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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • That’s not quite true, though, is it?

    $50 earned is yours to spend on anything. A $50 discount is offered by a vendor to entice you to spend enough of your money on them to make the discount worthwhile.

    Pirates don’t pirate because they’re trying to save money on something they would have bought otherwise… typically they pirate because the amount they consume would bankrupt them if they purchased it through legitimate means, so they would never have been a paying customer in the first place.

    So, if they wouldn’t have bought it anyway, and they’re not reselling it, did they really harm the vendor? Whether they pirated it or not, it wouldn’t affect the vendor either way.

    That’s not really the same thing, in my opinion.

    If you were able to pay for everything handily but pirated anyway, or if you resold pirated content, then yeah you have something similar to theft going on. But that’s not really the norm; those people are doing something bad irrespective of the piracy itself, aren’t they?


  • I’m not the above poster, but I really appreciate your argument. I think many people overcorrect in their minds about whether or not these models learn the way we do, and they miss the fact that they do behave very similarly to parts of our own systems. I’ve generally found that that overcorrection leads to bad arguments about copyright violation and ethical concerns.

    However, your point is very interesting (and it is thankfully independent of that overcorrection). We’ve never had to worry about nonhuman personhood in any amount of seriousness in the past, so it’s strangely not obvious despite how obvious it should be: it’s okay to treat real people as special, even in the face of the arguable personhood of a sufficiently advanced machine. One good reason the machine can be treated differently is because we made it for us, like everything else we make.

    I think there still is one related but dangling ethical question. What about machines that are made for us but we decide for whatever reason that they are equivalent in sentience and consciousness to humans?

    A human has rights and can take what they’ve learned and make works inspired by it for money, or for someone else to make money through them. They are well within their rights to do so. A machine that we’ve decided is equivalent in sentience to a human, though… can that nonhuman person go take what it’s learned and make works inspired by it so that another person can make money through them?

    If they SHOULDN’T be allowed to do that, then it’s notable that this scenario is only separated from what we have now by a gap in technology.

    If they SHOULD be allowed to do that (which we could make a good argument for, since we’ve agreed that it is a sentient being) then the technology gap is again notable.

    I don’t think the size of the technology gap actually matters here, logically; I think you can hand-wave it away pretty easily and apply it to our current situation rather than a future one. My guess, though, is that the size of the gap is of intuitive importance to anyone thinking about it (I’m no different) and most people would answer one way or the other depending on how big they perceive the technology gap to be.


  • 4K HDR

    Normally I use kdenlive to edit video, which supports 4K AFAIK, but although that doesn’t support HDR it looks like DaVinci Resolve supports both.

    Taxes

    That’s surprising. Turbotax and Quickbooks have online options, and there are a few native apps like GnuCash, but I haven’t used them—TurboTax works for me.

    GarageBand

    Yeah that’s too bad. I hear good things about Ardour, though. Also, bandlab if you’re okay with a webapp.

    Netflix

    I only stream on an actual TV, not my computer, so I haven’t done this in a while, but I thought you could do this in Firefox with DRM enabled? If not, seems like there are addons which enable it. Might be outdated knowledge.

    vector illustration

    Fun is hard to come by

    git client

    Git clients all suck for me, CLI is the way to go. However, my co-workers that use git clients all use GitKraken (on macOS) and that is available on Linux, too.

    screen recording was also painful

    Won’t argue with you there. Don’t know why it doesn’t have first-class support in many distros. I hear OBS Studio works well for this if you want to do anything fancy with the recording, otherwise there are plenty of apps for this (Kazam might be a simpler choice).

    barely meets my use cases

    I think really (considering the above) your main issue is that you just have some strong software preferences. There are certainly ways to meet most if not all of the use cases you listed. It requires a big change in workflow, though.

    For what it’s worth, I find that most of the issues with software alternatives in Linux is that everyone often recommends free/GPL replacements, which are invariably worse than the commercial/non-free software the user is used to. But there is paid software in Linux land, too, remember. In my case, I have often found that if I can pay for the software it will be better, and if there’s a webapp version of something non-free it will often be better than the native FOSS alternative. There are many notable exceptions to that rule, but money does solve the occasional headache.