I just saw it today. Can confirm - it’s bad. Bad enough I’m upset it exists, because it practically taints the first.

The plot is pretty weak, and to make it worse, sporadically there are flashes that make you think it’s finally building towards something, and then it just fizzles.

With very few exceptions, the songs are bad both in terms of the music and the lyrics, and they slow the movie to a crawl.

Additionally, Lady Gaga’s lip synching is shameful, especially considering she’s most famous for music. Her performance is otherwise fine, but it feels like they could have put anyone in there. She didn’t bring anything to the role.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is pretty good, and the cinematography is good. But… Don’t see it. Definitely don’t pay for it. I wish I had my money and my time back.

This ignores the first part of my response - if I, as a legitimate user, might get caught up in one of these trees, either by mistakenly approving a bot, or approving a user who approves a bot, and I risk losing my account if this happens, what is my incentive to approve anyone?

Additionally, let’s assume I’m a really dumb bot creator, and I keep all of my bots in the same tree. I don’t bother to maintain a few legitimate accounts, and I don’t bother to have random users approve some of the bots. If my entire tree gets nuked, it’s still only a few weeks until I’m back at full force.

With a very slightly smarter bot creator, you also won’t have a nice tree:

As a new user looking for an approver, how do I know I’m not requesting (or otherwise getting) approved by a bot? To appear legitimate, they would be incentivized to approve legitimate users, in addition to bots.

A reasonably intelligent bot creator would have several accounts they directly control and use legitimately (this keeps their foot in the door), would mix reaching out to random users for approval with having bots approve bots, and would approve legitimate users in addition to bots. The tree ends up as much more of a tangled graph.

This ignores the first part of my response - if I, as a legitimate user, might get caught up in one of these trees, either by mistakenly approving a bot, or approving a user who approves a bot, and I risk losing my account if this happens, what is my incentive to approve anyone?

Additionally, let’s assume I’m a really dumb bot creator, and I keep all of my bots in the same tree. I don’t bother to maintain a few legitimate accounts, and I don’t bother to have random users approve some of the bots. If my entire tree gets nuked, it’s still only a few weeks until I’m back at full force.

With a very slightly smarter bot creator, you also won’t have a nice tree:

As a new user looking for an approver, how do I know I’m not requesting (or otherwise getting) approved by a bot? To appear legitimate, they would be incentivized to approve legitimate users, in addition to bots.

A reasonably intelligent bot creator would have several accounts they directly control and use legitimately (this keeps their foot in the door), would mix reaching out to random users for approval with having bots approve bots, and would approve legitimate users in addition to bots. The tree ends up as much more of a tangled graph.

I think this would be too limiting for humans, and not effective for bots.

As a human, unless you know the person in real life, what’s the incentive to approve them, if there’s a chance you could be banned for their bad behavior?

As a bot creator, you can still achieve exponential growth - every time you create a new bot, you have a new approver, so you go from 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8. Even if, on average, you had to wait a week between approvals, in 25 weeks (less that half a year), you could have over 33 million accounts. Even if you play it safe, and don’t generate/approve the maximal accounts every week, you’d still have hundreds of thousands to millions in a matter of weeks.

If your drive is the bottleneck, this will make things worse. If you want to proceed:

You’re already using ffmpeg to get the sequence of frames, correct? You can add the -ss and -t flags to give a start time and a duration. Generate a list of offsets by dividing the length of video by the number of processes you want, and feed them through gnu parallel to your ffmpeg command.

My first thought was similar - there might be some hardware acceleration happening for the jpgs that isn’t for the other formats, resulting in a CPU bottleneck. A modern harddrive over USB3.0 should be capable of hundreds of megabits to several gigabits per second. It seems unlikely that’s your bottleneck (though you can feel free to share stats and correct the assumption if this is incorrect - if your pngs are in the 40 megabyte range, your 3.5 per second would be pretty taxing).

If you are seeing only 1 CPU core at 100%, perhaps you could split the video clip, and process multiple clips in parallel?

I think it is less a question of whether the voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson, as that is subjective and arbitrary (e.g. assume you could objectively measure the similarity, what’s the acceptable cut off - 80%? 90%?). The same is true for the uniqueness of her voice.

I think the real question will come down to intention. They clearly wanted her voice. Did they intentionally attempt to replicate it when they couldn’t have the real thing? If so, there is precedent that would suggest they could be in a little trouble here, e.g. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-story.html

This kind of reminds me of Crispin Glover, from Back to the Future. He tried to negotiate a higher pay for the second movie, so the producers hired a different actor to play the role, but deliberately made the actor up to look like Glover. In response, Glover sued the producers and won. It set a critical precedent for Hollywood, about using someone’s likeness without consent.

The article mentions they reached out to her two days before the launch - if she had said ‘OK,’ there’s no way they could have even recorded what they needed from her, let alone trained the model in time for the presentation. So they must have had a Scarlett Johansson voice ready to go. Other than training the model on movies (really not ideal for a high quality voice model), how would they have gotten the recordings they needed?

If they hired a “random” voice actress, they might not run into issues. But if at any point they had a job listing, a discussion with a talent manager, or anything else where they mentioned wanting a “Scarlett Johansson sound-alike,” they might have dug themselves a nice hole here.

Specifically regarding your question about hiring a voice actor that sounds like someone else - this is commonly done to replace people for cartoons. I don’t think it’s an issue if you are playing a character. But if you deliberately impersonate a person, there might be some trouble.

Not to justify the actions of the shooter, but ringing the doorbell before breaking in is definitely a thing. It’s a means of checking if the house is occupied - if you’re just trying to steal things, an unoccupied house is ideal, and if someone answers when you ring, it’s easy enough to make up an excuse and walk away.

