Fediverse Report 137 - this week’s fediverse news
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[li]altstore joins the fediverse, and you can interact with apps on the alternative iOS app store now via your fediverse accounts. Altstore also made a 500k USD donation to various fediverse platform
Fediverse Report 137 - this week's fediverse news
altstore joins the fediverse, and you can interact with apps on the alternative iOS app store now via your fediverse accounts. Altstore also made a 500k USD donation to various fediverse platforms
Mastodon is getting Starter Packs, with more details on the design, soliciting feedback
A New Social announced a new version for Bounce, which allows you to transfer your account from the fediverse to #bluesky
AltStore, an alternative app store for iOS, is joining the fediverse. The store launched early last year as an alternative to Apple’s own App Store, thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act. AltStore has been growing over the last year, and is now taking the next steps. AltStore is now connecting to the fediverse via their own Mastodon server. The integration that AltStore has build consists of every app on the store automatically also becoming a fediverse account, hosted on their AltStore Mastodon server. They explain: “Using ActivityPub, we plan to federate apps, app updates, and news alerts from AltStore to the open social web. Each AltStore source will receive its own ActivityPub account, which can then be followed by any other open social web account. You’ll be able to like, boost, and reply to everything, and most importantly all these interactions will appear natively in AltStore.” For now, they are using the microblogging format (ActivityPub ‘Notes’), but AltStore plans to publish new native ActivityPub objects specifically for software releases, that can be used by other fediverse app market places.
The organisation also has raised 6M USD in VC funding for further development. They believe that the long-term success of the AltStore is tied closely to the success of the open social web, and they are donation 500k USD to various fediverse projects. AltStore is donating 300k USD to Mastodon, and the other 200k USD is split across various fediverse projects: the bridging software Bridgy Fed (which AltStore uses to also connect their store to Bluesky), the fediverse clients Ivory, Phoenix and Tapestry, the mastodon server mstn.social (as operator Stux is also a regular publisher to the AltStore), and the platforms Akkoma, PeerTube and Bookwyrm, as well as the Fedify ActivityPub software framework.
Recently I wrote about how the app stores are the most likely choke point that authoritarian governments will use to apply pressure to force open social web platforms into compliance. Alternative ways of distributing apps that fall outside of the control of two Big Tech platforms is a crucial part of keeping the open social web open. AltStore connecting their marketplace to the fediverse is a great step into taking back control from these two gatekeepers, although much more work remains to be done. Over on ATProto people are also experimenting with distributing apps and software packages via the protocol, and the space of app distribution via open protocols is primed for more experimentation and projects.
Mastodon has shared more information on their upcoming plans to introduce ‘Packs’ to Mastodon. The design is based on Bluesky’s Starter Packs, which is a list of accounts you can create and share for other people to easily follow. Mastodon is taking a careful approach to designing the feature, and is actively soliciting feedback from the community. The main change that Mastodon is making is in giving people control over if and when they can appear in a Pack, as well as giving people the ability to easily remove their account from a Pack if they so desire.
One of the pain points for Starter Packs on Bluesky is that people got included on Starter Packs with no easy way to remove them from the list. When the Starter Pack got popular, that resulted in an account getting lots of new followers, but in a way that collapsed the context of the account, resulting in conflict. One of the challenge points with Starter Packs is that the identity of an account does not always match with what they are actually posting about. For example, if someone has a PhD in philosophy and sometimes posts about that, they might get added to a philosophy Starter Pack. But in practice they might mostly post about US politics, or reposts anime, which creates a mismatch in expectation and friction between the original account and the new follower from a Starter Pack.
Bluesky’s Starter Pack have gotten a lot of praise for their effectiveness in onboarding entire communities at the same time during migration waves, when entire communities move from one platform to another all at once. This seems to be one of the major reasons for Mastodon to also adopt a similar feature with Packs. But for Bluesky, the feature has turned out to be a mixed bag, with the developer who created Starter Packs being decidedly mixed on the feature herself. She says that Starter Packs are indeed highly valuable during migration waves, but that in other times they are susceptible to abuse for engagement-hacking, as well as the context collapse earlier. Mastodon is taking a careful approach with their Pack feature, and they are actively engaging with the learnings from Bluesky, so it’ll be interesting to see how the feature will turn out in Mastodon.
You can soon transfer your social graph from Mastodon to Bluesky, with the new version of Bounce. Bounce is a tool by A New Social, the organisation behind the bridging software that connects various open social web protocol. With Bounce, you can move your account from one social networking protocol to another. The organisation earlier released a version which allows you to port your Bluesky account to the fediverse. With the new update, which will be available on October 20, you can now do the same in reverse: move from the fediverse to Bluesky.
The projects by A New Social, both Bounce and Bridgy Fed, represent an effort to give people more control over their own digital identity and social graph. Both ActivityPub and ATProto give people the option to move their account to a different platform on the same protocol. With tools like Bounce, this capability is enhanced even more, with the ability to move an account to a different protocol as well. For people more interested in moving from Bluesky to the fediverse, the tool Slurp now allows you to import your Bluesky posts into your fediverse account.
Fediverse podcasting platform Castopod now has a repository for plugins for the platform. With plugins people can customise their Castopod instance to their own needs. As anyone can create plugins, this allows for greater diversity in development of the software. Castopod also announced during this week’s Fediforum that there are now over 1000 podcasts using Castopod.
A pro-Russian propaganda network has targeted the fediverse and Bluesky, “promoting pro-Russian narratives and linking to Telegram channels associated with known state-aligned disinformation operations”, IFTAS reports. Their findings are based on the work of the antibot4navalny research team, which notes that the campaign makes use of the Bridgy Fed to get their accounts that impersonate news organisations into Bluesky.
The ActivityPub framework Fedify has gotten a 192K EUR grant by the Sovereign Tech Fund to further strenghten the ecosystem. The grant will be used for further development of the framework. Fedify is already in use by Ghost, and is also supported by Ghost.
Mastodon is soliciting feedback for their new Terms of Service for their mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers. The organisation originally proposed a new ToS in June, but retracted those after criticism from the community.
China is increasing military activities near Taiwan and honing its ability to stage a surprise attack, as well as seeking to undermine trust in the government with "hybrid" online warfare tactics, the defense ministry said today.
Taiwan has faced increased military pressure from Beijing during the past five years, including at least seven rounds of major war games around Taiwan since 2022.
"The Chinese communists have adopted routine grey zone harassment tactics, combined with joint combat readiness patrols, targeted military exercises and cognitive warfare, posing a comprehensive threat to us," the defense ministry said in a report released every two years.
[...]
Beijing is also using "hybrid warfare" to weaken people's trust in the government and support for defence spending, and using artificial intelligence tools to weaken Taiwan's cybersecurity and to scan for weak points in critical infrastructure, it added.
"Through both conventional and unconventional military actions, it aims to test its capabilities for attacking Taiwan and confronting foreign forces," the ministry said.
[...]
The report said China is using a "professional cyber army" to manipulate social media accounts and flood them with misinformation to sow division in Taiwanese society and weaken trust in the government.
Chinese state media outlets and collaborators have also worked to weaken the will to fight, it said.
The ministry added China has also been using deepfake technology to make videos and utilising AI to "generate polarising political rhetoric".
[...]
The report was released one day before Lai gives his key national day speech. China last year held war games after that same event in what it said was a warning to "separatist acts".
China won't get a damn thing if they invade. Taiwan has bombs strapped to every server, computer, and machine. The moment China steps one foot on the island, everything they are invading for goes up in smoke. It'll cost them a million fighters lives for a bombed out island. Sadly, China isn't going to let that stop them. They have 3 years to take the Taiwan while America continues to crumble under Trump. Right now I doubt our military is prepared for any boots on the ground war because Trump just insulted every general and military personnel.
At the time of his arrest in 2015, Gui Minhai held only Swedish citizenship. Chinese officials have frequently stated that foreign passports do not protect individuals who were born in the People’s Republic of China, an interpretation that violates the Vienna Convention.
In February 2020, a Chinese court sentenced Gui Minhai to 10 years in prison on charges of ‘illegally providing intelligence abroad’, after a secret and unfair trial where he has been denied proper legal representation and access to Swedish consular services.
His current whereabouts are still unknown.
On 9 October, an overwhelming majority of 546 out of 593 Members of the European Parliament voted of a resolution calling on the European External Action Service (EEAS), the European Commission and EU member states to urge China to release Swedish publisher Gui Minhai.
JOINT MOTION FOR A RESOLUTION pursuant to Rules 150(5) and 136(4) of the Rules of Procedure replacing the following motions: B10-0412/2025 (The Left) B10-0414/2025 (Verts/ALE) B10-0429/2025 (Renew) B10-0431/2025 (S&D) B10-0433/2025 (PPE) B10-0435/202…
In February 2020, a Chinese court sentenced Gui Minhai to 10 years in prison on charges of ‘illegally providing intelligence abroad’, after a secret and unfair trial
The first sign of the American order came when a Houston TV station aired video showing people in the courtyard of the consulate apparently burning documents on Tuesday night.
Demonstrations went ahead despite calls from politicians and police leaders for the protests to be postponed in wake of the Manchester synagogue attack.
Americans will believe this about a Swede distributing anti-Communist agitprop, then lose their fucking minds if they see a Confucius Center or a Mosque open up in their neighborhood.
As the world observes the 36th International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction under the theme Fund Resilience, Not Disasters, China emphasizes the importance of science and technology in strengthening its disaster prevention and response capabilities.
However, it is that seemingly arbitrary three-times-a-year limit applied to the People section that is most concerning. Why not four? Why not as many times as a user wants?
Possibly because deleting or recreating the data is resource-intensive on the servers. It might actually be a good sign that Microsoft really removes the data, not just mark it inactive, when you turn the feature off.
"Microsoft OneDrive is rolling out AI face recognition for your photos." To disable (for now), go to Privacy & Permissions → People section. (if you are in EU, maybe it is deactivated by default) source: https://x.com/ProtonDrive/status/1978109833690665463
Yeah but they are taking your data from the laptop your mum bought yesterday and put all the family vacation pictures on. Mum didn't know she had to kill off OneDrive or Microsoft will hoover up and monetise your memories.
Fortunately not... I'm generally the one responsible for IT maintenance with my parents' as they get older. Disabled OneDrive long ago since they don't use it.
No, you really, truly can’t “rugged individualism” your way out of a societal problem. Remember that wedding you went to a few months ago? Someone uploaded this photos and now your social graph has been recorded. When your friend’s kid had a birthday party a few weeks ago? You were uploaded and graphed again. When you were out at that restaurant and you were in the background of someone’s date selfie? Graphed again.
The only solution to this problem is real data protection law, like the GDPR in the EU.
Oh, I definitely agree. We need better privacy and data protection laws here in Australia too. In the meantime, however, I do what I can to minimise my footprint. I'm well aware that other people are going to be the weak link!
I'm having computer issues in that after a couple of minutes of running windows crash, I get a blue screen and windows forces a restart.
That's NOT my problem.
it's a very good feature. if you have too much work and need a longer break, just restart a few times. i may need to change my work laptop from macbook to a windows
This is why I decided to dual-boot Ubuntu and Win10 until I'm fully comfortable on Linux. Every single thing about Win11 just makes my skin crawl.
Last week it was the news that they're eliminating methods to install the OS at all without being signed into a MS account. The degree of snooping had no plausible explanation other than for Microsoft to harvest and sell your data.
As someone who was in your exact position several years ago, nice!
I'd recommend Linux Mint to newcomers though. It's based on Ubuntu and is even easier to get comfortable with (much better GUI for updates and app "store"), but it strips out all the Microsoft-like stuff that Canonical have been doing in recent years.
Pop!_OS (also based on Ubuntu) and Bazzite are also meant to be beginner friendly, and are particularly geared towards gaming on Linux, especially the latter.
Great thing about Linux is you can change your distro whenever you want.
If you're uncertain, or not ready to go through the process just yet, you can always just boot Bazzite off a USB drive and play around with it for now.
Preventing their shitty brute force protection from allowing someone to get a users MS account password because they are FORCING users to use a non-local account?
The computer would have to store a hash locally to authenticate that account offline, so this is very likely why this is here. Because they've enabled a path to brute forcing their cloud accounts without their servers knowing.
The windows shithole is just layers of bad design all the way down.
I think that’s why it’s recommended to encrypt files containing personal information with a separate tool before uploading them to any cloud service. It prevents big data from automatically processing your Information and protects you from leaks.
Why do you think no one asks for stuff like this? Facial recognition is one of the best features of photo storage systems as it lets you easily find all of your photos that have certain people in them. It’s fantastic for making shared albums with family members where any pics of certain people are automatically added once recognized.
Onedrive having it makes using Onedrive for photo storage and sharing a much better experience.
Only if it can be done locally. I don't want my fucking face going out to a bunch of asshole corporations databases any more than absolutely necessary. Shit like this is why I don't let people take my picture.
Not sure why people are talking about the “you can only enable or disable it 3 times a year” as if it’s an issue? This is generally a thing you’d either turn off or on once, depending on what it defaults to. Why would anyone need to turn it on or off 3 times in a year?
I would assume that the "arbitrary limit" is actually based on something like the amount of processing power that it could take to go through every single photo/file that is uploaded.
Anyway, even if it is arbitrary - what reason would anyone have to turn it on and off more than 3x a year? It's something you'd decide you either want or you don't.
