the GPL shouldn't be interpreted as a contract -- only as a copyright license. What the SFC is doing now with the Visio lawsuit is only possible because the SFC had the courage to abandon that theory.

I sense there's a rift in the Free Software movement. Especially given that the SFC and FSF Europe explicitly cutting ties with the SFLC and Moglen. And individual supporters of Free Software are going to have to decide which parties in this split are going to speak for and champion the cause of the community as a whole.

I imagine it's pretty clear by this point that I favor the SFC in this split. I like what I've seen from the SFC in general. Not just the Visio lawsuit. But also the things I've heard said by SFC folks.

If the Free Software movement needs a single personality to be its face moving forward, I'd love for that face to be Bradley M. Kuhn, executive director of the SFC. He seems to have all of Stallman's and Moglen's assets (passion, dedication, an unwillingness to bend, and experience and knowledge of the legal aspects of Free Software enforcement) perhaps even more so than Stallman and Moglen do. And Kuhn excels in all the areas where Stallman and Moglen perhaps don't so much (social consciousness, likeability, strategy.) I can't say enough good things about Kuhn, really. (And his Wikipedia page doesn't even have a "controversies" section.) (Also, please tell me there aren't any skeletons in his closet.)

Even if the community does come to a consensus that the movement should distance itself from Stallman and Moglen, it'll be difficult to achieve such a change in public perception and if it's achieved, it may come at a cost. After all, Stallman is the first person everybody pictures when the FSF is mentioned. And acknowledging the problems with the Free Software movement's "old brass" may damage the reputation of Free Software as a whole among those who might not differentiate between the parties in this split. But I feel it may be necessary for the future of the Free Software movement.

That's my take, anyway. I'll hop down off of my soap box, now. But I wanted to bring this up, hopefully let some folks whose ideals align with those of the Free Software movement about all this if they weren't already aware, and maybe see what folks in general think about the future of the Free Software movement.

Often times, when looking at the comments on a post, some comments are hidden and replaced by a button that (in Lemmy-UI) says "1 more reply ➔" or "2 more replies ➔" (or in Lemuroid says "1 more replies") or some such. I assume the intent of this button is to cause the hidden comment to be shown, but the button never works for me.

I have similar issues in both Lemmy-UI and in Lemuroid. In Lemmy-UI on Firefox (on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Arch Linux Arm, but I doubt that matters), if I click the button, it turns into a loading graphic which spins forever. If I tap the button in Lemuroid, a loading bar appears at the top of the screen for a little under a second and then disappears, but the "1 more replies" button remains and the hidden comments do not appear.

Given that this is an issue in both interfaces I use, maybe that means it's a Lemmy issue and not specific to Lemmy-UI or Lemuroid? Not sure.

Looking in Firefox's Developer Tools, it appears that when I click that button, it does send a request to the server and the response is a 200. There's no output in the "console" tab when I click the button.

I did go look at the issue trackers for both Lemmy and Lemmy-UI, but haven't found any relevant bugs.

Actually, I'm not really sure what criteria are used to decide whether a post should be hidden by default. But I do moderate one community and if the hidden posts are the ones that are most downvoted or some such, it's probably important for mods to be able to see those hidden posts.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Well, today it's working in Lemmy-UI but only in some threads. In Lemuroid, the one that did work in Lemmy-UI just shows as expanded without me having to expand it, so I'm not sure about Lemuroid. Weird.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. . . .

—Thomas Jefferson

Never thought I'd see the day.

I've got a bit of a conundrum. I've got a 10 pound chihuahua whose entire world is a very specific 1.75 inch diameter rubber ball. (And when I say "entire world", I'm understating.) She's gone through a handful of this specific brand and model of rubber ball as old ones have gotten to the point of being too damaged to be safe.

But now the manufacturer has discontinued that line of ball and we're on our last one.

The few other models of rubber balls the same size that I've been able to find have been summarily rejected by the dog. I'm not sure quite what her criteria are for rejecting a ball, even. But I know she'd be a very sad dog indeed if we didn't manage to procure a suitable substitute.

So, at this point, I (and the dog too) am desperate enough to start thinking in terms of maybe crafting a ball as much like the one this dog currently loves to play with.

Of course my primary concern is safety. I wouldn't want pieces of rubber coming off of the final product to be ingested and cause blockages or anything. Nor any danger of blocking an airway.

The ball I'd be apeing is composed of natural rubber. I know you can get liquid latex like this stuff that air dries. Anyone have any idea if that would be suitable for this application? (Or would it be insufficiently durable after drying?)

I've got at my disposal a 3d printer and the skill to design 3d-printable molds. Hopefully the process of molding a ball could avoid heating the mold enough to deform it. I don't have any experience with printing anything but PLA and TPU. But I might be convinced to branch out into ABS or some such if necessary.

I'm just hoping to get some pointers and suggestions. I and my chihuahua thank you all in advance!

