TootSweet @ TootSweet @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It's almost like a club full of insufferable hate-filled assholes can't get along.

There's a character I didn't play for very long that I'd like to play again.

A cleric, but when asked who his deity is, he's pretty cagey. Maybe answers under his breath and coughs over his answer so no one can understand the answer.

He introduces himself as "Pope Hypatious Constantine Driac". ("Pope Driac" for short.) But every time he is referred to by his title, he corrects them, reducing the importance of his position. "Actually, call me cardinal. That's more accurate." "Archbishop, actually." "Did I say 'arch'-bishop? I meant regular bishop. Ha! Silly me."

He has terrible hygeine. And he's always got a runny nose that he's always wiping with his bare hand. And that's particularly gross because he keeps giving people blessings with a gesture that's basically palming (like one might palm a basketball) people's faces with a "bless you my child."

His secret? He's an adherent of a secretive cult dedicated to a god(dess?) of disease/infirmity/plague/sickness. Everything from head-colds to typhoid are sacriments which he believes brings people closer to his god. He actively tries to convert people to his faith, but he believes only an illness (temporary or permanent) may truly convert one, so he's always trying to get others (including enemies while in the heat of battle) sick.

He does know all the healing spells. His order practices by repeatedly infecting themselves with the sickness of the week (bubonic plague, leprosy, maybe this week I'll try influenza) and bringing themselves close to death. But their god isn't a god of death or suicide or necromancy, so they can't have their adherents dying all over the place. They heal their sickness with typical good-aligned-cleric sort of spells soon before death.

Optimally, he'd get spells that allowed him to infect people, but failing that, he could just collect samples of infected stuff in little vials over time. A flake of dead skin from someone with leprosy here. A smallpox-laden scrap of cloth there.

Last time I played him (not in D&D, but rather Lamentations of the Flame Princess), he had a blowgun. And his left arm was traumatically amputated in one of his first combat encounters. He saved the arm in his pack. Right as the next encounter (with lizardmen, I think) started, he said "wait!" in a commanding voice. He promised to show the enemy something grand and wonderful if they'd only give him a minute to show them. He rolled high on his persuasion roll. He withdrew his arm (now quite rotten and gross) from his pack, stabbed it a bunch of times with several darts, and then shot a lizardman with a gross dart with his blowgun. (You have to imagine him doing all this one-handed too. Lol.) Of course, at that point, the combat was back in full swing, but Driac had accomplished what he'd set out to. And of course, the party was all going "what the actual fuck...?"

So, back to the name. "Hypatius Constantine Driac." It's a play on "hypochondriac." No one I played with ever guessed my character was any sort of "plague priest" or whatever. But then again, I didn't get to play him for very long.

"You expected me to grant the letter of your wish in a way that subverted the spirit of your wish or you wouldn't have put 'that works how I expect it to' on the end. I fulfilled your expectations exactly as requested. Having a 10-inch penis on your forehead was exactly the sort of result you expected given how too-good-to-be-true your stumbling onto my lamp was, was it not?"

For real. I've been anxiously awaiting developments, but it seems that no more developments are likely to happen until September.

SFC ("Software Freedom Conservancy") is doing good work on a legal front that may well result in a lot more consumer electronic devices (like smart TVs) having fully FOSS OSs available.

More info at https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

My most played game is probably The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. No idea in terms of how many hours. But I played it, then hundred-percented it (yes I found all the Korok seeds), then the DLC came out and I played that, then I started over in master mode, then I replayed it with mods, then I replayed it with cheats, then I speedran it for like a year.

Remember the "Jitterbug" mobile phone made specifically for older users?

Kindof in the spirit of that.

Don't hide things in a "start menu" or anything like that. No task bar. Just put a small number of big icons on the "desktop". Open all applications in fullscreen. Don't allow two applications to run at the same time. Optimally, the browser wouldn't be as general-purpose as Firefox or Chromium or whatever. No address bar. Just links to a few bookmarked sites. In fact, no home page on the browser would be good. Just make the websites they have available to go to more icons on the GUI's main desktop. Don't make them right-click for anything, only left-click. But make it easy for people's family to get at the guts, including remotely, to customize the experience for the intended user.

AnySoftKeyboard does. And it's under an Apache 2.0 license which is fully foss.

Hate to tell you, but a "big ass mouse" is called a "rat".

FUTO Keyboard was forked from another project which is Open Source. But the license FUTO keyboard itself is under, by restricting modifications to for non-commercial purposes and forbidding removal of functionality that allows the user to make payments to FUTO, fails to qualify as "Open Source".

FUTO keyboard is not Open Source.

Too little too late. The damage is already done.

And even on that page, they're still being assholes about Open Source ("Our use of the term 'open source' thus far has been not out of carelessness, but out of disdain for OSI approved licenses which nevertheless allow developers to be exploited by large corporate interests.") while pretending what they've done with the FUTO license is some boon to consumer rights ("Fundamentally, our goals are to build great products that don’t abuse people, beat the tech oligopoly, and elevate the rights of programmers developing software that has source code open to public scrutiny and tinkering."). And they're still not dropping the effort to dilute the term "Open Source" ("The OSI, an organization with confidential charter members and large corporate sponsors, does not have any legal right to say what is and is not 'open source'. It is arrogant of them to lay claim to the definition.").