However, it is that seemingly arbitrary three-times-a-year limit applied to the People section that is most concerning. Why not four? Why not as many times as a user wants?
If it works the same way Immich does, probably because they have to retrain the models every time you turn it back on and want to aboid poeple turning it on when they need it, then off again, then back on, ... Although a less shitty mehod would be to limit the amount of times you can turn it on but I guess that iterferes with their goal of harvesting your data.
A simple, lightweight PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform various other changes to customize, declutter and improve your Windows experience. Win11D...
One of the best-known photographers in Mexico. Her work looks away from the sensational images of violence that have for years defined the nation, and instead looks inwards, to the traditions, faces, and unusual sights seen everyday.
Iturbide came to photography later in life. She was the eldest daughter of a wealthy, conservative couple. In 1962, she married the photographer Pedro Meyer and had three children. It was after the death of her daughter in 1970, aged just 6, that Iturbide turned to photography.
The 5th image is perhaps her best-known photograph. Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), it was originally published as part of her photo essay Juchitán de las Mujeres (1979-86), a project which began with Iturbide's support of feminist causes.
Iturbide was also involved in documenting the indigenous cultures of Mexico. This image, Mujer Ángel, in which a woman carries a tape recorder on her journey to ancient cave paintings. was shot in 1979 in the Sonora desert, when Iturbide was living with the Seri Indians.
In many of her photographs there is a sense of playfulness and strangeness. These qualities are at odds with many people's expectations or experiences of Mexico. Iturbide has always strived to look beyond the lurid headlines, to the absurdity of life.
Folk stories and religious themes are common throughout her work. Particularly when the visual language of the catholic church meets ancient native traditions and the realities of contemporary life.
Iturbide started photographing landscapes and birds. She had heard the Seri Indians talk of the significance of birds, and she began to incorporate living and dead birds into her art; symbolic of strength and fragility, freedom and vulnerability.
In the mid-1980s she photographed Mexican-Americans in Eastside Los Angeles, many of whom were involved in street gangs. The cholos and cholas of the White Fence Gang would later feature in the anthology A Day in the Life of America (1987).
With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data—including thousands of T-Mobile users’ calls and texts and even US military communications—sent by satellites unencrypted.
With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data—including thousands of T-Mobile users’ calls and texts and even US military communications—sent by satellites unencrypted.
Reminds me of from 1995. It was built from behind-the-scenes footage captured from live satellite feeds from the 1992 Presidential election and the 1992 Rodney King LA riots.
I just watched that for the first time a couple weeks ago. Very enlightening. The bits with Larry King were also completely insane. I would love to see the debate he moderated between Clinton and 'Poppy' Bush in an alternate timeline. That could have been pure chaos.
The Green party of England and Wales, at its conference last week, passed a landmark – and long overdue – motion backed by the Greens’ new, Jewish party leader Zack Polanski demanding the proscription, or banning as a terrorist group, of the so-called ‘Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF), in reality an arm of the terror state occupying Palestine, as well as calling for an apology by the UK to the Palestinian people for the ‘Balfour Declaration’ that paved the way for the theft of their land to create Israel as an ethnostate.
The Green Party: IDF are terrorists
It is the first time a UK political party has named the IDF as a terror group, despite the Israeli regime’s genocide and endless crimes against the Palestinians for the past two years and for decades before that.
The motion calls for:
The Israeli military (IDF) to be banned under UK counter-terrorism law, so that participation in or praise of its operations could be criminalised;A formal apology from the British government to the people of Palestine for the Balfour Declaration;An immediate cease of Israeli military operations in Gaza, a withdrawal of forces, and the guarantee of humanitarian access – food, water, medical supplies – to civilians;Support for the International Criminal Court’s case of genocide, and a full arms embargo on Israel;The end of British training, intelligence sharing, and spy-plane flights over Palestinian territory;Use of British shipping resources to deliver aid to Gaza and the West Bank;Deployment of a UN peacekeeping force into Gaza and the West Bank to protect Palestinian lives.
There is, of course, zero chance of the Starmer government classifying the IDF – and therefore itself for aiding it – as terrorists, or of either Reform or the Tories, both strongly Zionist, doing so either. All the more reason to do everything to ensure a Green/Your Party coalition is in government after the next general election.
Now that I know what's really going-on: it's a policy of Netanyahu's "Israel".. it makes much more sense.
( Thank you Lemmy.World for informing me of that doctrine, the other day )
It also makes-obvious that you have to meet force with force proportionately, such that any player who always throws-around disproportionate-destruction so as to always-increase their control-of-the-world, you HAVE to hit them with force-equal-to-what-they're-throwing-around, XOR you are accommodating-their-gaining-control-of-our-world.
Same as always, G-D's law is reflective, and that means equal-and-opposite-force. ( yes, same as physics )
The really-sad thing about Netanyahu's "Israel" is that their own scripture, like Jeremiah & Isaiah, identify that their relationship with their god is cyclical: with-god then against-god .. and when they go against-their-god, then their-god torches them.
So, IF their scripture holds-true, and their god is as it/"he" stated in their scripture, THEN Netanyahu's "Israel" should be toast, shortly.
if their god won't torch them, or enforce-their-torching, THEN their god is .. evil, apparently, or intermittent, or .. periodic, or something.
So, the Scientific thing to do, is simply .. wait & see.
Let's see if their scripture is right, & they're getting torched, shortly..
If so, then maybe their god is someone of integrity..
( for a bit more context, Jews are ordered to NOT read all of Isaiah, apparently, by their rabbis:
1 entire chapter of it is forbidden because it looks too-much like it backs the root-guru of the Christians, benJoseph.
The whole concept of rabbis outranking the prophets of Judaism .. I find that hard to reconcile with logic, you know?
but ideological-contortionism is normal, among humans.. )
whatever. From what I've read, zionists insist that Ezekiel .. iirc it is 39 .. vetoes all Jeremiah & Isaiah, & blesses their genociding of ALL peoples around them..
Therefore genociding Palestinians is just the beginning, right?
Rabies is rabies.
Ideological-rabies is ideological-rabies, it doesn't matter whether it is "zionist" or "christian" or "islamist" or "capitalist"/moneyarchist/oligarchist or "buddhist" or "hindutva" or "atheist" or "confucian" or "marxist" or "leninist" or "right-wing" or "fascist" or mass-shooter or ANY ideological-rabies:
we've got the inherent right to fight against ideological-rabies!
Same as the right to fight against the biological rabies, & ebola, too.
Healthiness is a right!
Always was, always will be.
Anyone opposing healthiness-is-a-right is .. representing wrongness.
With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data—including thousands of T-Mobile users’ calls and texts and even US military communications—sent by satellites unencrypted.
“Generally, our users choose the encryption that they apply to their communications to suit their specific application or need,” says a spokesperson for SES, the parent company of Intelsat. “For SES’s inflight customers, for example, SES provides a public Wi-Fi hot spot connection similar to the public internet available at a coffee shop or hotel. On such public networks, user traffic would be encrypted when accessing a website via HTTPS/TLS or communicating using a virtual private network.”
Can't decide the side of the fence I am on for this. Of course the vast majority of Internet traffic across the world is unencrypted. Anyone could be on the line between me and this Lemmy instance, just as they could if there was a satellite between us. However, you're also broadcasting it to like 25% of the globe and not even making any kind of physical infrastructure efforts.
Quest can't entirely guarantee nobody will snoop a fiber line, but they do bury them.
At the start of 2023, we sunsetted the HTTPS Everywhere web extension. It encrypted browser communications with websites and made sure users benefited from the protection of HTTPS wherever possible.
I mean, some parts of the protocols we use for the Internet need to be in the clear to work, DNS comes to mind. If you want that kept private as well you need to use something like tor.
But regardless, what people generally actually care about keeping secret is the content, not the protocol.
I mean, some parts of the protocols we use for the Internet need to be in the clear to work, DNS comes to mind. If you want that kept private as well you need to use something like tor.
Not really. We also have DNS over HTTPs, DNS over TLS, and DNSCrypt which are all becoming more popular. But that's still application level data that I'm not really talking about.
But regardless, what people generally actually care about keeping secret is the content, not the protocol.
A lot of information can be gleaned from protocol metadata though. Source, destination, which applications are being used, maybe more depending on protocols. Not exactly information I want to be easily available to the public, but also not exactly critical either.
Typically satellites have beams they turn on and off to service different areas, with one beam pointing towards the RAN that receives the data rather than just repeating a broadcast out to everywhere the satellite can theoretically reach. For mobile telecom backhaul via satellite it is standardized that the data should be encrypted for untrusted transport links so this seems to me like an issue of not following specs.
I remember reading that drug cartells in South America are using disused military communications satellites.
These satellites simply takes a signal recieved on one band and rebroadcast it on another band over a wide area, so as long as the satellite can pick up your signal you can basically talk to an entire continent at once, all while remaining anonymous.
Nope, lol. These suckers are fucking ancient. There isn’t any processing, you can’t overload something that isn’t actually reading the data or using a protocol.
They still use energy, no? To relay signals on another frequency. That should come from somewhere, and also the more different signals, the more noise. And without their input frequency being regulated, there must be lots of noise.
I'm not talking about technical things, just that IRL on regulated frequencies one can do something because people using it for bullshit are legally prosecuted. Depends on wavelength, of course.
But OK, now I think I get what you are talking about.
Well the biggest steps I'm going to assume are having a satellite dish, knowing where to point it, knowing what to send, then hope that someone is listening. Much easier for a hooligan to throw a rock at someone or find a can of spray paint
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Saatvik Green Energy, one of India's biggest solar module makers by capacity, said on Thursday it is shunning the once-promising U.S. export market as it is no longer "worth the risk" due to the thorny tariff issue
Are these likely to be used to get people off home coal though? To do that you need to replace the infrastructure that uses coal with electric. That's no small undertaking.
There's the tarrifs and theres the bizarre anti-renewable energy sentiment harbored by the current administration.
Personally, I think that's just coming from power utilities pushing the idea that, "it's cool if WE build a solar array but it's not cool if YOU do it."
No, it's stupidier and more nakedly corrupt. Fossil fuel companies gave Trump over a billion dollars in political donations, and fossil fuel jobs look "manly" and have "big trucks."
That's about it. He can appeal to rural voters in rural states working dying jobs while the companies he gives trillions in subsides to give him billions in donations back. For that, he'll kill the planet faster and trap millions in low wage, dangerous jobs instead of just letting solar and wind naturally ramp up.
Access to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat on mobile phones is currently restricted in Afghanistan. This comes after the Taliban cut internet and telecommunications services for two days last week.
The apps don't do anything useful if the government blocks connectivity to the servers that the software needs to talk to at the national network infrastructure level.
On October 13, a court outside Paris will put on trial Dr. Dilnur Reyhan, a prominent French-Uyghur scholar and activist, and the president of the European Uyghur Institute, for the criminal offense of “degradation of property belonging to others.”
Three employees of China’s embassy in Paris had filed a complaint against Dilnur Reyhan for her participation in a protest against the Chinese government at a Paris-area music festival in September 2022. During the festival, she allegedly threw red paint on an embassy banner, which, one plaintiff reported, resulted in a €25 shoe-cleaning fee.
The Chinese government alleged that Dilnur Reyhan had caused “damage to property” and that it was a “racist attack” -- a charge later dropped. Dilnur Reyhan was publicly protesting Chinese government crimes against the Uyghurs in northwest China, including mass arbitrary detention and imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearances, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, separation of families, and forced labor. Human Rights Watch and others have concluded that some of these acts amount to crimes against humanity.
“For the Chinese embassy, the aim is not to win or lose the case, but to impose a psychological and financial cost [on me] to silence [my] criticism,” Dilnur Reyhan said during a hearing in March. “I should not be prosecuted by the French courts but, instead, protected against China’s attempts to silence me.”
[...]
The prosecutor initially dismissed the Chinese government’s complaint in 2023. But the prosecutor reopened it on appeal a month after Chinese President Xi Jinping made an official visit to France in May 2024 and hundreds of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and others protested. A hearing scheduled for March 2025 was postponed until October when neither the Chinese embassy representatives nor its employees showed up.
In recent years the Chinese government has escalated its harassment of critics abroad and members of the diaspora, acts of abuse beyond China’s borders known as “transnational repression.” For instance, in July Chinese authorities arrested a Chinese student, Tara Zhang Yadi, for the grave crime of “inciting separatism,” all because she advocated for Tibetan rights while studying in Paris.
Not OP and not particularly knowledgeable, but under Modi India has shifted into something closer to old-school, early 1900s fascism than almost any other country currently. For example, his rise to power was largely on the back of inciting mob violence against Muslims while giving the perpetrators impunity. He continued that policy on the national level, and his party's paramilitary wing is much like the Brownshirts.
Coordinated Pro-Russian Propaganda Network Targeting ActivityPub and ATProto Services
Update October 25: Accounts are still being created (571 observed so far), and a number of servers are either unwilling or unresponsive in removing these accounts. A list of servers recommended for limiting or defederating is now available at about.iftas.org/library/known-…
Update October 14: Accounts are still being created, and unused accounts registered earlier are being activated.
Since 15 September, IFTAS has been tracking a coordinated network of over 300 accounts operating across Mastodon. These accounts are engaged in a high-volume propaganda campaign, promoting pro-Russian narratives and linking to Telegram channels associated with known state-aligned disinformation operations. We became aware of a related investigation by the Antibot4Navalny research team that observed these accounts bridging to Bluesky, and we have since collaborated to enhance our investigations and share our findings. Their public post provides further context.
