General nerd, programmer and sci-fi reader and writer. Neurodivergent, ADHD.

She/her.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • following its acquisition from Sony

    Has anything good EVER come from big company acquisitions AT ALL?

    Geocities -> acquired by Yahoo -> crap -> death

    Youtube -> acquired by Google -> ad crap

    Blogger -> acquired by Google -> crap

    Macromedia -> acquired by Adobe -> Monopoly crap

    Washington Post -> acquired by Bezos -> political crap

    MySQL -> Acquired by Oracle -> copyright crap

    Github -> acquired by Microsoft -> crap

    Reddit -> acquired by Conde Nast -> political crap

    Twitter -> acquired by Musk -> utter crap

    Every single time I see a cool startup get bought by a big player, all I can see is the service going to shit.



  • Okay, here’s the full explanation for you:

    VTubers are simply people using 2D or 3D avatars that move using face tracking technology.

    The issue at hand is that many VTubers have skimpy outfits but many of them are classy, i.e. not overly sexual. Furthermore, the content they produce is SFW even if at times they talk or joke about NSFW topics. Most of the time VTubers just engage in chat, gaming or reaction videos. And the official with Twitch’s new rules is that changing a VTuber model requires hiring a digital artist and a model animator aka “rigger”. These are super expensive, many of those models can cost thousands of dollars to make. So when Twitch days “cover your hips or be banned”, VTubers whose models have FROM THE BEGINNING shown hips, now have to pay artists and riggers a huge amount of cash simply to cover themselves up.

    To make things worse, Twitch’s rules are arbitrary and unpredictable. Who knows if tomorrow they’ll have to cover their shoulders? Cover their cleavage? Skirts below the knee? You don’t know, and every single time Twitch updates their TOS, VTubers have to spend money just to stay in the business. The least Twitch could do is state a fixed, immutable set of rules so VTubers can design their own outfits without fear of being targeted by Twitch’s sharia police. But that doesn’t happen. Twitch rules keep changing over and over, but mysteriously they never affect women wearing super tiny bikinis and showing off their sexy bodies in their pools and hot tubs section.

    That’s the issue. That Twitch’s TOS are not only unpredictable, but inconsistently enforced. One could say managers don’t like VTubers and engage in these practices to virtually kick them off their platform.

    TL;DR: VTubers are NOT porn. And yet, Twitch is selectively enforcing these rules against VTubers while completely allowing exactly the same - or even much more sexualized - content for IRL streamers in their bath tubs and pools section.










  • Okay you’re being a bigot. You know why? Because people aren’t demanding to be called “your highness”. They are just asking to be called with their preferred probouns. Putting neo pronouns aside, it’s not a heavy burden to be called he / she / it / they.

    And this is the internet! The are no bodies, only usernames. Why do you care if a person claiming to be a girl demands to be called a she? Oh my fucking god,what a scandal! The oppression imposed upon you, a free citizen, demanding that you have to use a pronoun different than “he” on the internet! The world is doomed! 😱 /s

    What you’re really asking for is the “right” to harass trans people (by misgendering them) because you don’t like them and abhor the idea of women having something extra down there. (it’s not like they’re plotting to force sex you, just leave them be, okay?) Not only that, you’re so obsessed with hating them that you went out of your way to post your biased opinion ON A LINUX FORUM.

    You’re being a transphobic asshole, and the mods were perfectly right in banning you.

    Just accept that there are different people in the world. If you have a problem with that, maybe it’s you who needs professional help.


  • What constitutes fair use?

    17 U.S.C. § 107

    Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

    GenAI training, at least regarding art, is neither criticism, comment, news reporting scholarship, nor research.

    AI training is not done by scientists but engineers of a corporative entity with a long term profit goal.

    So, by elimination, we can conclude that none of the purposes covered by the fair use doctrine apply to Generative AI training.

    Q.E.D.




  • It’s just another Mastodon-compatible server where you can log in.

    Mastodon, like Lemmy, is a federated network, meaning the more servers there are, the better things are for everyone. Huge servers with millions of users are harder to maintain, and moderation does not scale. There’s more noise, abuse is harder to spot, and harassment is harder to punish. Having many small servers is a better approach.

    On the other hand, new servers might be unstable: the admin needs to both maintain the server and moderate the community, and there have been cases of admins doing crappy jobs at either. Servers are born and die regularly on Mastodon; you might want to see how things go before opening an account there.


  • It’s the nazi bar analogy. The moment you allow nazis, they invited that’s friends and then you can’t kick them out because they can cause big trouble. The solution is not to allow nazis in the first place.

    And the issue with the “99% of people” argument is, it doesn’t matter what percentage of the population are decent people. If they’re too many, the network effect takes place and the platform becomes too big to fail.

    Do you know how many people are dictators in dictatorships? One. The leader. The rest are subjects. But that single leader is enough to make everyone’s lives shitty.

    So it doesn’t matter what percentage of Threads/Facebook users are nazis; by being there they support the nazis they can’t kick out.

    The decentralized fediverse model isn’t perfect, but defederation has worked so far at keeping nazis at bay. They have their little corner where they can talk all the racist shit they want, but they can’t harm users of instances that have blocked them.

    The real question is how much money Zuck plans to invest in moderating hate speech. I can’t be sure how much, but based on the precedents, I can say it’s a pretty small figure. That IS a problem.