Also, just as an aside, as page that the words "legal right" in that last quote link to says, the OSI attempted to trademark "Open Source." I'm not sure why FUTO seems to think the same reasons why the "Open Source" trademark was rejected won't apply just as much to the term "Source First" (but they do seem to think that: "we will be making our own term and trademarking it.")

I believe it. I'm lucky to have been working remotely and able to kinda-sorta keep working (at least enough not to raise suspicions or get fired or anything) once the worst of my long COVID exhausted all my sick days.

I worked flat on my back with my laptop resting on my belly for months and I could barely manage that. So much as tenting my knees would worsen my symptoms which included things like chest pain, heart racing, vision changes, dizziness, light headedness, and lots of other unpleasant and scary things.

Also, if you're one of those assholes who nags folks to turn on their cameras on Zoom meetings, fuck you and the smug fucks from whom you inherited congenital self-righteousness. You have no fucking clue. "Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication." I'd love to,

<name censored to protect the guilty>

(Unless you're required to nag folks to turn on their cameras by your employer, in which case, fuck them and... well, try to go as easy on people about that as you can within your limited sphere of power.)

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.

I'd choose to believe the typo was the inclusion of an extra "a" and that I could expect to be a member of the Green Lantern corps imminently.

To speak of AI models being "made public domain" is to presuppose that the AI models in question are covered by some branch of intellectual property. Has it been established whether AI models (even those trained on properly licensed content) even are covered by some branch of intellectual property in any particular jurisdiction(s)? Or maybe by "public domain" the author means that they should be required to publish the weights and also that they shouldn't get any trade secret protections related to those weights?

Kindof a hard question to answer. I work remotely in software. If I couldn't use the Internet, I'd have to change fields and start working in person. But is working remotely and writing code for my day job an expression of "addiction"? How about looking up documentation while I'm writing code on my own time? Definitely something I use the Internet for, but I wouldn't think it's an "addiction" thing. What about updating the software on my computer? Is finding recipes online "addiction"?

Social media is "addictive". For sure.

So, I guess if you're counting everything I use the internet for as "addiction" and asking how well I'd fare (with 100 being extremely poorly), I'd probably have to put it pretty high. Maybe 85 or more?

If you only disallowed uses of the Internet that qualify as "addictive" such as doomscrolling or four-hour-long YouTube in-depth deep dives on invisible walls in Super Mario 64, then I don't think I'd be really all that bad off. I might put myself at 20.

Can you name any real-world examples of this happening?

Actually, I can. I know before Minetest (a FOSS Minecraft clone (they'd bristle at being called that, but anyway) that has since renamed itself to "Luanti" - I reccommend it, actually) officially supported Android, somebody ported it to Android (I don't remember what they called the clone) and put it on the play store for money. Now, Minetest wasn't under a copyleft license, so the clone wasn't even FOSS (nor was it legally required to be.) I don't remember any malware being involved. The Minetest community did all heave a collective groan when a wave of clueless people who didn't realize it was FOSS started joining Minetest servers. People in the Minetest community definitely resented the clone. But beyond that, no real harm came to the game or its players. Some folks paid for an Android Minetest client that didn't afford them the freedoms guaranteed by the Free Software Definition or Open Source Definition, but at the time the official Minetest client didn't support Android. Aside from that, I don't know of any harm that came from any of that. And had Minetest been under a copyleft license, even less harm would have come of that.

Also, in practice, anyone who's only out to get a quick buck is going to either avoid copylefted code like the plague or just blatantly violate the terms of the license. They're unlikely to actually put forth the effort to compose a proper GPL compliance plan. (In fact, the ongoing U.S. court case "SFC v. Visio" is very apropos. Visio is named as a defendnt in that suit specifically for blatantly violating the terms of the GPL. Specifically the copyleft portions.)

And if someone who does just want to make a quick buck clones some GPLd code and sells it in compliance with the license, I'm still not convinced that does anyone any harm. The GPL was also designed with non-programmer empowerment in mind, specifically allowing the use case where if a non-coder wants a feature added to a piece of GPL'd code, they can commission a coder to add it. But I'm not sure the Grayjay license would allow that even if it would allow one to make changes themselves noncommercially.

I dunno. You seem to be really hung up on "contrubuting nothing". And mind you, I don't think that's uncommon. That's a big part of the whole "post-open-source" thing Parens is involved with these days. If FOSS as a whole was floundering right now in a way that money could solve, I maybe could get on board with the idea that there might be improvements that could be made to the existing FOSS paradigm. (Though something like legally-preserved nag screens in source-available software seems at best a clueless and ham-handed approach to that problem.)

Much more concerning to me is that software respect users' rights. I mostly won't use software I don't feel I can trust (either legally or security-wise.) And FOSS is software I can virtually always trust. When I'm publishing software, I do so under the AGPL v3 because I kinda don't care if anyone sells it. (Though they can always get a free version from my GitLab (yeah, I switched to GitLab before Codeberg was a thing).) I do care if someone distributes (for money or gratis) my code in a way that doesn't afford the end user the four freedoms. Which is why I use AGPL v3 over other options like non-copyleft FOSS licenses or noncommercial licenses.

And, just to repeat this, again, I'm not angry at FUTO for releasing their code under non-FOSS licenses. That's enough to make me not want to use their software. But not enough to make me resent them the way I do. The anger is at the way they've been sabotaging Open Source to the best of their ability while misrepresenting themselves as consumer rights advocates.

Why is that a problem?

Step 1) Install a file manager...