Antibot4Navalny’s observations identified additional impacted services we were unaware of, and highlighted that accounts were still being created. Furthermore, thanks to their specific expertise in this area, this helped clarify and confirm that what we were seeing was indeed the work of a coordinated campaign with an increased likelihood of it being a state-sponsored or state-approved campaign.
We have been contacting affected Mastodon administrators, and are now moving to a public advisory to inform the broader network.
The network includes accounts impersonating reputable news outlets such as BBC News, Euronews, and Meduza, designed to give credibility to Telegram propaganda links. We believe it may be connected to the “Pravda/Portal Kombat” pro-Russia propaganda network.
Accounts are hosted across numerous Mastodon instances and bridged into Bluesky, creating the appearance of independent sources. Activity on Bluesky helped reveal aggregate patterns, identical usernames, posting schedules, and content themes more clearly than across decentralised Mastodon services.
This campaign appears to mimic tactics observed in earlier influence operations, blending low-cost automation with impersonation and volume-based amplification.
Remember every time we find Putin backed propaganda outside of Russia in the wild, it's nearly always boosting predominantly conservative viewpoints versus anything else.
Outside of their borders they're more interested in people fighting with each other than anything like coming together. Right wing politics is how they do that
Sorry, but this is wrong. They're also actively sponsoring "left wing" propaganda, to further sow discord. Depending on which group you yourself belong to, it's just easier to spot "the others".
And of that propaganda being created, that conservative inclined people are most likely to fall for it: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/…
There seem to be plenty of other papers that more or less reach those same conclusions with a good number of citations, but I can't find anything really at all on Google Scholar concluding the opposite with a quick search, let alone something also credible.
The closest some papers come is saying that they try groups all over the political spectrum, as their goal is disunity ultimately, but they seemingly don't really have any kind of continued success with misinforming those groups anywhere near as effectively. They more or less all end up concluding that most of the propaganda targets conservatives, because they're the ones that fall for it.
I think one of the problems with citing that first study as evidence Russian disinfo is targeted at conservatives more than liberals is that it only studied one case, and Russian disinformation campaigns tailor their disinfo to different demographics, often through brute force/trial and error. So it is quite possible that the particular case they studied happens to be tailored to (or more successfully resonated with) conservatives, while another specific case would have resonated with liberals more thus resulting in more liberal exposure by their metrics.
Your assertion that more is conservative is a meaningless assertion in the context of this discussion.
More can be conservative on average but you don't see an average view of the internet, you see your filter bubble, and that source backs up the original assertion that yes, Russia is targeting leftists too.
Rumors and smears are part of free speech. To the extent that right-wing trolls and their audience are actual voters, it's essentially just a coarse form of ordinary political speech.
The extent to which a foreign government acting coverly is either creating or artificially boosting such content is scandalous.
True enough. But even a tyrannical government at least has a presumable intent of working for the betterment of its country. (Albeit through wrongheaded and small-minded means )
A.foreijgn power, especially a historical adversary and bad actor, is instead presumably working to harm or diminish us.
No, they have the intent of working for themselves. That's it. They don't give a shit about the country and you should never presume the ruling class of your country has your country's best interests in mind.
You presented it as proof that Russia is supporting misinformation on the left. To be that, it has to both include all three parts of the claim -- that there is disinformation on the left, that Russia is covertly supporting disinformation, and that some of the disinformation on the left was supported by Russia.
If your wife sleeps around, and I engage in casual sex, it does not necessarily follow that I slept with your wife.
A common suspicion in America is that Vladimir Putin believes that Trump as POTUS is good for Russia, and that Putin interferes with US politics with a specific goal of helping Trump.
If you have some reporting that directly links Russia to left-wing disinformation I'd love to read it. But the BBC article I read after following your link didn't have any such link.
When you make a statement it's your responsibility to provide proof because what if you're talking out of your ass? How would we find any proof in that scenario when it literally wouldn't exist? How would we know if you misinterpreted a source? How would we know we misinterpreted the correct source? What if we think what you're saying is so stupid we don't want to waste our time looking for proof? There are a lot of reasons the burden of proof shouldn't fall on us, which means the burden of proof should fall on the person who made the statement. They know if what they said is factual and if it's factual they know where they found this fact and thus it would be significantly less effort for them to find and present the source.
Better. That actually supports the assertion that Russia does engage in left-targeted disinformation (in Canada, on Twitter.)
It also supports the original point you dismissed as "wrong" -- of the 90 "most influential" accounts, only 9 were subjectively identified as "Canadian far left".
Maybe you should spend more time reading the actual articles, and not just their headlines?
Absolutely and utterly false. They try and promote fighting, anger, and distrust of government to everyone.
They target leftists with things that will upset them, make them angry at the right and the government and other leftists and sow further discord and polarization.
Less extreme Leftists generally aren't nearly as likely to be control freaks as the right (although there are always exceptions), so getting them (as a group) angry enough to fight takes much more effort than it does the right.
A source for my lived experience? Or do you mean an example?
I have been banned from .ml twice for stating that Russia shot down a civilian airliner over Ukraine - a matter of incontrovertible fact which has absolutely nothing to do with any leftist theory, as far as my masters degree in political science can discern.
.ml is moderated to be ideologically one sided. Pro-capitalism is literally not allowed and will deleted. Making a pro-west or anti-China or Russia comment is like a bat signal for .ml admins and users alike to dogpile on your comment.
It’s their right to moderate their instance how they see fit, but removing content on ideological grounds is going to result in people thinking what’s left is propaganda.
For the most part I like .ml users, I don’t care for the admin team and moderator decisions and that’s why I’m not on that instance. I could care less about the fact my instance is defederated from hexbear users or grad users. They do want to be polarizing and live in a propaganda bubble
I wouldn't call them that. Most if not all of them are genuine people with some having accs for many years before Reddit crossed the line for most of us and them becoming anyhow relevant to interfere. In a recent hexbearean post about fediverse negativity I've read a couple of opinions with a notion that federating with others wasn't that great, and they were pretty happy just by themselves. I assume, it's the same for other two too. That's a game too long and effortful to be a psyop imho. Their positions and where they get their info are things to argue, but let's not get as far as dehumanizing them.
Almost everywhere I soundly proclaim that I am a russian dummy anarchist, that I live in that state for I have no options, and I angrily disagree with their fascination, mystification of what it is, I hold a grudge with anyone who wants that russki mir to be the model the whole world should share.
I, nevertheless, find a lot of points, like personal stuff and grieveancies, theoretical things, sympathy to protesters, to Gazan survivors that I share with them. Unlike transparently racist/fascist troll comms that were there, unlike their campaigns I've noticed, there is a huge population of real people worthy of talking, arguing with.
Call me any names and ban me, but as long as any person or community is supportive of basic pillar causes like body autonomy, you, like, can at least talk to them and find something in common.
What I missed though, is that Diva said the same, but misleadingly doubted the existence of russian bot networks. Them and state suppression ruined the rusophonic space to that degree I dropped it altogether. I don't know how their actions affected other countries, but as a nolifer shitposting addict trying to trust them just a bit, I came through fire, water and copper tubes before dropping them altogether. They are like current Twitter, but worse. And, well, fuck, I wasn't abandoning that to find the next option already corrupted.
To be honest I didn't understand the thrust of most of what you wrote, but if you are against the Rusky Mir, you are probably on the right side to begin with. If you are an anarchist, you probably have no place on .ml to begin with.
Drunktexting and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
The main point why I wrote it was that I don't find them either bots or artifical influencers. They do probably want to have some reach or fresh blood, but don't want their local culture to be spread too thin like it's reddit 2.0. They are anything but cancer that I've met seeing real botfaming ops.
And, although I don't share many of their thoughts, most of the posts I see in my feed discuss common issues where we aren't that far from each other. Closer, than to maga/zionist/z-crowd. And in that context I find it alright to not draw any lines and just talk.
When things start to get overly political, well, that's a whole another thing, where different bestest solutions are incompatible, historical betrayals are dugged up and the internet infighting ensues. It's exhausting and pointless with just 2mil mostly irrelevant nerds on Fediverse. It's easier to just scroll through some amuzing takes, and instead focus on things where we can cooperate.
"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
"Thank you," the KGB agent says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
Lots of people can not stand the fact that you don't agree with them. They will accuse you of being a bot or something, rather than to accept the fact that people have different opinions on things.
The fact the comments here are so contentious is just funny. I will block as is appropriate but so far have not had to do to much of it on the fediverse. Man it needs to be reciprical though so their training is limited.
There are obviously agents from elsewhere, and some of them may be pretty effective, but it's nothing compared to Trump and Co getting money from the likes of Saudis and acting like they own the place. If the main concern is american politics, well, the real worms aren't theoretical or real foreign enemies, but corrupted fuckheads that ignore human, state rights, shutdown government, pack people from the streets to deport. No enemy could've done such damage so-called friends are doing.
The rise in right-wing nationalism has been notable across Europe, as well. It's a good guess that the Russians have been pushing that, too. The US is just ahead of the curve.
The network includes accounts impersonating reputable news outlets such as BBC News, Euronews, and Meduza, designed to give credibility to Telegram propaganda links. We believe it may be connected to the “Pravda/Portal Kombat” pro-Russia propaganda network.
Accounts are hosted across numerous Mastodon instances and bridged into Bluesky, creating the appearance of independent sources. Activity on Bluesky helped reveal aggregate patterns, identical usernames, posting schedules, and content themes more clearly than across decentralised Mastodon services.
If your first reaction was to post "posts I dislike are Russian bots", then you haven't actually grasped the argument. It has nothing to do with anyone disagreeing with specific posts.
It's also very telling that you're reflexively posting that when it says nothing about the data being presented.
The Grayzone has geolocated the underground bunker of an important military command and control center nestled within a densely populated Tel Aviv neighborhood. Known as ‘Site 81,’ the U.S.-built facility houses a hyper-secretive intelligence base.
When Iran struck a series of targets in the heart of north Tel Aviv with ballistic missiles on June 13, Israeli authorities immediately cordoned off the area to prevent journalists from filming the damage. “The building on this compound was just hit,” Trey Yingst of Fox News reported as he arrived that evening at the site of HaKirya, Israel’s Defense Ministry headquarters, and the nearby Azrieli Center. But within seconds, Israeli police officers arrived to aggressively shunt Yingst away from where he was standing, just north of the HaKirya Bridge on the west side of Menachem Begin Road.
That day, Iranian missiles struck the north tower of the Da Vinci apartment complex roughly 550 meters southwest of Yingst’s location. The Grayzone has determined that the building sits immediately south of the “Canarit” / “Kannarit” Israeli Air Force towers and above an underground military intelligence bunker jointly administered by the US and Israeli militaries. According to an analysis of leaked emails, public documents, and Israeli news reports, the location is host to a highly secretive, electromagnetically shielded intelligence facility known as “Site 81.”
Israel aggressively censors information relating to its urban military and intelligence facilities while simultaneously accusing its adversaries of engaging in ‘human shielding’ – a practice of protecting military targets with civilian populations that is prohibited by international humanitarian law. While the existence of a U.S. Army project to expand Site 81 to a 6,000 square-meter facility was widely reported from government records circa 2013, the specific location remained unknown...
It's always projection with fascists. "Khamas is using human shields!!!1!" "oh shit, pay no attention to our super secret spy base we built with the American Nazis right under apartment buildings in the middle of a residential area. We just really liked the location for other less illegal reasons."
I really loved when, a few years ago, he fell ill and flew to France (IIRC) for medical treatment. His family was so sure he wouldn't make it, they filled a commercial airliner with people ready to flee the country.
Then he bounced back! GD Methusala over here. And they all had to go home and pretend like nothing happened.
As the central African country prepares for Sunday's presidential election, he said he would not be heading out to vote. [... ] “He is already too old to govern, and it’s boring knowing only him as president," Nghobo told The Associated Press
The British government’s refusal to testify that China is a national security threat in a major espionage trial has signalled to Beijing that “the UK can be bullied”, according to a former senior diplomat who was due to be a prosecution witness in the now-collapsed case.
The warning comes after Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions (DPP), revealed that his team had repeatedly tried and failed to obtain witness statements from the government that said China was a threat to UK national security.
Prosecutors had to abandon the trial of two British men charged with spying on parliamentarians for China, just weeks before it was due to start, because of the government’s refusal to provide the evidence, Parkinson said in a letter to MPs on Tuesday.
Charles Parton, a former UK diplomat who spent more than two decades working on China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, had been due to appear as a prosecution witness in the trial.
“In broad fashion, this [collapse] says to the Chinese, ‘yes, we can bully the British, they will crumble if we play hard ball in whatever the negotiation is’ — that’s the worrying thing to me”, he told the Financial Times.
The failed prosecution was, he added, “a missed opportunity to demonstrate clearly China’s espionage efforts, and to say to anyone thinking of betraying our national interest, that you will be caught and punished”.
Parton, now an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “There is absolutely no doubt China is a threat, and it’s a common sense point. A threat equals hostility, intent and capability. Well, each of those is very easy to prove.”
Their main purpose is enabling their users to consume content from various sources in one place.
Uh, no? RSS/Atom only contains a summary. It's to inform you about news, a alternative to E-Mail newsletters. Website scraping is extra functionality some clients do.
RSS/Atom can contain a summary, or it can be the full article. It's the choice of the website what to put in it. They only put a summary to force you to visit their webpage to serve ads.
