The web version is very inferior to the desktop one. I had to use it at work and it was a very frustrating experience, e.g. missing many conditional formatting options.

Awesome progress, can’t wait until Illustrator, InDesign and Photosop can all run well on Linux ✨ Adobe’s lack of support is like 70% the reason why I haven’t switched to Linux yet.

I have a link to my Lemmy profile on my Reddit profile and not even shadowbanned 🤷

This, I follow a single Reddit sub on RSS because it just doesn’t exist on Lemmy 🤷 And in general, communities for many niche topics or smaller countries are nonexistent. But the conversations are much better here, so I hang out more on Lemmy nowadays :)

Interesting, I had my 9GAG phase around 2011-12. Never really used Digg, just saw the front page a couple times, then started dabbling in Reddit in 2015, then Lemmy in 2023 with the blackout protests. (I almost said those achieved nothing, but I think that’s probably when most current Lemmy users joined, so 🤷)

haha I ran into this too, someone changed the title of my question on one of their non-programming boards - I was so pissed, I never went back to that particular board (it was especially annoying because it was a quite personal question)

I’m happy to see a bit of a renaissance of forums in the last few years. Quite a few open source projects now run forums built on the Discourse engine (open-source, can be self-hosted for free). I was kinda sceptical at first, they look so different from the BBCode forums I was used to, but over time came to appreciate the features that drag the forum format into the 21st century.

I hope an increasing number of projects come to realise the drawbacks of Discord, namely that you keep years’ worth of information on someone else’s centralised platform, and it’s very difficult to find past information even for members of the server, and impossible from the outside. I look at a handful of Discord channels daily, but had to mute some because users keep asking the same questions every two days…

Hear hear, it was the hostile atmosphere that pushed me away from Stack Exchange years before LLMs were a thing. That very clear impression that the site does not exist to help specific people, but a vague public audience, and the treatment of every question and answer is subjugated to that. Since then I just ask/answer questions on platforms like Lemmy, Reddit, Discord, or the Discourse forums ran by various organisations, it’s a much more pleasant experience.

Otoh according to Iain Banks’s speculation, space colonisation might be the thing that finally lets humanity toss off the chains of capitalism:

The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.

Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.

Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the surface of a planet.

Even so, this is certainly the most vulnerable point in the time-line of the Culture’s existence, the point at which it is easiest to argue for things turning out quite differently, as the extent and sophistication of the hegemony’s control mechanisms - and its ability and will to repress - battles against the ingenuity, skill, solidarity and bravery of the rebellious ships and habitats, and indeed the assumption here is that this point has been reached before and the hegemony has won… but it is also assumed that - for the reasons given above - that point is bound to come round again, and while the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.

Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.

Google never thought to email their customers about this?? Why tf do I have to learn about this 2 months after the announcement, from social media…

Yeah, I never used it, except to follow links from lemmy/reddit, but even those acquaintances of mine that did use it, gradually stopped since Musk took over, with the last few leaving it around a year ago.

(My vocally pro-LGBT workplace also switched to other platforms bc our engagement noticeably dropped around that time. Either due some Musk-induced algorithm shenanigans or just users leaving in droves.)

that’s just sad (though I do like that they use fediverse, but it shouldn’t be the main way of communication)

who tf still uses Xitter…

I love that idea!

just set it to the January 1st of whichever year would make you 13 when you registered your account 😏 (I remember a platform deleting the account of someone when they, years later, revealed that they were under 13 when they registered)

good!

Artists tend to have websites where they sell their music or link to places where they sell it.

To me it seems the main issue is not even AI, it’s capitalism. If artists didn’t need to sell their art to survive, we wouldn’t even have this discussion.

Absolutely. It seems like 90% of the issues we have in society is because of this fucked-up economic system :/

That was the point I was trying to make too. The question of “is it theft” is moot, it still causes harm.

For me it boils down to: were the artists, whose work was used to build the large commercial models, asked about this and agreed to it? No.

Piracy only affects existing work, genAI affects all the future artwork they would try to make a living from. See AI hitting cultural sector hard: Fifth of freelance artists have lost income, work | NL Times