Skull giver

A factor in favour of jet fuel is that as the plane burns fuel if becomes lighter, thus consuming less fuel. Batteries stay the same weight. The difference between a full plane and an empty plane can be 18 metric tonnes. Super cheap operators tend to carry only a small extra margin of fuel over the amount technically necessary to make a trip, because it makes a real difference.

That means the energy density you need in this comparison isn’t really linear. If you’re doing Taylor Swift flights to the couch and back, you can save a lot of weight by having a minimal amount of fuel in the tank, but with an electric plane you’ll always have to have the full battery in case you need to go somewhere further away.

The difference between servers and countries is that servers aren’t countries and countries aren’t servers.

Servers aren’t a democracy. Well, most of them anyway.

The difference between a violent, oppressive authoritarian regime and a fee Fediverse server is that you’re free to join other servers. Multiple at the same time, even! You can just leave, no passports, no refugee status, no paperwork.

You can even set up your personal little server where you decide on the rules. A server for you and your friends can cost as little as ten dollars per month. Try that in any real country and you’d be considered an insurrectionist or a traitor, do it online and it’s just everyday business.

The unfortunate reality of most “everybody is welcome” servers is that hey generally attract a lot of people who have been banned elsewhere. Some for stupid reasons (like calling any criticism of the CCP “orientalism”), some for very valid reasons. You need some form of moderation, or your server is going to be a cesspool. Some server admins preemptively decide to block servers that don’t have moderation that’s up to their standards, others wait for abuse to spread to their server.

If you still use MBR, and Windows has an update to its bootloader, yeah.

I don’t even know if Windows 11 still supports MBR, though. Maybe it’ll happen if your firmware is broken and always boots from the fallback bootloader instead of the normal boot entry? But in that case Windows is right and the firmware needs an update.

My GPU is a 10 series, actually. Same generation as my laptop’s GPU, though that’s technically a Quadro I think.

I’ve been using Wayland on Ubuntu 24.04 with Nvidia’s 555 driver and I have yet to see something seriously break because of it. 545 was unstable as hell, but 555 has been running perfectly. I’ve even got a working external display on my laptop with the 555 drivers, something I’d previously given up on with Wayland.

Plasma is much further along (having stuff like HDR and VRR working for instance) but things have gotten a lot better quickly with Nvidia+Wayland.

Even if they’re marketing BS, some decent mainline support for Qualcomm chips is always welcome. It’ll help projects like postmarketOS and mobile Linux distros massively to have more usable Qualcomm code.

Damn, they really overfit their music models. With image generation and text prediction it’s very hard to prove a direct connection, but with four or five of those songs it’s unmistakable that the original songs were used to generate the music output

I wonder what the effect will be of fixing the models’ overfitting. I’m guessing it’ll generate worse music, or they would’ve done so already.

Quite sad that it took the music industry to notice before any lawsuits with a chance of succeeding got off the ground.

Then, what prevents whosoever, to copy that file through cloning the complete disk?

Nothing. At most, you can have a hardware encrypted drive that won’t permit access to the encrypted data without a password, but the file will remain available after unlocking that. Plus, dedicated people (law enforcement, data recovery specialists) may be able to get access to the flash chip itself unless you buy one that self destruct on any tampering attempts (and even those have flaws).

You cannot prevent copying of data if that data is readable at disk level. At most, you can make the data useless by padding a layer of encryption (as well-encrypted data may as well be random data without the key material). That’s why everyone is going for encryption: encrypted files may as well be inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know the passphrase. There’s no sense in copying a file which you cannot possibly read any bytes from.

If the key is gone (i.e. the real key is a password protected file that gets overwritten so even the password doesn’t work anymore), the file becomes irretrievable. This is sometimes called “cryptographic erase” in the context of disks. There are variations of this, for instance, storing the key in the computer’s processor (fTPM) behind a password, and clearing that key out. There’s no way to get the key out of the fTPM so it cannot be backed up. Even if someone were to guess your password, the file will forever remain locked. Or at least until someone manages to break all cryptography, but even quantum computers don’t know how to do that part yet.