I have tried all sorts of RSS feeds. All the same painful to navigate through a painful, outdated email-like interface that makes it vastly inferior to, you know, scrolling through a website.
FFS, RSS people must have grown up on being desk jockeys stuck in Outlook all day and they don't know how to navigate anything else.
I don't know if it's Lemmy not standing different opinions than: A) some opinions don't add much value to any conversation except to say "I disagree" and that's both not super helpful and in a small community I'd argue it's healthy for positive engagement to be more prevalent than negative engagement. B) some comments disagree or tear down a solution without offering up a good alternative - which leaves the people with solutions feeling worse for their solution, the problem unaddressed in a different way, and if someone likes their solution or even knows it's superior to alternatives it becomes very easy to down vote a subjectively wrong opinion.
In this instance "going to the website" is not a helpful alternative for a tool who's purpose is to aggregate many desired websites into one location only when they have new content. "Going to the website" would be less efficient both in time and effort. This person saying they don't get them, while being on Lemmy - a site aggregator - is to me very funny.
My instinct was to down vote because it was already down voted and for the reasons above, but your comment gave me pause so now I won't down vote but I also won't upvote because it's not content I think anyone should waste their time reading.
Should there be a neutral response on site aggregators for this very circumstance? Never thought about that before.
I think that's a very common and logical instinct/bias. I'm fairly confident you and everyone else does this as well. If someone told you two compare two drinks and that one was expensive, the expensive one gets a statistical boon. If someone says this book sucks and the author is an asshole, you're primed to take previously neutral statements and skew them towards a negative understanding.
I always read before voting but ya, we have bias my guy and talking about them is good.
I’ve liked using FreshRSS in the past, but has the developer finally capitulated and allowed users to sort entries by publication date?
It was probably the most requested feature and they always insisted it didn’t make sense or wasn’t possible despite being a common feature among other RSS feed readers.
my problem with these was that id have one website filling up the feed with a lot of posts and another interesting website that only makes a post every once in awhile and i almost never see it
I have a firehose folder on freshrss that has its own rotation rules such that posts are only retained for a couple days and are then deleted. It is also excluded from the “main” feed listing. Works great for news sites.
I’ve been using FeedBin after Google Reader sunset… so, a long time now. Every year I say I’ll bring it in-house, then I get billed for another year and say fuck it. It works fine. And now they have a minimalist podcast app called Airshow that lets me use my FeedBin account to synch my podcasts across devices. So, whatever… take my money. 25$ a year isn’t going to break me.
Edit: want to add that I use Netnewswire (free) to read my feeds. Integrates Feedbin and isn’t overkill on ridiculous feature that turn it into a p.o.s. subscription app.
Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous Oct 13, 2025
In Khan Younis, thousands of people gathered to greet the freed detainees, who arrived in dozens of buses operated by the Red Cross and in Red Crescent ambulances. The crowds gathered in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital and on rooftops and balconies overlooking the medical complex where the freed captives were taken for medical checks. Nasser hospital, which has been repeatedly bombed by the Israeli military, is one of only 13 out of 38 hospitals still partially functioning in Gaza.
Freed detainees wearing gray jumpsuits leaned out of bus windows and waved to the crowds. Family members and friends embraced them through the windows as they drove by.
VIDEO: Hundreds of Palestinian Captives Released in Khan Younis From Israeli Detention
Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous Oct 13, 2025
In Khan Younis, thousands of people gathered to greet the freed detainees, who arrived in dozens of buses operated by the Red Cross and in Red Crescent ambulances. The crowds gathered in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital and on rooftops and balconies overlooking the medical complex where the freed captives were taken for medical checks. Nasser hospital, which has been repeatedly bombed by the Israeli military, is one of only 13 out of 38 hospitals still partially functioning in Gaza.
Freed detainees wearing gray jumpsuits leaned out of bus windows and waved to the crowds. Family members and friends embraced them through the windows as they drove by.
Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous Oct 13, 2025
In Khan Younis, thousands of people gathered to greet the freed detainees, who arrived in dozens of buses operated by the Red Cross and in Red Crescent ambulances. The crowds gathered in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital and on rooftops and balconies overlooking the medical complex where the freed captives were taken for medical checks. Nasser hospital, which has been repeatedly bombed by the Israeli military, is one of only 13 out of 38 hospitals still partially functioning in Gaza.
Freed detainees wearing gray jumpsuits leaned out of bus windows and waved to the crowds. Family members and friends embraced them through the windows as they drove by.
During Friday's massive strike action in support of the Palestinians, demonstrators went to the Italian national team's training centre in Florence to demand the match against Israel be called off.
As of Tuesday only around 4,000 tickets had been sold for the game in Udine, a small city in Italy's far north-east, which was picked specifically to help limit the potential for disorder.
Italy are struggling to qualify automatically for next year's World Cup finals and the pressure on the team is exacerbated by the tension surrounding next Tuesday's qualifier with Israel in Udine.
All children – wherever they are in the world – deserve to be children: to explore, laugh and play, especially since play is a vital path to their learning and growth. But what about Palestinian children’s play time – or lack thereof? This is a human right taken from them by Israel.
Some people have the audacity to say that Trump's policies don't lead to misery and death.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: “No one has died” because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: “No children are dying on my watch.”
But the data says and projects otherwise.
A study published in The Lancet journal in June said the U.S. funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030.
The United States could have been a beacon of hope and a model to look up to. For many years, that was the case for people and immigrants all around the world.
In a matter of months, that has all crumbled to its foundation. It's so hard to watch.
No, it was never a model all around the world. The US has been hurting some groups of people for hundreds of years. Don't think they don't see it... So foreign aid is good, but don't get all patriotic on us.
My use of 'all' was a generalization, not literal. Historically, many people around the world did view the U.S. as a model and a place to aspire to, even as others rightly criticized its actions. My point is that the MAGA slogan claims to be trying restore (something like) that old image, yet their actions only deepen global resentment.
It would be great to see the US genuinely become a beacon of hope again (and atone for their sins), but I'm not holding my breath. Honestly, I've been cheering on other nations to fill that role. I'm not a US nationalist or patriot.
I'm afraid that you aren't seeing just how bad it really is:
There are specific dimensions to human-evil:
narcissism
machiavellianism
sociopathy-psychopathy
nihilism
sadism
systemic-dishonesty
eradication-of-objectivity
eradication-of-considered-reasoning
( and possibly others I haven't found, yet )
The problem is that MAGA is pushing-the-envelope on ALL these dimensions, simultaneously, & less than 1/4 way through Trump's 2nd term, he's got about 1/2 of "Project 2025" implimented.
People don't underrstand: there's a tipping-point" when it becomes totalitarian-dictatorship, & that point is *fast approaching.
The manufacturing of homelessness, combined with the criminalization of homelessness,
The law he got enacted that exempts him & his appointees from court-injunctions & related court actions,
The law he used to de-register Democrat voters, just before the Trump/Harris election,
The law that allows him to simply remove citizenship from everybody he doesn't like, "denaturalization",
There is NO limit to the evil that they will bee allowed to "legally" enforce, shortly.
As I tried explaining to the USMC, some time before Sept 11, 2001, "the USMC obeys any LEGAL order" does NOTHING to protect the USMC's heart/spirit once the law has been rewritten so that murdering babies is now a legal order.
The reason he's throwing-around the National Guard sooo much, now, is simply because it's part of how he's going to be enforcing his removal-of-rights-from-the-"woke", from the non-Republican, from the non-White, obviously too, in his enforcement of his confederate-kingdom..
The only saving-grace is that he'll be waging war on 3 fronts: war against Canada, because it's intolerable to him that he doesn't possess the entire-continent ( that's why he wants Greenland: to seal-off Canada from Europe, to quicken our butchery )
war against the US itself, Civil War Part2,
AND war against the countries to the US's south, basically all of Central America & much of South America,
WHILE picking fights with China whenever he can, offshore ( the navy )..
This is going to be the worst 6-7y that the Americas EVER had, once that tipping-point is crossed.
( & anybody who thinks that Russia isn't going to launch all-out war against Europe once NATO's butchered, is foolish: China'll be backing them, North Korea'll be backing them, & Canada'll be looking like Ukraine does, right now, if not like the way Mariupol did..
& China'll be rampaging Asia, with impunity..
etc.
IOW, regional-conquering will be the only thing the world is orienting-to for literally years, until Putin & Trump implode )
Tipping-points are violations of status-quo, & we're all unconsciously-wired to ignore violations-of-status-quo, unfortunately..
IF you're not with Trump, & you're in the Americas, please consider arming yourself significantly better than you are now..
( I've spent my life trying to find the Himilayan-Buddhist-monastery HOME that my soul remembers, from a previous-incarnation/life..
it is depressing-as-hell to have to say what I just told you, but it is dishonest to even think-of not telling you that.
I expect that there will be a couple hundred million dead in North America by the early 2030's, in Trump's rampaging of our world.
I expect that there will be a similar percentage dead in Europe then, too.
Even if I'm wrong by over-estimating-by-factor-of-2, that'd still be .. unimaginable for us, now, right?
US's Civil War Part2 .. civil wars are BAD: the most intense hatred-enforcement of any kind of war.
I hope that Canada's Carney finds somebody who can think in the proper frame-of-knowing that CAN stand, systematically, against Trump, because as European journalism has identified, he's spineless against Trump in the longer-term, & that isn't strategy: we're deadmeat, if that remains ruling Canada.
Financially, he's got no equal, that I know-of, anywhere near Canadian politics, but .. as a war leader??
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
One of the best-known photographers in Mexico. Her work looks away from the sensational images of violence that have for years defined the nation, and instead looks inwards, to the traditions, faces, and unusual sights seen everyday.
Iturbide came to photography later in life. She was the eldest daughter of a wealthy, conservative couple. In 1962, she married the photographer Pedro Meyer and had three children. It was after the death of her daughter in 1970, aged just 6, that Iturbide turned to photography.
The 5th image is perhaps her best-known photograph. Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), it was originally published as part of her photo essay Juchitán de las Mujeres (1979-86), a project which began with Iturbide's support of feminist causes.
Iturbide was also involved in documenting the indigenous cultures of Mexico. This image, Mujer Ángel, in which a woman carries a tape recorder on her journey to ancient cave paintings. was shot in 1979 in the Sonora desert, when Iturbide was living with the Seri Indians.
In many of her photographs there is a sense of playfulness and strangeness. These qualities are at odds with many people's expectations or experiences of Mexico. Iturbide has always strived to look beyond the lurid headlines, to the absurdity of life.
Folk stories and religious themes are common throughout her work. Particularly when the visual language of the catholic church meets ancient native traditions and the realities of contemporary life.
Iturbide started photographing landscapes and birds. She had heard the Seri Indians talk of the significance of birds, and she began to incorporate living and dead birds into her art; symbolic of strength and fragility, freedom and vulnerability.
In the mid-1980s she photographed Mexican-Americans in Eastside Los Angeles, many of whom were involved in street gangs. The cholos and cholas of the White Fence Gang would later feature in the anthology A Day in the Life of America (1987).
I think QoL tools for moderators need to become more of a Fediverse priority. This burns people out. Key moderators of communities quit and communities become abandoned.
Ideas : - Automatic removal option to remove posts and/or comments for specific keywords. This would be most useful for automatically removing posts and comments when people slur. Piefed already has a keyword filter for visibility. This could be expanded to community settings. Have it also fire-off a report to the moderators when someone triggers it. - Automatic URL removal. Allow communities to blacklist specific urls. Useful for politics or news communities that want to negate sources known for misinformation. - Automatic removal for repeat URL posting. Very useful for politics or news communities to prevent double-posting. - Make it so a community can set itself up to only accept text posts, video posts, or image posts. This should prevent tedious janitorial cleanup for communities that only allow links, or text posts (the most common two). - Post Delay Restrictions. Some communities, perhaps not many, might be interested in posting cooldowns for users. So you can only post 1 post every hour, or 2 posts every hour - or whatever the chosen limit is. This would help negate spammers and over-enthusiastic posters flooding a topical community. - Post Formatting Requirements. This one could be trickier and more effort than most of the others, but setting conditions for the formatting of new posts would be useful.
Now, not all communities would make use or have any need to make use of all of these - but many would to varying degrees - and it would help them.
I think going down this road is important to prevent moderators burning out over the drudgery of moderating communities.
I suppose not. Although I imagine if the Fediverse gets more users it will happen more and more. The current mod tools are not really up to the job as it increases in activity.
If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
By now I've written four bots using the lemmy API.
Any one of your ideas is doable in a weekend if I ever feel the need for a modding bot. But I haven't. Several communities and instances already have them.
Honestly that's how it should be. Modding can have such diverse needs depending on community that just implementing every possible eventuality into lemmy itself, is a huge ask.
Any large community on discord, reddit and other platforms, make extensive use of automod bots. Because using the API, you can write bots that do whatever you can think of.
Modding is volunteer work, but it is work.
If you need tools, find them. If they don't exist, create them. If you don't have the skills or time, then don't volunteer.
Asking some volunteers to do more than they already are because you think they are letting down another set of volunteers just risks burning out a different set of volunteers.
To be clear, I'm not thinking about Lemmy here specifically. But in any case, however its done - either via the settings, or an easy to access official or officially endorsed mod-bot - access and knowledge to and of these tools should be easy and well-known for community owners.
If you need tools, find them. If they don’t exist, create them. If you don’t have the skills or time, then don’t volunteer.
