Maybe something is sending a play/pause signal? My headset will automatically pause media when I take it off and resume playing when I put it back on, but sometimes it triggers when I'm not wearing it and starts playing whatever I was playing last.

Maybe check the keyboard shortcut list to find if some kind of keyboard shortcut has been bound to play/pause as well.

There's this project that'll try to read your old water meter with a camera. All you need is a $10 dev board of the right model and a power supply near your water meter.

I'm not sure if the ability to tell would help. Just like typing hints are very much optional in Python, I don't expect many libraries to get their exception declarations right. Especially if there are transitive dependencies

I write Java code for my day job and while throws has been part of the language for ages, Java developers seem intent on avoiding it at all costs.

I would welcome a throws in Python so that libraries and coworkers that do the right thing are easier to work with, but I don't think it'd solve the underlying issue in most cases.

AI is as shit as its input. The internet, as a whole, is racist as hell, but it's also the biggest source of training data. It's too much work to compose a dataset without biases, so instead every AI model is trained after the fact, or prompts are changed, in an attempt to combat this bias.

This is how we got Google's AI inserting black people into generated images specifically about white people, and how AI models learned to treat certain populations with satin gloves. Fixing the root cause of the problem isn't financially viable, and all of this stuff is developed with private funds, so a patch job is the best we can get.

I don't think it'll get better. I grew up with "don't use Wikipedia as a source" drilled into me and I don't know anyone who didn't go to Wikipedia every time they needed to read up on a new subject. We'll get the same with AI models, except AI models lie in more subtle ways than the Wikipedia trolls that I encountered as a kid.

I think AI will exaggerate the slight biases introduced to combat the problems of the dataset to the extreme. As society continues to take the output if AI models as truth, and bigots continue to write terrible shit online that makes it into the infinite copyright violation treadmill, the effect will slowly become more pronounced, but not fast enough to get noticed.

Just about every high schooler with an internet connection is doing their homework following instructions from AI models. You know AI is just autocomplete on steroids, but the vast majority of its users don't. Several lawyers have already been caught putting AI confabulations into official court documents, for instance.

Not caring about bias and the broader impact of technology is what got us Facebook and Tiktok.

It's strange for SMS/MMS, where recipients are explicitly listed.

I don't think there's a practical use preventing the arrival of such messages, but on a technical level it's a bit peculiar.

I'm not familiar enough with the RCS spec to know if RCS has the same design or if it's simply incapable of hiding messages from members of a group chat. In encrypted chats, you'd expect encrypted messages to become undecryptable for blocked recipients at least, that's one of the major advantages of using encryption, but I guess there must've been a reason why this wasn't implemented.

That's unfortunate, these automatic visas bypass a lot of crap. Best of luck to you and your moving endeavours!

I don't want to dash your hopes of emigrating to a better country, but don't underestimate how painful emigration can be. You can't just pick a country and move there. Moving countries is not like moving states. You'll need to convince the country you're going that you're worth letting in. If I were you, I'd start with a list of countries that might be willing to let you in, and work your way down from there.

I would suggest Europe, the Nordics in particular; the Nordics are some of the best countries to live in in the entire world, with (in my opinion) rather pleasant politics in comparison. Germany and other north-western countries tend to score well too, but you'll have to look into how much they match your ideals and culture. Europe is generally on pretty good terms with the USA, which helps a lot. However, you're not alone in wanting to move there. Don't be surprised if the process of applying for permission to enter the country takes months to years and several thousand dollars in paperwork, time and money you don't get back if you're refused. Things can go a bit smoother if you've got a claim on citizenship by blood or family history, but that too can take time and paperwork to arrange, and is entirely dependent on the current laws in the countries your ancestors are from.

In many countries, being a highly skilled worker gives you a major advantage. However, your nursing education may not be accredited in other countries, or be considered "highly skilled" enough; with some bad luck, you may need to go back to school in your country of choice to get your education revalidated (if you're let in for that). The same goes for driver's licenses and certifications you may have achieved over the years.

One trick you may be able to use if you're of European descent is getting European citizenship by blood (I believe Italy, Spain, and a bunch of other countries allow for this) and then use the freedom the Schengen accords provide to move elsewhere in Europe, skipping a whole lot of paperwork. This way, you can, for example, work in Denmark without needing to go through the strict Danish immigration system (though validating your education may still need work).

