Giphy has a documented API that you could use. There have been bulk downloaders, but I didn’t see any that had recent activity. However you still might be able to use one to model your own script after, like https://github.com/jcpsimmons/giphy-stacks

There were downloaders for Gfycat - gallery-dl supported it at one point - but it’s down now. However you might be able to find collections that other people downloaded and are now hosting. You could also use the Internet Archive - they have tools and APIs documented

There’s a Tenor mass downloader that uses the Tenor API and an API key that you provide.

Imgur has GIFs is supported by gallery-dl, so that’s an option.

Also, read over https://github.com/simon987/awesome-datahoarding - there may be something useful for you there.

In terms of hosting, it would depend on my user base and if I want users to be able to upload GIFs, too. If it was just my close friends, then Immich would probably be fine, but if we had people I didn’t know directly using it, I’d want a more refined solution.

There’s Gifable, which is pretty focused, but looks like it has a pretty small following. I haven’t used it myself to see how suitable it is. If you self-host it (or something else that uses S3), note that you can use MinIO or LocalStack for the S3 container rather than using AWS directly. I’m using MinIO as part of my stack now, though for a completely different app.

MediaCMS is another option. Less focused on GIFs but more actively developed, and intended to be used for this sort of purpose.

Wouldn’t be a huge change at this point. Israel has been using AI to determine targets for drone-delivered airstrikes for over a year now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip gives a high level overview of Gospel and Lavender, and there are news articles in the references if you want to learn more.

This is at least being positioned better than the ways Lavender and Gospel were used, but I have no doubt that it will be used to commit atrocities as well.

For now, OpenAI’s models may help operators make sense of large amounts of incoming data to support faster human decision-making in high-pressure situations.

Yep, that was how they justified Gospel and Lavender, too - “a human presses the button” (even though they’re not doing anywhere near enough due diligence).

But it’s worth pointing out that the type of AI OpenAI is best known for comes from large language models (LLMs)—sometimes called large multimodal models—that are trained on massive datasets of text, images, and audio pulled from many different sources.

Yes, OpenAI is well known for this, but they’ve also created other types of AI models (e.g., Whisper). I suspect an LLM might be part of a solution they would build but that it would not be the full solution.

Unless something has changed, it did. The page linked reads:

And, obviously, this POC is open source, the code is publish here on our forge.

The link takes you to their repos. The server repo has instructions on self-hosting directly on your server or with Docker. The app repo has code for both the iOS and Android apps. That’s good, because the iOS app at least doesn’t have a built-in way to select a different backend server.

Whisper is by OpenAI and as far as I know they have not shared the training code, much less the data sets, so the best you can do is fine-tune the models they’ve provided.

If use of Whisper is a problem, but the project is otherwise interesting to you, you could ask them to consider using a different STT solution (or allowing the user to choose between different options). I’m not aware of any fully open STT applications that are considered to be as capable as Whisper, but if you do, that would be great info to share with them.

What else have you tried?

Just don’t use Ubuntu. They do too much invisible fuckery with the system that hinders use on a server.

Would that warning also apply to Mint, since it’s based on Ubuntu, as well as other Ubuntu-based distros?

Depends on your perspective. Would it be fine for Meta Threads to replace it? Threads supports ActivityPub, so in some ways it likely interacts better with the fediverse.

If we agree that Threads isn’t a suitable replacement, then clearly there’s some criteria a replacement should meet. A lot of the things that make Threads unpalatable are also true of Bluesky, particularly if your concern relates to the platform being under the control of a corporation.

On the other hand, from the perspective of “Twitter 2.0 is now a toxic, alt-right cesspool where productive conversations can’t be had,” then both Threads and Bluesky are huge improvements.

As it is, you only see new comments if you scroll past the post again (and your client has refreshed it) or if you open it directly. If your client hasn’t updated the comment count or if you refresh your feed and the post falls off, you’ll never see it anyway.

A “Watch” feature would solve this better. If you watch a post, you get aggregated notifications for edits and comments on the post. If you watch a comment, you get aggregated notifications for replies to it or any of its children.

By aggregated notifications, I mean that you’d get one notification that said “The post you watched has been edited; 5 new comments” rather than a notification for each new comment.

Then, in addition to exposing a “Watch” action on posts and comments, clients could also enable users to automatically hide posts that are watched, either by marking them as hidden or by hiding watched posts without updates.

If the latter approach were taken, notifications might not even be necessary - the post could just get added back into the user’s feed when changes were made. It would result in a similar experience to forums, where new activity in a topic would bump it to the front, but it would only impact the people who were watching it.

You can kinda get that behavior by sorting your feed by Active, but this could be used with other sorting methods.

Your comment makes no sense.

The article you posted is from 2023 and PERA was basically dropped. However, this article talks about PREVAIL, which would prevent patents from being challenged except by the people who were sued by the patent-holder, and it’s still relevant.

• Assembled: 1200 USD
• Kit: 950 USD

No, game mechanics aren’t subject to copyright law. Game mechanics can be patented in the US, so long as they’re unique and nonobvious (to someone with ordinary skill in the field).

Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering both had patents on their mechanics, for example.

And of course, patents in Japan are a completely different animal than patents in the US.

500 grams of what, though? Folgers?

The current average price per pound (454 grams) of ground coffee beans in the US was double that just a couple months ago, so spending $3.00 per pound would necessitate getting cheaper than average - and therefore, likely lower quality than average, or at least lower perceived quality than average - beans.

The sorts of beans that companies tend to stock (IME) that are perceived as higher quality aren’t the same brands that I tend to buy (generally from local roasters), but they’re comparably priced. For a 5 pound (2267 grams) bag of one of their blends (which are roughly half the price of their higher end beans), it’s similar to what you’d pay for 5 pounds of Starbucks beans - about $50-$60.