Not every would-be moderator of a community has the skills or knowhow to make and/or host these things. Even Reddit now, at its size, lacks some capable tools not consistently covered in automod tools.
What I disagree with is that this is a priority. It's a nice-to-have.
Once mod actions are supported, and an API exists, any imaginable automation can be implemented by anyone with the impetus to do so.
As such, the priority of further integration drops drastically and platform developer attention can and should move elsewhere.
Mod tools are best created by the people who use them. Even better when they are created for the needs of a specific community. As such, more advanced features should be deferred until later.
Once communities grow large enough that there are a significant number of moderator-developers around, it might be worth creating a generic bot that can be configured as needed. (As has happened with reddit, discord, etc.)
Asking for these tools before then, is inefficient, because the people who ideally should be working on them, haven't shown up yet, and the platform developers time is better spent on other things.
Well I'm thinking in terms of how to 'shore up' the fediverse, so to speak - to make it able to cope with potential future growth. I do think all of the examples in my OP that I've given are pretty general and one or more of them would be implemented by most communities the moment they were able to do so.
In Skavau's defense, they aren't a programmer, but are probably one of the most active people on piefed's chat server/matrix room as well as the codeberg repo providing ideas and feedback. So they are volunteering time that way (in addition to being site staff for piefed.social).
Some of the ideas in this post are good imo, but are currently not possible yet using the piefed api due to it being much less complete compared to lemmy's. So, it helps us figure out prioritization on what kinds of endpoints would be useful to flesh out next.
My core point is that when it comes to moderation, I would prioritize actual mod actions (such as a mod being able to mark posts nsfw instead of deleting them outright) and API support for those actions, over built-in automod features.
Once you have an API, anyone with the skills can implement whatever automation they need.
After that, I would priotize a bunch of other things, too, before ever coming back around to built-in automod features.
There are a lot of people who make excellent mods who are not programmers. It's already a small enough pool that requiring a particular skill only further narrows the pool. It also has a secondary effect that good mods may be unwilling to take on larger communities, or additional responsibilities.
If we want better moderation, the fediverse has to become more friendly to non technical people.
That seems like the best of these ideas. But it would be better for the originating instance to warn the poster that their url has already been seen and stop them posting it unless they really really want to.
Well yeah Piefed actually already does this. But some people will just ignore it even if everyone uses Piefed. I would make use of blocking repeat-url posting and have it so anyone who ignores it has their post automatically removed or blocked.
What are the differences between piefed and lemmy? Is one financed/supported/organised by commercial companies (or people that work for them)? Are they both grassroots and independent? Do they combat algorithms? Or something else?
Yes, piefed is independent in the same way as lemmy is.
Piefed has tools that Lemmy does not: Flairs, user flairs, hashtags, custom feeds/topics, scheduled posts, poll posting, events - word filters for users.
Most of these features are also implemented in Lemmy, and others too such as private communities (which can only be browser by users that were manually approved by moderators). However we have very high standards for correctness, performance and UX so it takes a while to get all of this released in the upcoming 1.0 version.
Don't donate to the Lemmy devs except if you are ok with supporting transphobes and tankies, because that's what the Lemmy-Devs are (and it's very well documented!). Donate either to the piefed team or to your local instance instead!
Donations are to pay for the development of Lemmy which is a full-time job and pays for our bills. Donating to Lemmy does not mean "supporting transphobes and tankies", thats a really weird thing to say.
If you want to donate to lemmy instances (or the devs as well if the other replies haven’t changed your mind) a lot of them are on Liberapay and if yours isn’t, they probably have a donate link on their web UI.
Interesting, why do you think that scriptable moderation bots need a completely new platform? Wouldnt it be much easier to utilize the Lemmy api directly?
Well, my initial idea was to build this only for lemmy and yes it would be easier that way if I didn't care about scalability.
However, the API was not good enough for my use case. Polling new posts and comments was my main issue with it. So mostly scaling issues. You could miss some posts and comments. The amount of API requests would get bigger with the amount of communities the bot moderates. There are also some problems with the rate limits.
They can be solved by directly querying the database, but who's going to give you database access? So you'd have to host lemmy yourself just for the bot. And I'd imagine the database would grow pretty fast with the number of communities. I explicitly do not want to store any posts or comments.
Another solution would be using Lemmy's new webhook system, but I don't know how reliable it will be.
So I stopped halfway through and started a new project with new goals:
Make a new federated platform
With federation, the problems above would be solved. This also allows it to be hosted without having to find a suitable Lemmy instance for it or even self host one yourself.
Stronger integration with platforms via a modular federation system
If I made it depend on Lemmy, a strong integration with other platforms wouldn't be possible. Piefed has features that Lemmy doesn't, for example. People can maintain a set of platform specific activitypub structs and enable the bot to federate with that platform.
Not really answering your question, but I'd like to make a clarification: The bots will only be able to operate within the boundaries of the communities they are appointed to (or I guess groups). They cannot manage any instances. Furthermore, my main intention is for them to be used primarily as moderation bots, but they can also be used as general purpose bots within the community.
To get new posts and comments for all known communities you only need to make regular requests to /api/v3/post/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=All and /api/v3/comment/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=All. Its not necessary to make separate requests for each community. The default rate limit allows 180 read requests per minute so you can comfortably poll this every second (in practice every 30s or so should be enough). If you miss an item (ie post or comment id was skipped) just load the following page.
The plugin system in 1.0 would be another option. It will still take some time until that is released, but there shouldnt be any reliability issues.
Youre right that federation solves these problems, but instead you get another problem of writing all this federation code and making sure it is compatible with different platforms. Lemmy's federation code has around 12k lines so that is a lot. It seems much simpler to use the API for Lemmy, Piefed etc and write abstractions for common functionality.
Anyway this is my opinion. Its your project so in the end its your decision how to implement it.
Yep. I did use those endpoints with the ModeratorView (The bot doesn't need posts or comments from communities it doesn't moderate) on my first attempt. I went with the federation approach at last because of future scalability issues. Though that is probably an exaggeration. If the default rate limit is 180 read requests per minute, that would be more than enough, honestly. The scale at which the scalability issues I mentioned would appear at about more than 4500 comments/posts per minute. Frankly, I think we'll never reach that in the near future. So actually the rate limiting issue is practically not an issue for the foreseeable future.
The plugin system would work. The fetching problem would disappear.
Though I don't think the federation code would be huge. I am not trying to make it compatible with all platforms. For example I'll write the required Lemmy ActivityPub structs to send moderation related activities and actors. The Group's instance would handle distributing the activities, so even though this project might not federate with Piefed for example, it would still receive the activities the bot sends to the Group's inbox through the instance's software, Lemmy.
If someone wanted to get the bot to work on another Ap platform that supports groups, they would have to write the necessary Ap actors, activities, and a bit of glue code, and that would be it... or at least that's how I'm planning it.
I guess I'll try to work with the plugin system if I can't achieve what I want and keep it simple. It would at least be a learning experience, if nothing else. Thank you for the info.
With 4500 posts per minute you will probably get a lot of other scaling issues too, like with your database or the processing of incoming and outgoing activities. In any case its a good way to learn how Activitypub works. Is the code open source? Dont see it on your codeberg.
Using the plugin system you basically just need a way to get notified about each new post and comment, right? I expect that will be one of the major use cases for plugins. We will likely provide various official plugins, eg push notifications for Android and iOS. The same thing should also work for you.Version 1.0 will let you subscribe to communities to get notifications for all new posts and comments (code).
Rewrites the notification system to be more flexible and extensible
Removes the tables inbox_combined, person_post_mention, person_comment_mention and comment_reply replacing them with a single not...
I haven't released the source code yet. The private repo at the moment is very messy in general so I am just waiting until I get a somewhat working pre-alpha done with the design that I am still experimenting with finalized. There's still a ton of work to be done since I just started 2 weeks ago.
Yes, although communities on here already roll with some of these rules. Some don't want double link posting or want to ban specific urls or specific keywords - they just have to do it manually. This can cause mod burnout over time.
That could happen in the future but at the moment and in the past surely we lost more mods as a result of their community being dead than from their community being too active. But we don't hear from them because they feel rejected and like they failed so they slink away quietly.
True. I am just mostly trying to make a record of this stuff for the future. Obviously in the event of these tools existing, mods wouldn't have to turn them on.
I definitely think there needs to be some rough guide on making your community federated and then advertising it effectively so communities can get that early kick.
and it seems to brick itself? If I refresh OS everything seems to work fine. But as soon as I update UEFI firmware 480 - 20241101 it will not only not find nor update firmware, but I'm having to frequently hard reboot my machine. It might work. It then becomes unresponsive (won't load past disk encryption password, mouse stops working) until I get to the point of refreshing the OS. Rinse and repeat.
Am I doing something wrong? Is it my machine? Anyone else run into this
Maybe the firmware file supplied by the Pop OS repo is broken? Download the firmware updater directly from Dell's website and put it on a FAT32 USB drive. Nice thing about Dell BIOS is that you can use the .exe update without Windows - there should be an option in your BIOS to browse for the update file and apply it. Then install a fresh copy of Pop OS and don't let it update firmware for now.
That was excellent. Thanks for sharing... although I'm more into pottery, I'm sure some soulless shithead will want to "democratize" it with a janky robot hand controlled by a dumb algo.
But do i find myself conflicted about dismissing it as a potential technical skill all together.
I have seen comfy-ui workflows that are build in a very complex way, some have the canvas devided in different zones, each having its own prompts. Some have no prompts and extract concepts like composition or color values from other files.
I compare these with collage-art which also exists from pre existing material to create something new.
Such tools take practice, there are choices to be made, there is a creative process but its mostly technological knowledge so if its about such it would be right to call it a technical skill.
The sad reality however, is how easy it is to remove parts of that complexity “because its to hard” and barebones it to simple prompt to output. At which point all technical skill fades and it becomes no different from the online generators you find.
I think there’s a stark difference between crafting your own comfyui workflow, getting the right nodes and control nets and checkpoints and whatever, tweaking it until you get what you want, and someone telling an AI “make me a picture/video of X.”
The least AI-looking AI art is the kind that someone took effort to make their own. Just like any other tool.
Unfortunately, gen AI is a tool that gives relatively good results without any skill at all. So most people won’t bother to do the work to make it their own.
I think that, like nearly everything in life, there is nuance to this. But at the same time, we aren’t ready for the nuance because we’re being drowned by slop and it’s horrible.
All of that's great and everything, but at the end of the day all of the commercial VLM art generators are trained on stolen art. That includes most of the VLMs that comfyui uses as a backend. They have their own cloud service now, that ties in with all the usual suspects.
So even if it has some potentially genuine artistic uses I have zero interest in using a commercial entity in any way to 'generate' art that they've taken elements for from artwork they stole from real artists. Its amoral.
If it's all running locally on open source VLMs trained only on public data, then maybe - but that's what... a tiny, tiny fraction of AI art? In the meantime I'm happy to dismiss it altogether as Ai slop.
If you download a checkpoint from non trustworthy sources definitely and that is the majority of people, but also the majority that does not use the technical tools that deep nor cares about actual art (mostly porn if the largest distributor of models civitai is a reference).
The technical tool that allow actual creativity is called comfyui, and this is open source. I have yet to see anything that is even comparable. Other creative tools (like the krita plugin) use it as a backend.
I am willing to believe that someone with a soul for art and complex flows would also make their own models, which naturally allows much more creativity and is not that hard to do.
Eh, I'm not so sure on that. I often find myself tripping up on the xkcd Average Familiarity problem, so I worry that this assumption is inadvertently a bit gatekeepy.
It's the unfortunate reality that modern tech makes it pretty hard for a person to learn the kind of skills necessary to be able to customise one's own tools. As a chronic tinkerer, I find it easy to underestimate how overwhelming it must feel for people who want to learn but have only ever learned to interface with tech as a "user". That kind of background means that it requires a pretty high level of curiosity and drive to learn, and that's a pretty high bar to overcome. I don't know how techy you consider yourself to be, but I'd wager that anyone who cares about whether something is open source is closer to a techy person than the average person.
For a person who already actively uses comfyui, knows how the different nodes work,
Makes complex flows with them,
Making their own checkpoints is not a big step up.
I have not gotten to this level myself yet, i am still learning how to properly using different and custom nodes, and yes
In the mean time yes, i experiment with public models that use stolen artwork. But i am not posting any of the results, its pure personal use practice.
I have already seen some stuff about making your own models/checkpoints, if i ever get happy enough with my skills to post it as art then having my own feels like a must. The main reason i haven’t is cause it does take a lot of time to prepare the training data.
People that don’t use their models while calling themselves artist are cheating themselves most of all.
How is that any different from "stealing" art in a collage, though? While courts have disagreed on the subject (in particular there's a big difference between visual collage and music sampling with the latter being very restricted) there is a clear argument to be made that collage is a fair use of the original works, because the result is completely different.
Collage art retains the original components of the art, adding layers the viewer can explore and seek the source of, if desired.
VLMs on the other hand intentionally obscure the original works by sending them through filters and computer vision transformations to make the original work difficult to backtrace. This is no accident, its designed obfuscation.
The difference is intent - VLMs literally steal copies of art to generate their work for cynical tech bros. Classical collages take existing art and show it in a new light, with no intent to pass off the original source materials as their own creations.
The original developers of Stable Diffusion and similar models made absolutely no secret about the source data they used. Where are you getting this idea that they "intentionally obscure the original works... to make [them] difficult to backtrace."? How would an image generation model even work in a way that made the original works obvious?