If you’re willing to go deep, you could reprogram the firmware on your SSD/HDD to refuse reading the file. A few years back, someone made a proof of concept firmware that detected disk imaging attempts (because all blocks on the disk were read in order) and had the firmware return garbage while secretly wiping the disk when this detection triggered. You could, in theory, write firmware that refuses to read that block of data. However, if whoever you’re hiding this file from know about that, they can take out the platter/memory chips and dump them directly, bypassing your firmware entirely.

“undoing the protection should include filling in a password” That sounds like an encrypted drive. There are USB keys that’ll require software to enter an encryption password before you can do anything (including deleting the contents).

If you’re on Windows, try Bitlocker or Veracrypt. You can create hard disk images that can be mounted temporarily with a password.

Same can also be done on other operating systems, though I don’t know what tools yours come with.

In a pinch, you can just create a password protected 7zip archive, though viewing and editing those files usually involves a temporary copy.

There’s no way to prevent a file that’s loaded in memory from making it back to the disk. The best you can do is also encrypt the system drive so only people who know the encryption password can boot the computer that’s accessing these files.

The edits are what makes it made with AI. The original work obviously isn’t.

If you’re in-painting areas of an image with generative AI (“context aware” fill), you’ve used AI to create an image.

People are coming up with rather arbitrary distinctions between what is and isn’t AI. Midjourney’s output is clearly AI, and a drawing obviously isn’t, but neither is very post-worthy. Things quickly get muddy when you start editing.

The people upset over this have been using AI for years and nobody cared. Now photographers are at risk of being replaced by an advanced version of the context aware fill they’ve been using themselves. This puts them in the difficult spot of wanting not to be replaced by AI (obviously) but also not wanting to have their AI use be detectable.

The debate isn’t new; photo editors had this problem years ago when computers started replacing manual editing, artists had this problem when computer aided drawing (drawing tablets and such) started becoming affordable, and this is just the next step of the process.

Personally, I would love it if this feature would also be extended to “manual” editing. Add a nice little “this image has been altered” marker on any edited photographs, and call out any filters used to beautify selfies while we’re at it.

I don’t think the problem is that AI edited images are being marked, the problem AI that AI generated pictures and manually edited pictures aren’t.

Looks like people are finally finding out they’ve been using AI all along.

Seems to me that employing the use of AI to alter an image should be labeled as “made with AI”. It’s not made by AI, AI was merely one of the tools used.

If you don’t like admitting you used AI, just strip the metadata, I guess. This feels like something you should be able to turn off in your editor’s settings, but I guess Adobe hasn’t implemented that.

This comment was made with AI, as my phone’s keyboard uses AI to automatically complete words, in a process strikingly similar to how ChatGPT works.

Now that single window mode is a thing across all platforms, it’s not as bad anymore.

I still don’t know how to draw a circle, though. I think I may need to turn a selection into a path? I just use Photopea for this stuff these days.

Gimp is what you use for image editing if you’re poor or Stallman-like. It’s good at being scripted for programmers that want to automate their image processing workflow.

Krita is what you use for drawing stuff if you don’t want to spend money on software or are Stallman-like.

Photoshop is what you use if you do photo editing or digital art for a living. Paid, proprietary options exist if you don’t do photo editing.

There’s one tool that comes close to competing with Photoshop and it’s Photopea, a subscription based/ad ridden website clone of Photoshop.

Recommending GIMP as a Photoshop alternative is like recommending LaTeX instead of Word. It’ll work for some people, and it’ll do some things much better even, but it’s ridiculous to assume any normal user of the proprietary product is going to be able to use the open source alternative without weeks or months of training.