Often when a company says “free coffee,” they don’t mean “free batch-brewed drip coffee,” but rather, free espresso beverages, potentially in a machine (located in the break room) that automates the whole process. I assume that’s what Intel is doing.

At $10 per pound (16 ounces) and roughly 1 ounce (28 grams) of beans per two ounce pour of espresso, that means that if each person on average drinks two per day, then that’s $1.25 for coffee per person per day.

However, logistics costs (delivering coffee to all the company’s break rooms) and operational costs (the cost of the automatic machine and repairs, at minimum; or the cost of baristas, or adding the responsibility to someone’s existing job (and thus needing more people or more hours) if just batch brewing) have to be added on top of that. Then add in the cost of milk, milk alternatives, sweeteners, cups, lids, stir sticks, etc…

Obviously if they just had free coffee grounds and let people handle the actual brewing of coffee in the break room, it would be much cheaper. But if the goal is to improve morale, having higher quality coffee that people don’t have to make themselves is going to do that better.

That’s $3.33 per employee per work day, assuming 50 5-day weeks per year. Seems a bit high to me, but not exorbitant. If the figure included things that they’re not reinstating (like free fruit) then that would make sense.

That’s fair, but he would be able to play the games in the meantime. And since hardware generally gets cheaper as time passes, if he could set aside more than the subscription fee each month to save for his own hardware, he’d be able to game in the meantime. And if he ever had to cancel it, he’d be closer to being able to buy his own hardware than he is today - meaning more time total spent gaming.

How so? The games aren’t purchased on GeForce Now and he could just cancel his subscription if they changed the service in a way he didn’t like.

Call me crazy, but if adults are on a gaming platform meant for kids causing problems, then they should probably be the ones restricted from spaces, not children.

How would you possibly do that in a way that didn’t invade the privacy of every child who wanted to explore those spaces?

Thanks for clarifying! I’ve heard nothing but praise for Kagi from its users so that’s what I was assuming, but Searxng has also been great so I wouldn’t have been too surprised if you’d compared them and found its results to be on par or better.

By the way, if you’re self hosting Searxng, you can use add your own index. Searxng supports YaCy, which is an actively developed, open source search index and crawler that can be operated standalone or as part of a decentralized (P2P) network. Here are the Searxng docs for that engine. I can’t speak to its quality as I still haven’t set it up, though.

there is a better open source meta search engines

I already use Searxng and have never used Kagi, but I’m curious why you say that Searxng is “better.” Are you saying that because the quality of the searches is better, because it’s open source and Kagi isn’t, or for some other reason?

I gather you’re from the US.

Yes, but also the prison abolition movement is US specific. I’m not affiliated with it, to be clear - not that I oppose it or anything, but I certainly don’t speak for any of its activists.

If we “only” reduce the prison population to 5% or 1% of its current count in the process

Then why call it abolish prisons?

Have you ever heard the quote “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars?” “Abolition” is a goal, an ideal - and even if it isn’t accomplished fully, working toward that end goal and considering everything necessary to get there along the way is the point.

Along those lines, I posit that if 90% of prisons are torn down or repurposed and the remaining 10% are drastically changed - holding fewer prisoners; not being privately owned and operated; focusing on rehabilitation, like learning new job skills, when possible, and otherwise simply being more humane, then the prison abolition movement would have succeeded.

But if you disagree with the name, what would you call it? “Prison Reform” is already taken and means something drastically different.

And to be clear, for some the goal is to eliminate prisons entirely. The movement isn’t monolithic. Abolishing the “prison institution” as it exists today is a pretty common goal, though, and using “prison” to mean “the prison institution” is a pretty common literary technique called “Synecdoche,” which you likely use every day.

I see now that you’re trying trying to trigger an additional emotional response. Working on association, rather than logic.

It’s a logical association, though. If the name evokes feelings of slavery, that’s a good thing, as the situation is similar enough to slavery to warrant that.

Slavery in the US is still legal (so long as the person is in prison). Black Americans are 5 times as likely to be in prison as white Americans. A black man born in 2001 has a 20% chance of being in prison at some point in his life.

The systemic oppression of black Americans is obviously because of racism, and the parallels between slavery and the prison institution aren’t accidental. For example, here’s a quote from Slavery and the U.S. Prison System:

Gary Webb’s famous investigation revealed that the CIA was operating a gun-running and drug-smuggling operation that brought guns to the Nicaraguan contras that the U.S. was using to destabilize the popular government in that country, while bringing cocaine into the U.S. and funneling it to street-level dealers with access to black inner-city neighborhoods.  The history of black street gangs is part of the afterlife of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counter-intelligence program that actively sabotaged black social movement throughout the long civil rights era.  Bobby Lavender, one of the founders of the Bloods in Los Angeles, explained that the COINTELPRO assassinations of black leaders, and the terrorizing of rank-and-file civil rights activists, left an organizational vacuum in many communities that youth like him filled with their “own brand of leadership.”  COINTELPRO established a pattern of law enforcement interference and sabotage of black self-determination, including gang truces, from the 1970s through to the present.

Such manipulation, especially, is something I would not want to be a part of. It’s vile.

Personally, I think the systemic sabotage of black people’s livelihood, communities, and families is vile, but you’re welcome to your opinion.

The name is important because of the parallels between slavery and modern day prisons.

At minimum, the movement is about completely rethinking our approach to dealing with crime. If we “only” reduce the prison population to 5% or 1% of its current count in the process, we won’t have abolished all prisons, but we will have succeeded in abolishing many parts of the current criminal justice system.