How is ROCm these days? I remember needing the official AMD drivers for OpenCL stuff a while ago and ROCm was in very early development.

I mean offsetting complex shapes in one go.

Just randomly throwing together an example:

I don’t even mind the UI that much,

Agree to disagree.

From what I remember something as common as offsetting lines in a sketch required switching away from the sketch workbench into the draft workbench and exiting the sketch editor altogether.

FreeCAD feels like it’s where Blender was before version 2.8. The core functionality is there but the UI feels almost user hostile.

I mean if you pay attention most social media inundated with influencers and companies is basically:

“Buy this, no buy this, buy this instead, spend your money here!” It even leeches into everyday conversations outside of social media.

Pay attention to how often people talk about buying things and newly released products. Hell, I’ve caught myself contributing to it. It’s kind of gross when you realize how steeped in consumerism nearly everything has become.

What I’m getting from this is that some monopoly busting is sorely needed.

What happens if you take a picture of the screen with your phone? Not ideal in terms of quality but I’m willing to bet it would work as a stupid easy bypass.

What I’d like to see is an image format that is digitally signed by default so that modifications can be flagged and the source can be verified. Yeah people could modify them for malicious use cases (I don’t think it will be possible to ever prevent that unfortunately) but at least we’d know that it wasn’t the original. This doesn’t work for cases where people want to be anonymous but for things like social media selfies and posts where people are visible it could be helpful in preventing people spreading deepfakes and claiming they’re real.

Pure “prompt → image” with nothing in between I absolutely agree. It’s lazy and ripe for abuse by copyright trolls. That being said there’s a lot more in the world of AI assisted art than what most people are aware of.

Determining where the legal lines will be drawn is going to be a monumental task but I think there’s value in allowing authors to retain copyright on AI assisted works. I also can’t see the free open source models not going the way of restricting training data to public domain works like Adobe did with Firefly if that becomes a legal issue.

My pie in the sky hope is that copyright somehow becomes less stringent after all of this.

Don’t get me wrong I want protections for creators and support reasonable copyright (life of the author +25 years with the possibility of a 15 year extension) but letting a company lord over an IP for damn near a century isn’t ideal for anyone.

So, what you’re saying is maybe one more lane in space then? /s

FWIW, I totally agree. It’s just that I’ve lost hope in people after disposable single-use Li-Po battery banks. Who knows, maybe I’m wrong and the public will start to push more for public transit rather than buy the next new shiny.

I try, but it does feel kind of hopeless.

Hey, if someone can actually do it in a way that:

• Satisfies public safety requirements
• Satisfies all legal requirements
• Restricts usage to trained pilots or autopilot
• Runs on electricity or other low/zero emission fuel source
• Lasts an appreciable amount of time before recharge

Then it may free up public roads enough to push pedestrian and bike usage while offering people a large incentive to go electric. I just don’t think the technology for personal automobile-aircraft hybrids is there yet.

I’d love to be proven wrong.

I just kind of assumed that they, as well as anyone in the space was doing that already.

Whether that means that we all collectively have ownership over the outputs of these models if they’re trained on content that we produced over the years is another thing. As someone who uses AI tools a fair bit I would be totally fine with generated content being public domain unless a threshold for human intervention is met.

That threshold is where the messy legal work lies.

They can ban google accounts of people who use those apps though. I can see them doing it.

Importantly, posts hosted and visible on Meta’s server will be subject to Facebook’s content moderation rules, which means those policies will likely have a sweeping impact across the Fediverse.

Is it just me or does that sound like anything on instances hosted outside of meta’s own that can be merely seen from theirs? I’m all for moderation, the stricter moderation against hate-speech is part of why I joined Beehaw. But if I’m reading that right (I hope I’m not), then it seems like they plan to call the shots on other instances as if they have any say in what everyone else does right out of the gate.

Maybe what’s meant here is simply defederation of entire instances and banning of problematic users like any other instance does, ok. But it could also mean pressuring admins to enforce Meta’s TOS on a case-by-case basis which feels like the start of EEE tactics.

I would be ok with allowing federation until they (inevitably) cause problems.

• Push Ad spam: Defederated
• Allow hate groups and blatant disinformation to spread: Defederated
• Try strong-arming changes to the fediverse?: Believe it or not - Defederated

Or anywhere outside of their own continent for that matter.

I would disagree with the common assertion that that applies to everyone, but most people yeah.

Problem is, those that don’t care about money and power usually don’t accumulate those things and have little impact on discourse around them, leaving those who only care about money and power to grasp and maintain control over services that are important to shaping societal narratives: news, social media, politics (through lobbying), etc…

If someone with less shallow motivations does accumulate wealth and power it becomes a struggle to remain humble and not be influenced by said money and power.

No easy solutions here.

^{Edit: Changed wording for clarity}

Yeah. This cycle of advertisers infiltrating social media has to end.

^{This comment brought to you by the refreshing taste of Coca-Cola™}

This is a list of all the open source software I have come across and use frequently to semi frequently. There will likely be some overlap with stuff everyone has already posted.

Photography and Image manipulation

• Darktable → RAW photo processing
• GIMP→ Photoshop alternative
• Krita → Digital painting (have only used it a bit, but I hear it’s good)
• Inkscape → Vector Graphics
• Automatic1111 → Diffusion model AI toolkit (mostly Stable Diffusion but also has extensions for other diffusion based models like OpenAI’s Shap-E)

3D modeling and Printing

• Blender → 3D Modeling, sculpting, 2D animation, compositing all rolled together (simply one of the best examples of FOSS)
• Meshroom → Photogrammetry
• PrusaSlicer → 3D printing slicer based on Slic3r

Video editing and Processing

• Kdenlive → Genuinely good video editor
• FFMPEG → Command line media toolkit (very complex but also works on android through Termux)
• Instant NeRF → Neural Radiance Fields, think photoscan to a 3D representation (not meant to make 3D meshes unfortunately)

Misc

• Calibre → E-book management
• Serge → Self hosted Local LLM’s made a bit easier to deal with
• Firefox → Web browser

FOSS I’m excited for

• DragGAN → Manipulate images by intuitively dragging, more on this here and here (official code being released this month but there are already projects based on the paper with working examples)
• CoDi → “Composable Diffusion” Any2Any conversion Txt2Vid, Vid2Audio, Audio+Txt2Img, whatever
• Neuralangelo → Promises to be NeRF’s for 3D models (don’t know if it will be FOSS but I’m hopeful)