Advertising doesn’t need to be privacy infringing. That’s something from the last 20 years. No conflict of interest necessary if all they do is ads.

Actually, Windows has implemented quite a few tricks to make this very difficult without setting off antivirus engines at least. X11’s security model is absolute trash compared to Windows Vista and above. Linux is getting safer with Wayland, but Linux on the desktop hasn’t had the XP SP1 security humiliation that Windows had so almost all of it is opt-in.

Solving the issues Windows has already solved with things like integrity levels will break compatibility with many applications (it also did on Windows, which is why Vista made you run everything as admin) but simply enabling the Flatpak sandbox can solve many problems already.

I wonder if there’s a desktop distro out there that enforces sandboxed applications by default. It would make running Linux a lot less risky.

Shitty companies are selling AI editing tools explicitly for this purpose. Their ads are all over Instagram. They’ve been found in supposedly regulated app stores. Yet, I’ve never seen anyone report on this trash industry.

There is no stopping the existence of these tools when running on local hardware, but it shouldn’t be this easy for teenagers. Somehow these companies manage to make money while real sex workers find themselves shoved into platforms like OnlyFans because no credit card company will process their payments. That’s the wrong way around!

Apple does actually build quite a few privacy preserving technologies into its operating system. The only unique identifier they intend to provide is the ID that the “we want to stalk you” prompts are referring to.

Tracking companies have proven to find new ways to track users, unfortunately, but they are trying their very best. Something you can’t say of Microsoft or Google.

As far as Apple has been capable of so far, the only unique device identifier apps on their platform can get access to is the one that you need to accept a prompt for. However, they know damn well that there are ways of fingerprinting devices that they can’t prevent (without fucking up the user experience) so it would be dishonest to pretend that saying “no” blocks these attempts.

Apps requiring accounts to be useful, for instance, can be tracked by the user ID on the app’s end. That’s not something Apple can ever prevent through technical means.

I’ve got my Mastodon and Lemmy servers hooked up to a postgres server that’s running separately, and the CPU usage between the two is now about the same.

That actually proves that Lemmy is more efficient, because it’s handling a hell of a lot more data. I don’t follow a lot of big accounts, and I’m the only user on my server, so I rarely get more than 40 posts + metadata through Mastodon. On Lemmy, however, each post can easily produce hundreds of events to process because of comments and likes all federating out.

In total, Lemmy seems to be heavier, but only because it does more. Mastodon is super inefficient, especially with things like RAM. I think it has something to do with the framework and language it’s running on; Gitlab seems to be using the same runtime and that eats through RAM like crazy as well.

You need to ask because Apple can’t enforce on an API level that apps don’t track you. Less vague language may lure people into a false sense of security. In theory Apple should be safeguarding you from malicious apps, in practice they regularly turn a blind eye once an app is big enough that an app not working becomes a problem for Apple rather than for the app developers.

I also think the language in that prompt is very much intentional. Apple doesn’t want apps to track their users, so I think they’ve added an ick-factor to the prompt. On Android, buttons are labels with things like “allow” or “deny”.

The only way to get rid of the tracking system is to make it interesting for companies to stop tracking you. 1 star rating + uninstall + switch to a competitor is the best you can do.

When you puke, you get rid of the alcohol in your stomach. However, if the alcohol is already in your system, puking won’t help.

If your body is continuing to make you puke, you’ve probably poisoned yourself. Your body is desperately trying to get rid of the toxic substance killing you, but it’s too late to eject it out through the mouth, so it just has to tank the damage by sacrificing liver cells and brain cells, which are both things your body Does Not Like.

If you’re still drinking after your body triggered its poison response, well, it’s trying to stop you from poisoning yourself.

If you regularly drink until you puke, something may be wrong with you medically (making you sick after one or two glasses of alcohol) or you’re killing yourself (by drinking way too much alcohol). Either way, you need to get yourself help.

Given your “it becomes like I drink water”, I think you have a serious problem.