This is a weird one.

I'm running Arch Linux ARM on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Sway if any of that matters. (I've also got fcitx enabled if that helps any.)

The issue I'm running into is that randomly Firefox will freeze while I'm typing. Like, while I've got the address bar or some text area in the page focused and I'm typing something into it. This frequently happens multiple times a day even with the coping strategy I use. (See below.)

It never freezes that I've noticed when I'm doing something other than typing into a text input or textbox or address bar. (I don't recall ever seeing it freeze while I was typing into a password input, but I wouldn't say that's reason to think the issue is limited to not password boxes.)

It will usually freeze in the middle of a word somewhere. I type pretty fast. But it'll freeze for instance 3 letters into a 7 letter word which is the third word I've typed into the box or some such. (Or sometimes it'll freeze on the first letter. Or sometimes it'll freeze two paragraphs in.)

When it freezes, I usually open a shell and ps aux | grep firefox to get the PID of the parent Firefox process and then kill $pid to kill Firefox. I don't usually have to use -9 or anything. But just closing the window (with a super+shift+q) doesn't do the trick.

Mostly how I deal with this is to vi /tmp/t, type a post, and then wl-copy < /tmp/t so I can paste the post into Lemmy or whatever. When typing a url, I usually just risk a freeze since it usually doesn't take a lot of keystrokes to load the url I'm going for. ("lemmy.wo", and then enter to accept the type-ahead suggestion, for instance.) I think basically every keystroke has a small-ish chance of causing a freeze, so something that only takes 10 keystrokes is low-enough risk to go for it. But a post like what I'm posting here would be almost guaranteed to freeze before I finished composing it.

I'm posting here in the Firefox community because I haven't seen this happen with any application other than Firefox. (Though to be fair, I rarely use any graphical applications on this Raspberry Pi other than Firefox, st, and OpenSCAD on this Raspberry Pi 4. I used to use Cura occasionally on this machine occasionally as well. Chromium is way too resource hungry to try to use as a daily driver on a Raspberry Pi 4. I'm not sure I even have it installed right now.) I suppose this could be more of a GTK issue or Sway issue than a Firefox issue, but again it seems like it only happens with Firefox.

And I realize this is a weird enough issue that it might be pretty difficult to diagnose.

I've tried running Firefox from a terminal emulator and reproducing the issue to see if there's any outut to STDOUT/STDERR when it reproduces the issue, but ther'es no useful output. I thought to try strace-ing Firefox, but strac-ing Firefox gives a veritable Niagara Falls of output when nothing's happening, so it seems pretty untenable to try to comb through that to get anything useful.

Any ideas a) what the issue might possibly be or b) how I might go about trying to get a diagnosis? This has been an issue on this particular machine (and only this particular machine, though I haven't tried Firefox on other Raspberry Pis) for probably over a year now. I've been alternately trying to debug it and just ignoring it. I figured maybe it's finally time to see if anyone else has any ideas.

Thanks in advance!

Is it just me or is passing off things that aren't FOSS as FOSS a much bigger thing lately than it was previously.

Don't get me wrong. I remember Microsoft's "shared source" thing from back in the day. So I know it's not a new thing per se. But it still seems like it's suddenly a bigger problem than it was previously.

LLaMa, the large language model, is billed by Meta as "Open Source", but isn't.

I just learned today about "Grayjay," a video streaming service client app created by Louis Rossmann. Various aticles out there are billing it as "Open Source" or "FOSS". It's not. Grayjay's license doesn't allow commercial redistribution or derivative works. Its source code is available to the general public, but that's far from sufficient to qualify as "Open Source." (That article even claims "GrayJay is an open-source app, which means that users are free to alter it to meet their specific needs," but Grayjay's license grants no license to create modified versions at all.) FUTO, the parent project of Grayjay pledges on its site that "All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so." I hope that means that they'll be making Grayjay properly Open Source at some point. (Maybe once it's sufficiently mature/tested?) But I worry that they're just conflating "source available" and "Open Source."

I've also seen some sentiment around that "whatever, doesn't matter if it doesn't match the OSI's definition of Open Source. Source available is just as good and OSI doesn't get a monopoly on the term 'Open Source' anyway and you're being pedantic for refusing to use the term 'Open Source' for this program that won't let you use it commercially or make modifications."

It just makes me nervous. I don't want to see these terms muddied. If that ultimately happens and these terms end up not really being meaningful/helpful, maybe the next best thing is to only speak in terms of concrete license names. We all know the GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, Mozilla, etc kind of licenses are unambiguously FOSS licenses in the strictest sense of the term. If a piece of software is under something that doesn't have a specific name, then the best we'd be able to do is just read it and see if it matches the OSI definition or Free Software definition.

Until then, I guess I'll keep doing my best to tell folks when something's called FOSS that isn't FOSS. I'm not sure what else to do about this issue, really.