Literally steal
Copying digital art wasn't "literally stealing" when the MPAA was suing Napster and it isn't today.
For cynical tech bros
Stable Diffusion was originally developed by academics working at a University.
Your whole reply is pretending to know intent where none exists, so if that's the only difference you can find between collage and AI art, it's not good enough.
Stable Diffusion? The same Stable Diffusion sued by Getty Images which claims they used 12 million of their images without permission? Ah yes very non-secretive very moral. And what of industry titans DALL-E and Midjourney? Both have had multiple examples of artists original art being spat out by their models, simply by finessing the prompts - proving they used particular artists copyright art without those artists permission or knowledge.
Stable Diffusion also was from its inception in the hands of tech bros, funded and built with the help of a $3 billion dollar AI company (Runway AI), and itself owned by Stability AI, a made for profit company presently valued at $1 billion and now has James Cameron on its board. The students who worked on a prior model (Latent Diffusion) were hired for the Stable Diffusion project, that is all.
If they're taking CC BY-SA and failing to attribute it, then they are also breaking licencing and abusing content for their profit. An VLM could easily add attributes to images to assign source data used in the output - weird none of them want to.
In other words, I'll continue to treat AI art as the amoral slop it is. You are of course welcome to have a different opinion, I don't really care if mine is 'good enough' for you.
Stable Diffusion? The same Stable Diffusion sued by Getty Images which claims they used 12 million of their images without permission? Ah yes very non-secretive very moral. And what of industry titans DALL-E and Midjourney? Both have had multiple examples of artists original art being spat out by their models, simply by finessing the prompts - proving they used particular artists copyright art without those artists permission or knowledge.
Getting sued means Getty images disagrees that the use of the images was legal, not that it was secret, nor that it was moral. Getty images are included in the LAION-5b dataset that Stability AI publicly stated they used to create Stable Diffusion. So it's not "intentionally obscuring" as you claimed.
Copying is not theft, no matter how many words you want to write about it. You can steal a painting by taking it off the wall. You can't steal a JPG by right-clicking it and selecting "Copy Image". That's fundamentally different.
An VLM could easily add attributes to images to assign source data used in the output
Oh yeah? Easily? What attribution should a model trained purely on LAION-5b add to an output image if prompted with "photograph of a cat"?
In other words, I’ll continue to treat AI art as the amoral slop it is. You are of course welcome to have a different opinion, I don’t really care if mine is ‘good enough’ for you.
You can do whatever you want (within usual rules) in your personal life, but you chose to enter into a discussion.
From that discussion it's clear that your position is rooted in bias not knowledge. That's why you can't point out substantial differences between AI-generated images and other techniques which re-use existing imagery, why you make up intentions and can't back them up, and why you prefer to dismiss academics as "tech bros" instead of engaging on facts.
Sidestepping the debate about whether AI art is actually fair use, I do find the fair use doctrine an interesting lens to look at the wider issue — in particular, how deciding whether something is fair use is more complex than comparing a case to a straightforward checklist, but a fairly dynamic spectrum.
It's possible that something could be: * Highly transformative * Takes from a published work that is primarily of a factual nature (such as a biography) * Distributed to a different market than the original work but still not be considered fair use, if it had used the entirety of the base work without modification (in this case, the "highly transformative" would pertain to how the chunks of the base work are presented)
I'm no lawyer, but I find the theory behind fair use pretty interesting. In practice, it leaves a lot to be desired (the way that YouTube's contentID infringes on what would almost certainly be fair use, because Google wants to avoid being taken to court by rights holders, so preempts the problem by being overly harsh to potential infringement). However, my broad point is that whether a court decides something is fair use relies on a holistic assessment that considers all four of pillars of fair use, including how strongly each apply.
AI trained off of artist's works is different to making collage of art because of the scale of the scraping — a huge amount of copyrighted work has been used, and entire works of art were used, even if the processing of them were considered to be transformative (let's say for the sake of argument that we are saying that training an AI is highly transformative). The pillar that AI runs up against the most though is "the effect of the use upon the potential market". AI has already had a huge impact on the market for artistic works, and it is having a hugely negative impact on people's ability to make a living through their art (or other creative endeavours, like writing). What's more, the companies who are pushing AI are making inordinate amounts of revenue, which makes the whole thing feel especially egregious.
We can draw on the ideas of fair use to understand why so many people feel that AI training is "stealing" art whilst being okay with collage. In particular, it's useful to ask what the point of fair use is? Why have a fair use exemption to copyright at all? The reason is because one of the purposes of copyright is meant to be to encourage people to make more creative works — if you're unable to make any money from your efforts because you're competing with people selling your own work faster than you can, then you're pretty strongly disincentivised to make anything at all. Fair use is a pragmatic exemption carved out because of the recognition that if copyright is overly restrictive, then it will end up making it disproportionately hard to make new stuff. Fair use is as nebulously defined as it is because it is, in theory, guided by the principle of upholding the spirit of copyright.
Now, I'm not arguing that training an AI (or generating AI art) isn't fair use — I don't feel equipped to answer that particular question. As a layperson, it seems like current copyright laws aren't really working in this digital age we find ourselves in, even before we consider AI. Though perhaps it's silly to blame computers for this, when copyright wasn't really helping individual artists much even before computers became commonplace. Some argue that we need new copyright laws to protect against AI, but Cory Doctorow makes a compelling argument about how this will just end up biting artists in the ass even worse than the AI. Copyright probably isn't the right lever to pull to solve this particular problem, but it's still a useful thing to consider if we want to understand the shape of the whole problem.
As I see it, copyright exists because we, as a society, said we wanted to encourage people to make stuff, because that enriches society. However, that goal was in tension with the realities of living under capitalism, so we tried to resolve that through copyright laws. Copyright presented new problems, which led to the fair use doctrine, which comes with problems of its own, with or without AI. The reason people consider AI training to be stealing is because they understand AI as a dire threat to the production of creative works, and they attempt to articulate this through the familiar language of copyright. However, that's a poor framework for addressing the problem that AI art poses though. We would be better to strip this down to the ethical core of it so we can see the actual tension that people are responding to.
Maybe we need a more radical approach to this problem. One interesting suggestion that I've seen is that we should scrap copyright entirely and implement a generous universal basic income (UBI) (and other social safety nets). If creatives were free to make things without worrying about fulfilling basic living needs, it would make the problem of AI scraping far lower stakes for individual creatives. One problem with this is that most people would prefer to earn more than what even a generous UBI would provide, so would probably still feel cheated by Generative AI. However, the argument is that GenerativeAI cannot compare to human artists when it comes to producing novel or distinctive art, so the most reliable wa**y to obtain meaningful art would be to give financial support to the artists (especially if an individual is after something of a particular style). I'm not sure how viable this approach would be in practice, but I think that discussing more radical ideas like this is useful in figuring what the heck to do.
I completely agree on pretty much the whole sweep of this. AI just exposes another way in which copyright law is insufficient for the digital age.
On a personal note, a couple of years ago I tried to use chatgpt to write a story. It was shit so I wrote my own. I've taken up drawing again and want to properly learn digital painting.
In my mind, AI doesn't threaten any of this because the enjoyment I get from these things doesn't depend on selling what I do. Artists have been stereotypically starving for a long time because the innate human desire to create exceeds the desire of people to pay.
Allowing people to satisfy that desire without literally starving should be a societal goal.
I often find myself being the person in the room with the most knowledge about how Generative AI (and other machine learning) works, so I tend to be in the role of the person who answers questions from people who want to check whether their intuition is correct. Yesterday, when someone asked me whether LLMs have any potential uses, or whether the technology is fundamentally useless, and the way they phrased it allowed me to articulate something better than I had previously been able to.
The TL;DR was that I actually think that LLMs have a lot of promise as a technology, but not like this; the way they are being rolled out indiscriminately, even in domains where it would be completely inappropriate, is actually obstructive to properly researching and implementing these tools in a useful way. The problem at the core is that AI is only being shoved down our throats because powerful people want to make more money, at any cost — as long as they are not the ones bearing that cost. My view is that we won't get to find out the true promise of the technology until we break apart the bullshit economics driving this hype machine.
I agree that even today, it's possible for the tools to be used in a way that's empowering for the humans using them, but it seems like the people doing that are in the minority. It seems like it's pretty hard for a tech layperson to do that kind of stuff, not least of all because most people struggle to discern the bullshit from the genuinely useful (and I don't blame them for being overwhelmed). I don't think the current environment is conducive towards people learning to build those kinds of workflows. I often use myself as a sort of anti-benchmark in areas like this, because I am an exceedingly stubborn person who likes to tinker, and if I find it exhausting to learn how to do, it seems unreasonable to expect the majority of people to be able to.
I like the comic's example of Photoshop's background remover, because I doubt I'd know as many people who make cool stuff in Photoshop without helpful bits of automation like that ("cool stuff" in this case often means amusing memes or jokes, but for many, that's the starting point in continuing to grow). I'm all for increasing the accessibility of an endeavour. However, the positive arguments for Generative AI often feels like it's actually reinforcing gatekeeping rather than actually increasing accessibility; it implicitly divides people into the static categories of Artist, and Non-Artist, and then argues that Generative AI is the only way for Non-Artists to make art. It seems to promote a sense of defeatism by suggesting that it's not possible for a Non-Artist to ever gain worthwhile levels of skill. As someone who sits squarely in the grey area between "artist" and "non-artist", this makes me feel deeply uncomfortable.
I actually had a friend who jokingly mocked me for liking ai because i was initially very exited ablut Dall-E and ChatGPT 3.5
Back then i could only see the potential that it continues to have. OpenAI appeared to have altruistic goals and was a non profit. Trojan horse it turned out to be.
Had to make pretty clear to my friend that “ yes, but not like this, everything but this” about the current slop situation.
This was a great read! As someone who was initially excited about the possibilities of AI art, it's been hit or miss with me.
I've come to realise over time that I like the connection that art offers. The little moment of 'I wonder what the artist was thinking when they imagined this and what experiences did someone have to get to a place where they could visualize and create this?'
And I think that's what missing with AI art. Sure, it can enable someone like me who has no skill with drawing to create something but it doesn't get to the point of putting my actual imagination down. The repeated tries can only get to point of 'close enough'.
For me, looking at a piece and then learning it's AI art is basically realizing that I'm looking at a computer generated imitation of someone's imagination. Except the imitation was created by describing the art instead of the imitator ever looking at it. An connection I could have felt with original human is watered down as to be non-existent.
One thing I've found interesting with AI art is that it's changed how I look at handmade art. It is similar in a way to appreciating a handmade piece of furniture or a machine compared to a mass produced commodity item. Art that I previously would have dismissed instantly sometimes makes me think for a second about the artist and how it was made, even when it lacks a professional level of quality. That said, I've also seen enough AI art that I can distinguish between garbage slop and something (at least a little) interesting made in Comfy UI. There's always been a lot of low quality art out there, but I think the real issue is with people trying to pass off low effort generated slop as real art, rather than the gen-AI tech itself (environmental impact notwithstanding).
I made a comment about a week ago about how copying people's art is still art, and it was a bit of an aha moment as I pinpointed for myself a big part of why I find image generators and the like so soulless, inwardly echoing a lot of what Inman lays out here.
All human made art, from the worst to the best, embodies the effort of the artist. Their intent and their skill. Their attempt to make something, to communicate something. It has meaning. All generative art does is barf up random noise that looks like pictures. It's impressive technology, and I understand that it's exciting, but it's not art. If humans ever end up creating actual artificial intelligence, then we can talk about machine made art. Until then, it's hardly more than a printer in terms of artistic merit.
It's impressive technology, and I understand that it's exciting, but it's not art.
I would add that a lot (most?) graphical elements we encounter in daily lives do not require art or soul in the least. Stock images on web pages, logos, icons etc. are examples of graphical elements that are IMO perfectly fine to use AI image generation for. It's the menial labour of the artist profession that is now being affected by modern automation much like so many other professions have been before them. All of them resisted so of course artists resist too.
The impact on livelihoods is important, but it's ultimately unrelated to defining what art is. My consideration of art is not one born of fear of losing money, but purely out of appreciation for the craft. I don't think it's entirely fair to suggest all the criticisms against generated art is solely borne of self-preservation.
In regards to corporate "art", all the things you listed, even stock images, are certainly not the purest form of artistry, but they still have (or, at least had) intent suffusing their creation. I suppose the question then is - is there a noticeable difference between the two for corporations? Will a generated logo have the same impact as a purposefully crafted on does? In my experience, the generated products I've noticed feel distinctly hollow. While past corporate assets are typically hollow shells of real art, generated assets are even less. They're a pure concentration of corporate greed and demand, without the "bothersome" human element. Maybe that won't matter in their course of business, but I think it might. Time will tell.
I'd argue that logos are a hugely expressive form. It's just that 90% of them are basic ass shit tier stuff.
AI has basically raised the level of "shit tier" pretty high. I sometimes go check out Hotone Audio's Facebook page to see if there are new firmware updates for my device, but they mainly peddle pointless AI slop marketing images. I'm sure there are tons of companies like this.
It's the literal example of the marketing person being able to churn out pictures without an artist being involved, and thus the output is a pile of crap even more vapid than stock photos.
The most generic logo from ten years ago still was made with choices by a designer. It's those choices that make a difference, you don't choose how things are executed with ai
But you still choose the final result...for something like that, the how is really quite irrelevant, it is just the end result that matters and that still remains in the hands of humans as they're the ones to settle on the final solution.