Just as an example: if you want to apply for a license for a general nurse in Norway as a non-EEA citizen, processing time takes at least 11 months if you provide all the required paperwork and costs $152 to file (which you don't get back if you're refused). You need a license to be a general nurse; without a license, you can't do your job. Without a job, you can't just move there; you can get a temporary holiday visa but you can't apply for jobs with that. This is on top of the other requirements, like speaking B2 level Norwegian. If you apply, you may be given a deadline to conform with the requirements.

Nobody is "cheering" for anything here. Neither is anyone claiming they did something miraculous here. Windows' elevation system has worked without something as risky as the SUID bit for decades, for instance. Using system services to spawn root (or NTAUTHORITY\SYSTEM) tasks has been a thing since what, Windows XP? systemd-run does a bunch of really cool stuff that I could consider revolutionary if the tools all line up, but this isn't one of them.

All that's happening is that one of the systemd devs is happy to announce a sudo alternative that doesn't have the common sudo risks. No distro has announced implementing this in place of sudo, and it wouldn't make sense in the first place; sudo does stuff like LDAP that systemd-run doesn't even support, so it can't be replaced. It's taken years for Wayland to be enabled by default, I doubt we'll see distros with run0 instead of sudo this decade. It'll be available on recent distros and you can use it if you want, it's up to you.

I've never seen doas come close to taking sudo's place so I doubt this will change much. With Ubuntu and a few others having recently released a new LTS, it'll be a while before run0 will be available in distros in the first place, if it doesn't get patched out by the likes of Debian.

However, if people find run0 to be better than sudo, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to be happy about that. Personally, I'd rather see sudo implement a daemon/client model rather than systemd-run having an alternative argv[0], but until sudo gets better, this is the best we get.

Windows isn't any better I'm afraid.

I blame C for forcing users to use goto, conditional returns, or terribly nested code. Language features like defer or even try/catch/finally make it much easier to write readable code with limited returns.

Ligatures are great. Don't use them if you don't like them, but don't try to shame people for having different preferences.

The biggest exception to using ligatures is in documentation. I believe Kotlin used (uses?) ligatures in some of its documentation, leaving the reader to figure out if they actually need to type ≠ or if != will suffice. Not a great move, even if the IDE will render the ligatures just fine!

Maybe this will be the biggest contribution AI will do for programmers: figure out good names. I should try that some time!

On the other hand, AI will only generate output as good as its input, and most large code projects (including Linux) are terrible at naming things.

The oldest local church was constructed in the 13th century, but has undergone renovations over the centuries.

Not a lot of very old houses have remained because they were mostly built out of wood and the occasional fire and the tendency to build newer homes rather than patch up the old rotten ones meant that most houses didn't make it past the 18th-19th century, when stone overtook wood everywhere except in remote farms.

I meant boring to !linux@lemmy.ml :)

Boring is good when it comes to operating systems, cars, and other utilities, unless you like maintaining that stuff as a hobby!

It's a tough balance, for sure. I don't want AI companies to exist in the form they currently are, but we're not getting the genie back into the bottle. Whether the economic hit is worth the freedom and creative rights, that I think citizens deserve, is a matter of democratic choice. It's impossible to ignore the fact that in China or Russia, where citizens don't have much a choice, I don't think artistic rights or the people's wellbeing are even part of the equation. Other countries will need a response when companies from these countries start doing work more efficiently. I myself have been using Bing AI more and more as AI bullcrap is flooding every page of every search engine, fighting AI with AI so to speak.

I saw this whole ordeal coming the moment ChatGPT came out and I had the foolish hope that legislators would've done something by now. The EU's AI Act will apply March next year but it doesn't seem to solve the copyright problem at all. Or rather, it seems to accept the current copyright problem, as the EU's summary put it:

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, will not be classified as high-risk, but will have to comply with transparency requirements and EU copyright law:

• Disclosing that the content was generated by AI
• Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content
• Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training

The EU seems to have chosen to focus on combating the immediate threat of AI abuse, but seem to be very tolerant of AI copyright infringement. I can only presume this is to make sure "innovation" doesn't get impeded too much.