A much better solution than a gun, though, is a security door (similar to a screen door, but more kick proof).

Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but lirc has a database. Instructions for contributing files can be found here, files should adhere to the checklist here.

Considering that you are not using their software, was the laptop worth the premium you paid for it, vs buying from Clevo directly?

I figured the hardware and software coming from the same vendor would yield the best results, and wanted to support a company that supports right-to-repair, and Linux in general. But ultimately I found Pop!_OS buggy and had performance issues, so I’m not using their OS, and their firmware is causing issues with my SSD, so I’d like to be off of it as well (but was told "there’s no process for reverting to the proprietary firmware“ for the specific model I have). I could have bought a Clevo directly, saving hundreds of dollars, and probably had a better working machine.

Would not recommend System76. I’ve had many issues with my machine (primarily software, related to their buggy custom firmware, and Pop!_OS, until I ditched that for stock Ubuntu). Their support has been terrible - rather similar to OP’s, actually. I’ve had the laptop for about 2.5 years, and I’m checking practically daily for something to replace it.

You might get lucky. Based on https://support.system76.com/articles/system-firmware/, it doesn’t seem to be all models. Note however that the list is out-of-date; my galp5 is not listed, but does not work. Fortunately, I found this out doing a RAM check, and not a firmware upgrade.

My usb-c ports can be a little touchy, too. The SD card slot is also really bad - the card has to be positioned perfectly to slide in, or it jams. I’m also upset that the usb-c port can only be used for charging after a full boot. It cannot be used to perform firmware updates, or even to do a ram test. This means day-to-day, usb-c can be used, but I have to keep track of the barrel charger, just in case. This, of course, was not specified on the product details page (nor, I think, that only one of the two usb-c ports could be used for charging - it’s possible I overlooked that, but still frustrating on an expensive laptop that lists usb-c charging as a feature).

I currently have a System76 laptop, and sincerely regret my purchase. When I purchased it, the Framework was not out yet - I wanted to support a company that supports right-to-repair, and figured since they controlled the hardware, firmware, and software (Pop!_OS), it would be a good, stable experience. It has not been, and support has generally been poor. I know other people have had better experiences than I have, but personally, I won’t be buying from them again.

I haven’t personally used Purism, but former co-workers spoke really poorly of them. They were trying to buy a big batch for work, and said the build quality was awful. Additionally: https://youtu.be/wKegmu0V75s

According to the license, it is better than source available. You can modify and redistribute, you just can’t sell it. Other than that caveat, as far as I can tell, your rights are basically the same as with other open source licenses. (Feel free to correct me if I’ve missed something.)

I noted in another comment that SearXNG can’t do anything about the trackers that your browser can’t do, and solving this at the browser level is a much better solution, because it protects you everywhere, rather than just on the search engine.

Routing over Tor is similar. Yes, you can route the search from your SearXNG instance to Google (or whatever upstream engine) over Tor, and hide your identity from Google. But then you click a link, and your IP connects to the IP of whatever site the results link to, and your ISP sees that. Knowing where you land can tell your ISP a lot about what you searched for. And the site you connected to knows your IP, so they get even more information - they know every action you took on the site, and everything you viewed. If you want to protect all of that, you should just use Tor on your computer, and protect every connection.

This is the same argument for using Signal vs WhatsApp - yes, in WhatsApp the conversation may be E2E encrypted, but the metadata about who you’re chatting with, for how long, etc is all still very valuable to Meta.

To reiterate/clarify what I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not making the case that people shouldn’t use SearXNG at all, only that their privacy claims are overstated, and if your goal is privacy, all the levels of security you would apply to SearXNG should be applied at your device level: Use a browser/extension to block trackers, use Tor to protect all your traffic, etc.

They are explicitly trying to move away from Google, and are looking for a new option because their current solution is forcing them to turn off ad-blocking. Sounds to me like they are looking for a private option. Plus, given the forum in which we are having the discussion (Lemmy), even if OP is not specifically concerned with privacy, it seems likely other users are.

As for cookies, searxng can’t do any more than your browser (possibly with extensions) can do, and relying on your browser here is a much better solution, because it protects you on all sites, rather than just on your chosen search engine.

“Trash mountain” results is a whole separate issue - you can certainly tune the results to your liking. But literally the second sentence of their GitHub headline is touting no tracking or profiling, so it seems worth bringing attention to the limitations, and that’s all I’m trying to do here.

You mean between their instance and the final search engines? Or between them and a public instance of searxng?

In either case, I’m not sure it buys you anything in terms of privacy you wouldn’t get by using the VPN and going directly to the search engines.

It looks like a few people are recommending this, so just a quick note in case people are unaware:

If you want to avoid being tracked, this is not a good solution. Searxng is a meta search engine, meaning it is effectively a proxy: you search on Searxng, it searches multiple sites and sends all the results back to you. If you use a public instance, you may be protected from the actual search engine*, because many people will use the same instance, and your queries will be mixed in with all of them. If you self host, however, all the searches will be your own - there is then no difference between using Searxng and just going to the site yourself.

*The caveat with using the public instances is while you may be protected from the upstream engine, you have to trust the admins - nothing stops them from tracking you themselves (or passing your data on).

Despite the claims in their docs, I would not consider this a privacy tool. If you are just looking for a good search engine, this may work, and it gives you flexibility and power to tune it yourself. But it’s probably not going to do anything good for your privacy, above and beyond what you can get from other meta search engines like Startpage and DuckDuckGo, or other “private” search engines like Brave.