Considering Microsoft is dropping support for Windows Mixed Reality devices with Windows 11 24H2, effectively sending millions of otherwise perfectly fine VR headsets to landfill with no recourse. I can see them releasing a handheld with a “custom” version of Windows that allows users to install Steam, GOG, Epic, etc… then bait and switch with a future “feature update” that makes compatibility “too hard” to support or a “security risk”. Maybe the desktop mode is a “developer only” option that gets disabled, or you have to enable third party apps like in windows 10 S and that ability gets taken away. I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft.

Maybe I’m just peeved at Microsoft for deciding that my VR headset will be E-waste even though the hardware is fine, or ignoring the concept of user consent by enabling OneDrive cloud backups for local folders by default while basically forcing you to create a Microsoft account to install Windows if you don’t know the right sequence of arcane f-ing rituals to create a local account. But I don’t trust them…

I’m sure the EU will love that bit of malicious compliance that apple have shown they will use to remove non-malware that they just don’t approve of using the same mechanism…

Not sure if this is what you’re talking about but RIP the coolest media that never got to production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

INB4 trust fund babies and gormless capitalists go and ream every last fucking cent from the brand destroying it in the process before moving on to the next thing.

It would be weird if they were listening to criticism of other handhelds and still went with windows.

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How is ROCm these days? I remember needing the official AMD drivers for OpenCL stuff a while ago and ROCm was in very early development.

I mean if you pay attention most social media inundated with influencers and companies is basically:

“Buy this, no buy this, buy this instead, spend your money here!” It even leeches into everyday conversations outside of social media.

Pay attention to how often people talk about buying things and newly released products. Hell, I’ve caught myself contributing to it. It’s kind of gross when you realize how steeped in consumerism nearly everything has become.

What I’m getting from this is that some monopoly busting is sorely needed.

What happens if you take a picture of the screen with your phone? Not ideal in terms of quality but I’m willing to bet it would work as a stupid easy bypass.

What I’d like to see is an image format that is digitally signed by default so that modifications can be flagged and the source can be verified. Yeah people could modify them for malicious use cases (I don’t think it will be possible to ever prevent that unfortunately) but at least we’d know that it wasn’t the original. This doesn’t work for cases where people want to be anonymous but for things like social media selfies and posts where people are visible it could be helpful in preventing people spreading deepfakes and claiming they’re real.

Voice typing long messages is IMO faster than using a phone keyboard, even with gesture typing.

Pure “prompt → image” with nothing in between I absolutely agree. It’s lazy and ripe for abuse by copyright trolls. That being said there’s a lot more in the world of AI assisted art than what most people are aware of.

Determining where the legal lines will be drawn is going to be a monumental task but I think there’s value in allowing authors to retain copyright on AI assisted works. I also can’t see the free open source models not going the way of restricting training data to public domain works like Adobe did with Firefly if that becomes a legal issue.

My pie in the sky hope is that copyright somehow becomes less stringent after all of this.

Don’t get me wrong I want protections for creators and support reasonable copyright (life of the author +25 years with the possibility of a 15 year extension) but letting a company lord over an IP for damn near a century isn’t ideal for anyone.

So, what you’re saying is maybe one more lane in space then? /s

FWIW, I totally agree. It’s just that I’ve lost hope in people after disposable single-use Li-Po battery banks. Who knows, maybe I’m wrong and the public will start to push more for public transit rather than buy the next new shiny.

I try, but it does feel kind of hopeless.

Hey, if someone can actually do it in a way that:

• Satisfies public safety requirements
• Satisfies all legal requirements
• Restricts usage to trained pilots or autopilot
• Runs on electricity or other low/zero emission fuel source
• Lasts an appreciable amount of time before recharge

Then it may free up public roads enough to push pedestrian and bike usage while offering people a large incentive to go electric. I just don’t think the technology for personal automobile-aircraft hybrids is there yet.

I’d love to be proven wrong.

I just kind of assumed that they, as well as anyone in the space was doing that already.

Whether that means that we all collectively have ownership over the outputs of these models if they’re trained on content that we produced over the years is another thing. As someone who uses AI tools a fair bit I would be totally fine with generated content being public domain unless a threshold for human intervention is met.

That threshold is where the messy legal work lies.

They can ban google accounts of people who use those apps though. I can see them doing it.

Have you checked out something like https://github.com/serge-chat/serge? It’s changed a bit since I installed it, but I remember it being pretty quick to set-up.

I was doing some photography with a 50mm equivalent prime and didn’t want to go back to my car to get a wider lens for a shot that I was a bit too close to get the framing I wanted for. So I took 6 photos of the scene and stitched them together as a panorama with Hugin.

Turns out I was missing the bottom right corner and I had a big black square ruining the shot. So I took the post-processed panorama into GIMP, drew a crude outline of what I thought would be there and used StableDiffusion’s Img2Img to generate the missing bit.

A little messy, but better than losing the image entirely.
(Unfortunately the image includes things that would get me doxxed instantly)

As for LLM’s. Apparently GIMP doesn’t have a bulk export function that exports all active images at once. So instead of exporting 140 images that I had masked for photogrammetry manually one at a time, I asked Bing Chat if it could make me a GimpFu script to batch export.

It gave me this:

from gimpfu import *

def export_all_images():
    for image in gimp.image_list():
        filename = image.filename
        if filename:
            new_filename = filename.rsplit(".", 1)[0] + ".jpg"
            pdb.gimp_file_save(image, image.active_layer, new_filename, new_filename)
        else:
            print("Image has no filename. Skipping.")

export_all_images()

which worked and saved me quite a bit of time.

I was thinking the absolute worst case scenario is a bad faith use of the regulatory laws aimed at Meta but put on a firehose and aimed at federated servers who don’t prostrate before them.

Things like partnering with copyright holders for automated DMCA floods for literally all images on the instance that have copyrighted content visible.