I'll take this into account during the EU vote that's about to happen soon, but I'm afraid it's too late. I wish we could go back and stop AI before it started, but this stuff has happened and now the world is a little bit better and worse.

I don't think it's bad to ask; even Debian asks you for feedback. Ubuntu, Debian, and a bunch of other distros are doing the right thing by making this feedback opt-in, but for some people even that is already too much.

I have no idea what supposed privacy issues Ubuntu has these days. Snap is certainly A Controversial Thing, but it's been years since they made a deal with Amazon.

Conceptually, Nix is just the next evolution of tools like Ansible, and tangentially related to projects like Silverblue, but in practice, it's only used by enthusiasts. And, of course, you can use Nix outside of NixOS.

Unless there's a tool I don't know about, there's no equivalent for Discover or Gnome Software for NixOS. Because that's the class of boring people that make up the silent majority: the people who don't know how to, or don't want to edit configuration files. This was how Valve made Linux on a console a success, and it's why Ubuntu is still popular despite their experiments causing them to be decried by the community over and over again.

The thing with many of these services is that they're not run by companies with a legal presence, just by some guy(s) who do it for fun. For many laws, personal projects are considered differently compared to business/organisational endeavours.

It's the same thing with personal blogs lacking a privacy policy: the probability of the thing becoming an actual problem in the real world is so abysmally low that nobody bothers, and that's probably okay.

During the first wave of some troll uploading child abuse to various Fediverse servers (mostly Lemmy), a lot of server operators got a rough wake-up call, because suddenly they had content on their servers that could land them in prison. There has been an effort to combat this abuse for larger servers, but I don't think most Lemmy servers run on the Nvidia hardware that's strong enough to support the live CSAM detection code that was developed.

The idea that someone does this willingly implies that the user knows the implications of their choice, which most of the Fediverse doesn't seem to do (see: people asking questions like "how do I delete comments on a server I've been defederated from", or surprised after finding out that their likes/boosts are inherently public).

If the implied license was enough, Facebook and all the other companies wouldn't put these disclaimers in their terms of service. This isn't true in every jurisdiction, but it does apply to many important ones.

I agree that international copyright law should work like you imply, but on the other hand, this is exactly why Creative Commons was created: stuff posted on the internet can be downloaded just fine, but rehosting it is not allowed by default.

This is also why I appreciate the people who put those Creative Commons licenses on their comments; they're effectively useless against AI, which is what they seem to be trying to combat, but they do provide rights that would otherwise be unavailable.

Just like with privacy laws and data hosting laws, I don't think the fediverse cares. I think the fediverse is full of a sort of wilful ignorance about internet law, mostly because the Fediverse is a just a bunch of enthusiastic nerds. No Fediverse server (except for Threads, maybe) has a Data Protection Officer despite sites like lemmy.world legally requiring one if they'd cared about the law, very little Fediverse software seems to provide DMCA links by default, and I don't think any server is complying with the Chinese, Russian, and European "only store citizen's data in locally hosted servers" laws at all.

The training data set isn't the problem. The data set for many open models is actually not hard to find, and it's quite obvious that works by the artists were included in the data set. In this case, the lawsuit was about the Stable Diffusion dataset, and I believe that's just freely available (though you may need to scrape and download the linked images yourself).

For research purposes, this was never a problem: scientific research is exempted from many limitations of copyright. This led to an interesting problem with OpenAI and the other AI companies: they took their research models, the output of research, and turned them into a business.

The way things are going, I expect the law to be like this: datasets can contain copyrighted work as long as they're only distributed for research purposes, AI models are derivative works, and the output of AI models is not a derivative work, and therefore the output AI companies generate is exempt of copyright. It's definitely not what I want to happen, but the legal arguments that I thought would kill this interpretation don't seem to hold water in court.

Of course, courts only apply law as it is written right now. At any point in time, governments can alter their copyright laws to kill or clear AI models. On the one hand, copyright lobbyists have a huge impact on governance, as much as big oil it seems, but on the other hand, banning AI will just put countries that don't care about copyright to get an economic advantage. The EU has set up AI rules, which I appreciate as an EU citizen, but I cannot deny that this will inevitably lead to a worse environment to do business in compared to places like the USA and China.