But that's exactly my point; logos, icons, stock images etc. are already nothing but noise meant to just catch the eye...might as well just get it auto-generated.
That you can't see or appreciate the intent of the artist behind those doesn't mean it's not there or not important. Why they were made or how they are used in the end is not important. All that matters is how they were made.
I would honestly argue that the way an artist makes art is also completely irrelevant. The art is only meaningful in the way it's perceived, how the artist physically makes it is of very little importance. The tools and materials are just a means to an end, it's the finished product that inspires feelings and thoughts, not the process of how it came to be.
Not really. It's the equivalent of ordering a "build it yourself" sandwich where you specify type of bread and content, and having someone else make it. Yes you didn't actually assemble the sandwich yourself, but who cares how that happened, you have the sandwich you wanted, it contains what you wanted, it tastes and looks like you intended.
I'm not arguing that people using AI generated images can call themselves artists, I'm arguing that AI generated can have a useful purpose replacing menial "art" work.
Oh my fucking god people...I didn't say you could claim you made something when using AI generated images. I claimed it still makes sense for some things because they hold pretty much no artistic value when made by humans already (like icons, stock images and logos)
Your example is shit. It would be more appropriate for when you commission a piece of work from someone, where they are using their skills and choices and you're telling them what you want and don't want on the sandwich.
AI doesn't make choices when creating an image. It generates an image based off of other images and you hope that it gets something that follows some aesthetic principles that it's lifting from other images. Just because you reroll the die doesn't mean you're choosing shit.
That "menial" process when you're making art is literally the best part. When you're painting a sky for the background of something you don't want that just filled in, that's where you can experiment and maybe even add an element that you weren't thinking of before when you started the piece. AI can't do that for you.
I've been practicing at being a better writer, and one of the ways I've been doing that is by studying the writing that I personally really like. Often I can't explain why I click so much with a particular style of writing, but by studying and attempting to learn how to copy the styles that I like, it feels like a step towards developing my own "voice" in writing.
A common adage around art (and other skilled endeavours) is that you need to know how to follow the rules before you can break them, after all. Copying is a useful stepping stone to something more. It's always going to be tough to learn when your ambition is greater than your skill level, but there's a quote from Ira Glass that I've found quite helpful:
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
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I want to touch on how he mentions hitting the button to automatically make music on a Casio keyboard.
I fully realize I'm being reductive to the point of being offensive but that's not my intent and I preemptively apologize, when I say: that's at least in part, the very first seed to becoming a professional DJ. That's not nothing.
Using AI to generate images can be the same thing if it's extrapolated out into complexity and layered nuance. It might not make you an artist exactly, in the same way that a DJ might not be a musician but it IS a skillset that potentially has value.
And even if you think I'm totally off-base in saying so? I liked pretending with the little automatic music button on the keyboard.
Are you speaking from experience? 'Cause that's not even vaguely related to how any of the DJs I know (including a couple of professionals) got started. The prime motive for most DJs is sharing cool music, and Casio keyboards don't do that..
No. Not from experience at all. I saw a small documentary once saying DJs remixed and sometimes create almost entirely new music and that they used computer based audio tools to do so. I'm probably thinking of a different profession. My ignorance, sorry.
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I watched a short saying you might be an art director, at best, but not really an artist. Because you have the vision but you're only telling someone (something) to materialize it. I was kind of happy with that.
I was kinda against their argument at first, then I was with them and continued reading. But then they went into all sorts of detail, weighing pros and cons etc., and after reading more than half I evtl. gave up.
It seems all "why AI is bad" articles seem to go this way.
It seems all "why AI is bad" articles unwillingly even support the hype.
Fuck AI "art", it's not art you morons, it's automation, which takes away real people's jobs. The current implementations made by greedy companies also very obviously steal. 'nuff said.
I liked it, personally. I've read plenty of AI bad articles, and I too am burnt out on them. However, what I really appreciated about this was that it felt less like a tirade against AI art and more like a love letter to art and the humans that create it. As I was approaching the ending of the comic, for example, when the argument had been made, and the artist was just making their closing words, I was struck by the simple beauty of the art. It was less the shapes and the colours themselves that I found beautiful, but the sense that I could practically feel the artist straining against the pixels in his desperation to make something that he found beautiful — after all, what would be the point if he couldn't live up to his own argument?
I don't know how far you got through, but I'd encourage you to consider taking another look at it. It's not going to make any arguments you've not heard before, but if you're anything like me, you might appreciate it from the angle of a passionate artist striving to make something meaningful in defiance of AI. I always find my spirits bolstered by work like this because whilst we're not going to be able to draw our way out of this AI-slop hellscape, it does feel important to keep reminding ourselves of what we're fighting for.
As a passable quality 3D artist who does it for a living I've found AI art (which can do 3D now to some degree) has kind of narrowed the scope for me. If you want generic Unreal style pseudo-realism or disney toon then AI can do that for you* I've had to focus much more on creating a unique style and also optimizing my work in ways that AI just doesn't have the ability to do because they require longer chains of actual reasoning.
For AI in general I think this pattern holds, it can quickly create something generic and increasingly do it without extranious fingers but no matter how much you tweak a prompt its damn near impossible to get a specific idea into image form. Its like a hero shooter with skins VS actually creating your own character.
**Right now AI models use more tris to re-create the default blender cube than my entire lifetime portfolio but I'm assuming that can be resolved since we already have partially automated re-topology tools.*
I often hear AI enthusiasts say that AI democratized art. As if art weren't already democratized. Most anyone can pick up a pen, draw, write, type, move a mouse, etc. What AI democratizes in art, is the perception of skill. Which is why when you find out a piece of art was made by inputting some short prompt into a generator, you become disappointed. Because it would be cool, if the person actually had the skill to draw that. Pushing a few buttons to get that, not so much.
I have always felt that I'm not good at art (the practice I did got me not very far), and I've recently had reason to make little collages. One thing that I've done is uploaded pictures to Canva and traced them so I had something resembling recognizable images (my dog, me in a kayak). I don't think tracing is making an art, AI is definitely not making an art.
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What makes you want to do art? I'm just curious, because I am also someone who has bounced off of attempting to learn to do art a bunch of times, and found tracing unfulfilling (I am abstaining from the question of whether tracing is art, but I do know it didn't scratch the itch for me).
For my part, I ended up finding that crafts like embroidery or clothing making was the best way to channel my creative inclinations, but that's mostly because I have the heart of a ruthless pragmatist and I like making useful things. What was it that caused you to attempt to learn?
I like and admire visual arts. I wanted to try to be able to do the thing. I have a strong imagination and extremely good visualization skills, so I wanted to be able to take things from my minds eye to reality.
I have found much of my art/creative outlet in dancing and crafting.
And people forget how many forms of art there are. If you can speak any language which if youre reading this you can then you can create art. Putting your feelings into words is art. The point of art is not to be good at it or to earn money with it. Its to express your feelings. Of course enabling people who express their feelings in a way that others like to earn money with it is a good thing but even that can be very restrictive. Look at all the twitter porn artists who really just want to create something else but need some sort of revenue stream.
What AI democratizes in art, is the perception of skill.
I was a professional artist for many years, and often noted a strong preference for photo-realistic art among non-artists, often to the exclusion of any other style or aesthetic. The people around me who tried to draw or paint or sculpt, even just one time, often had an appreciation for a more diverse array of approaches and media.
To me, most AI 'art' feels like the product of 'artists' who don't even really like art.
Note: If you're just going to come in and engage with me in an uncivil manner with your dick behavior, you'll be auto blocked.
One part that gets me is when they stated that they took art classes. Just, what is the point of taking art classes today? There have been artists whose stories I've read about and heard of, who spent years practicing their craft to get to where they are. The idea of taking an art class for an otherwise approachable hobby just always feels odd to me and always will. There are countless ways to improve one's art and craft, not by AI though.
And then right after, they mention about practicing. So again - what's the point of taking art classes?
I stopped reading about half way through, because my mind went "yeah yeah yeah..." since nothing this comic artist was saying anything new that I hadn't heard of in regards to anti-AI.
Here's my stance on AI Art and it's going to rub people the wrong way but I don't care. I was told by an artist friend whom I've known and has done pictures for me before. They started raising their prices a smidge for their commissions and this artist was and is on their way of being recognized as a good artist in their community (they're furry). We got into a conversation about how I brought up that prices could be hard to achieve because of the economy and blah blah.
They told me in response that 'Art is a luxury'. And you know what? It kinda is. It is a luxury and sets a baseline as to what one can and can't afford. If someone is frustrated enough that they can't afford some $300 commission piece (yes those people do exist), they're going to go to AI because they know they can do it at home. Now it doesn't excuse the fact that they could've just picked up art as a hobby and actually practice, there is that argument. However, not everyone is an artist and not everyone is going to practice it.
And if someone isn't going to practice art and isn't able to afford high prices asked of the artists who have open commissions - what do you honestly expect them to do?
As far as things regarding like studios function and how this all relates to them, that's a whole can of worms of its own. How many times have we heard animation studios or other studios get shut down because the funding dried up? "Oh we planned 2 seasons in advance - oh wait - we can only do one season now" and then that's a wrap of that series.
I don't know where I want to go with that and this has been lengthy anyways so I'll just summarize it as this. I don't have a big problem with AI Art because Art and Creativity in of itself, is a luxury. It's an expensive luxury at that, that has its limits. That is why people have turned to AI in droves. I don't agree with a lot of the reasons behind what people do with AI Art and proclaiming themselves as 'artists' when they're not (I prefer to call them envisonists because you are still inputting and projecting the imaginations of your mind into an input that can visualize it for you).
The point is the same as taking classes for any other skill, from baseball to carpentry: you have to learn technique before you can engrain the skill through practice. Some people can pick it up on their own if they're motivated enough, by studying other people's art, watching artists working, reading books, etc., but it's more difficult and time-consuming without an instructor's feedback. Sometimes they even figure it out wrong, and develop a very difficult and time-consuming method of doing something when a much simpler one exists.
So it's optimal to both have the classes and do extensive practice outside of them. One is not a substitute for the other.
I was going to read this but stopped halfway through because my mind went "yeah that yeah another person who never bothered trying to draw having a hot take that's just sucking off a tech bro"
Art classes can introduce you to new techniques that you wouldn't have otherwise pursued and elevate your art to greater heights. Depending on the school, it also helps with networking. Lotsa famous animators at places like CalArts, Sheridan, Gobelins, etc.
What a beautiful read. I feel the same about AI art and I remember a longer talk I had with my tattoo artist: 'I need the money so I will do AI based tattoos my clients bring to me. But they have no soul, no story, no individuality. They are not a part of you.'
I feel the same.
Also I like Oatmeal's reference to Wabi Sabi: The perfection of imperfection in every piece of art.
At least by redrawing it, the tattoo artist is injecting (pun intended) some of the human skill and decision-making into it?
But, ugh! Who would get an AI tattoo?
And what's the point? Let's say I have an idea of a tattoo I want (Jack Sparrow, dressed in a McDonald's uniform, fighting off a rabid poodle, in the style of Baroque painting), but I cannot draw. So I use AI to render it, how clever!
But wait - a tattoo artist will be physically drawing it anyway. They know how to develop concepts into sketches, don't they?
Just get them to do it! Skip the pointless AI step!
It was an ok read for me, but mostly because I enjoyed the art rather than relating to the entirety of the sentiment.
I'm an artist and I find AI art evocative and illustrating things in a way that I wish that I could illustrate, but feel that is only because it comes from real human artists. I agree that it is a void in terms of difficulty to process, but there is still skill involved in both using search engines and describing something to an llm. A minute amount of skill, but still a skill.
I hate AI art because it is stealing from artists, not because it doesn't feel right. It can have a million iterations and only needs to get it right once to count as feeling right to me. The relationship between the content and their artists to the ultimate product is removed, this to me is the wrongfulness of claiming new art from it. It is just stealing in a more wind-about manor. This isn't like generating fractal art or something.
After all these years of corporations fucking up the literal social fabric and and how we communicate over IP law, for them to turn around and steal everything and just get a pass is an extra slap in face. Stealing only gets allowed2 one way in our society, and AI is just another example of that.
I'm honestly surprised to not see this take more from others and felt like i needed to mention it.
edit: emphasized that by making AI art taking skill, I only mean just a minute amount.
I think AI art serves a different purpose from the art we talk about when we say "real art has heart" or "the process of creating the art affected me when I looked at it".
I think about how I feel when I'm scrolling through pictures in some app on my phone - some will be memes, some will be cats, but then some will be there for artistic purposes. As I'm scrolling through, such a picture will spark a brief glimmer of emotion - "huh, that looks neat" for example. I'm not looking close and examining the brush strokes, not thinking about what troubles the artist went through, and not thinking about the process of its creation at all.
In that context I don't think it makes much difference that it's AI-generated. I'd kind of like to know, and I don't want to see a dozen different outputs of the same prompt because whoever hit the button couldn't even apply the modicum of effort require to pick their favourite, but AI-generated images are just as able to instigate that glimmer of "hey that looks cool" that any image can.
There's zero need to throw insults around; I made the context absolutely clear in my comment and it has nothing to do with what I do when at an art gallery or something.
Maybe some people are having an experience like they are looking at a Rembrandt when they scroll through /c/pics or something, but I'm not. Do you also shit on people for being unable to appreciate music because they put something on in the background? Is it only OK to go to concerts and immerse yourself in it? If you're in a shop and a tune you like comes on, do you park your cart to really appreciate the depths of emotion it's inspiring in you?
Well I'm not going to slap you on the back and praise you for saying the equivalent of "I just eat potato chips anyway I don't care if the new chips are made of styrofoam they still got flavor blasted".
Also, I totally disagree with you. If I see a neat picture someone took from getting dropped onto earth from low orbit, I'm gonna think that's way cooler than an ai image trying to emulate the same thing, even if I'm only looking at it for a second. I'm going to think a crudely drawn parody of a meme is funnier than an ai generated imitation of a meme, even if all I'm doing is making that little exhale with the nose instead of laughing.
There's a difference. You can tell. If you're so Internet addled you genuinely are saying you don't think there's a difference, then you've got like, negative skills in art appreciation.
I think this is completely missing the point when it's talking about "the minutiae of art". It's making two claims at the same time: art is better when you suffer for it and the art is good whether or not you suffered. But none of that is relevant.
When Wyeth made Christina's World, I don't know if he suffered or not when painting that grass. What I do know is that he was a human with limited time and the fact that he spent so much of his time detailing every blade of grass means that he's saying something. That The Oatmeal doesn't draw backgrounds might be because he's lazy, but he also doesn't need them. These are choices we make to put effort in one part and ignore some other part.
AI doesn't make choices. It doesn't need to. A detailed background is exactly the same amount of work as a plain one. And so a generated picture has this evenly distributed level of detail, no focus at all. You don't really know where to look, what's important, what the picture is trying to say. Because it's not saying anything. It isn't a rat with a big butt, it's just a cloud of noise that happens to resemble a rat with a big butt.
Visitor to your grave: "...I need more context." Your ghost: "It's about AI art." Visitor: "...I still don't get it." Ghost: "That's because you're a robot. Everybody's just robots now. Us ghosts are all that's left of humanity. All that you know is based on what we suffered to learn and create." Robot visitor: "...but why a rat with a big butt?" Ghost: "Draw one, and reflect on the cloud of noise that you produce instead." Robot: *draws a rat with a big butt Ghost: "...AI wasn't as good back then. Fuck you." *whisps away
Oh wow, it's so hard to ask a computer to generate an image. You might get a repetitive stress injury from writing so many prompts to constantly pump out vapid slop devoid of any artistic merit or value.
It was a good read until he started with the art is a skill and anyone can do it. He's kind of in his bubble there making assumptions about people. People have various levels of aphantasia, it's not binary. Those that are good at visual imagination do art, people without can't draw a fucking apple from memory reasonable art is beyond many, even if they had the time to dedicate to it.
Everything else he said was on point. well eventually on point, that was a long ride.
Edit: Man, look at all these talented people telling me I could be talented too if I just tried. Some of you might find a shocking revelation in thevfact that not everyone has the ability to perform the skill you perform. Some people, like me, have put several thousand hours into trying to improve my ability to draw, and while it has improved slightly, I am still not capable of drying anything above rudimentary. Talented people find it easy to project their skill onto other people but that's not how it works. It's not just a feeling that you can't do it, it's trying for years and not being able to do anything appreciable with it. My seven-year-old had more skill out of the gate than I had after scoring around with it for 30 years. So keep on telling me that I could just do it if I'd just invest the time and make yourself feel better that you invest at the time. That's truly helpful to me.
One of the things I find most awesome about art is seeing how so many people with different capacities find ways to make art.
I likely have aphantasia, and whilst I call myself an artist, there are times where I see a particular shape or form within the world and think "damn, that's beautiful". I find myself taking a mental note of it, because whilst I don't make art, I do enjoy making clothes. Aphantasia does make it hard to take those experiences and make cool stuff out of them, because without a mental image to work from, it may take me many attempts to correctly mark out the shape, where my only guiding sense is whether a particular attempt looks right though. It hasn't stopped me from making things I'm truly proud of though, and a key thing that drives me to keep creating is that sense of fulfillment I get from taking something beautiful from the world and reusing it in a manner that allows me to share that slice of wonder with other people.
I feel like I've only been half decent at that in recent years though; before that, I tended to focus on the more technical aspects of the craft, but that doesn't mean it wasn't creative. I made a chainmail hauberk for myself once, because the base technique didn't seem hard and it seemed like it would be fun (turns out the hard part is sticking with it long enough to make a whole item). Part of my quest was that I knew that wearing a sturdy belt over a chainmail hauberk is essential for the weight to be properly distributed, and I thought it might be cool to use an underbust corset in place of a belt. The creative part of that required little, if any, visual imagination — I mostly just enjoyed the juxtaposition of the traditionally masculine armour with the femininity of the corset.
Beyond my own personal experiences, I've been awed by seeing so many examples of creative people working with what limitations they have, and honing their skills in whatever way they can. A close friend has such poor vision that they legally count as blind, but their paintings have such incredible colours — they have a beautiful diffuseness to them, which is apparently how they see the world. Seeing their art makes me feel closer to them. Unfortunately, they've recently suffered injury to their hands, so they can't paint like they used to — so they have found new ways to paint that don't rely on their hands so much. And there's even more examples of this kind of persistence if we consider music to be art too.
I don't really give a fuck about art — not really. I care about the people who make it. I get that it's frustrating to try something creative when your skill can't match up to your figurative creative vision, but that's also a problem that even experienced artists struggle with. If you made something that required little to no skill, but it was something that you had cared about, then that's enough to make me care. That might sound silly given that you're just a random person on the internet to me, but that's precisely why I care; art makes me feel connected to people I've never even met.
People who make the point that you're making are often people who have within them the desire to make art, but they feel that it's inaccessible to them. I know, because I was one of them (years before AI hit the zeitgeist). I realise that this may not apply to you, and you might be speaking in a more general sense, but if it does, then I would hope that you would someday feel able to give things a go. I think it'd be a shame if someone with a desire to create never got the chance to see where that could go. I'm not saying "maybe you could start a career as an artist", because even highly proficient artists often struggle to make a career out of art that doesn't kill their soul (most working artists I know use their paid work to support work that's more artistically fulfilling to them). Just know that if you make things that you care about, there will always be people who will care about what you make.
I say this as someone who has just written out a veritable essay full of care in reply to someone I'm probably never going to speak about. And hey, if you've gotten this far, then that is surely evidence towards my point about how making stuff you care about causes people to care about what you've made — either that, or you've jumped to the bottom in search of a TL;DR. Regardless, people like me care so much about art because human connection helps us to survive this pretty grim world, and art is our most reliable way of doing that. I'd love to have you here with us, if you'd like to be.
Uh, lots of really great painters have aphantasia. It's very prominent in the population and 100% not a medical disability. Art is a skill. There's people without arms that paint. Deaf people who make music. There's blind people drawing. There's this cool japanese girl without an arm that plays the violin. There's all sorts of people who make art, because humans can't not make art.
Are you going to win prices and sell work for millions of dollars, or feature at the MOMA, or play at the Superbowl half time show? Or achieve any of the inane arbitrary goalpost that people like to set for calling stuff real art. Most assuredly you won't. Because less than 0.1% of all the people in the planet will achieve any of that. But every single child has and will be born an artist. Every child draws, sings, dances and plays spontaneously. All that is art.
If you think only people born artists can make art, congratulations, you were born an artists, every human is, go do your art. If you think only specific people with extraordinary characteristics get to make art. I'm sorry you were hurt so bad to develop such bleak worldview and poor self image.
If you do art, you'll get good at art. If you don't do art and instead make the slop machine manufacture expensive Styrofoam for you to chew on, then you'll never get good at art. Regardless of your biological makeup. Being shit at doing something is the first and mandatory step for becoming good at doing something. Do it poorly until you can do it decently, then do it some more. Art is the experience of doing art. Even bad art is superior to mass consumption generated pixels.
While I appreciate the pep talk, I truly think your heart is in the right place. You just claim that my artwork is better without having any view of my artwork or knowledge of my skill.
This is a very common thing that people do. You can't conceive that someone can't do something, so you blame them on their persistence, or their ID or their ego. I don't know what your skills are, but it feels an awful lot like projection.
It's not like I'm useless at art, I can sculpt 3D objects from 3D objects. I can even, with limited success, use Zbrush.
It was none of those things actually. It's impossible to objectively judge our own artworks. We can analyze it, tell others what we think are the strong and weak points, but it's extremely common for most people, especially when it comes to art, to judge it with a much higher degree of scrutiny that we do not reserve for others.
It's something I've had to work through myself, both with my art and myself as a person. And with that comes an inherent distrust of others opinions of themselves and their work, especially when it's excessively dismissive or pessimistic.
After the news cycle recently exploded with the announcement that Google would require every single Android app to be from a registered and verified developer, while killing third-party app stores …
The constraint to require a valid signing isn't something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn't check for a registered signature, that should work fine.
I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don't have to do so.
I think that there's a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don't need to install an alternative firmware on your phone --- it's not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn't registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that's going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.
Even if you can handle installing the alternate firmware, a lot of developers probably just aren't going to bother trying to develop software without being registered.
But if Graphene chooses not to do this, they diverge from the Android project. Which will take more time to maintain the project which will ultimately lead to more developers burning out and dropping out of the project.
It doesn’t need to be affected, but most open source projects don’t have the resources to keep going against big companies when most of their users aren’t contributing.
I would guess that it's probably not much by way of change --- theoretically, maybe just a single line patch --- to cause this check not to take place.
They already diverge by having a network permission and a bunch of other differences, and not being allowed to use Google Pay because of those differences
That might be true, I don’t know much about GrapheneOS. But I do know that users of open source projects expecting changes to come out of thin air, and filing bugs when they don’t, is hurting the volunteers behind open source projects. So we should all make sure to volunteer some of our own time or money to keep the projects we love going, instead of just expecting them to fix the things we dislike.
The aosp has been in the process of being gutted, I surmise in preparation of these anti consumer measures, graphene os has its work cut out for it. I imagine that after the dust settles, consumers will have to pick between an immature Linux os or their personal preference of walled garden.
GrapheneOS wasn't going to be affected anyway and there's nothing for the GrapheneOS developers to change. The developer verification thing will be done by proprietary Google apps. Those apps cannot get the necessary permissions to block app installs or disable apps.
GrapheneOS won't be affected. The developer verification thing will be handled by another app and won't be part of the OS. That app won't have permission to block app installs or anything like that.
The pause in Calyx updates has nothing to do with Google's fuckery, and they are not "dying." They lost a major lead developer and decided they needed to restructure so no one would be so essential going forward.
For mobile phones that works as a daily driver? Gobbling up iOS. Or gobbling up what's becoming of Android.
I really wish we had open phones that "just work". I'd even go with slightly quirky but functional. Unfortunately, that requires strong cooperation between hardware maker and software developers; and it will require a lot of work. But that's not the main issue. The direction we're headed toward is "everything need an official app", and those will mostly only work on "official" phones made by big manufacturers.
Even today, making some bank apps work on non vanilla Android is not always straightforward, and it's still relatively open and easy to do. The move by Google is going to tighten this even more, and I have no doubt, if they pull through, that this will go in the requirements for the "play protect" validation BS. Meaning if you want that bank app, or whatever state digital ID app (meh) to work, you'll need a "real" Android or an iOS device. And those apps are becoming more and more mandatory (I can't log-in to my bank's online website without their app and proprietary 2FA…).
A niche, open-source OS, Linux or modified AOSP or whatever, will have a hard time filling that gap as things keep moving. Which is really sad.
GrapheneOS isn't dying. There's an OEM partnership in the works and they'll release devices with support for GrapheneOS in a year or two. GrapheneOS still provides updates and while the changes have made some things harder, the project is still going strong.
Most F-Droid users are NOT custom ROMs. This means that as long as F-Droid does not get their own developer key - it will become useless. F-Droid is privacy focused - both dev and user, and they oppose requiring devs to essentially give up their privacy and sign the APK with their own dev key.
Now, if F-Droid is dead, GrapheneOS becomes useless. Who would want to develop apps for the 0.0001% of the population (i.e custom ROM users)
I am the person you are talking about. I've looked into graphene before and I do host some of my own services at home. I also work full time and I don't want to spend all of my free time managing things. I use F-Droid, but I am on stock android on my pixel.
I appreciate the privacy and FOSS nature of F-Droid, but I use things like Android auto Google maps for work, I use banking apps on my phone as well. I know technically micro G and blah blah blah, but like I said: work full time.
i wonder if it's possible for fdroid or another dev to make a linux/windows/osx app which basically uses an adb connection to automatically upload and install applications
I wouldn't count on it. I'm 100% expecting them to follow up on this in another update, blocking devices from wirelessly debugging themselves for "security" reasons.
I haven't used revanced in a while, but Fennic + ubo + sponsor block should get you to basically the same place unless they've added new features since I used it last.
All APKs will require a signed developer certificate.
I doubt they will be signing keys for developers who circumvent Google's services, or that violate their ToS.
They're copying this scheme from Apple in Europe, when it was forced to allow other app stores.
In that case, Apple revoked certificates for apps it didn't like, such as P2P/torrents. Mind you, these were NOT apps that were not hosted on Apple's App Store.
I suspect this is designed to block revanced entirely. It won't be able to install the apk it compiles or downloads, so apps won't be able to update even if you have it installed via adb to begin with.
They're doing the same thing Apple has been doing for years, I used to run a self-signing application which ran every week or so by itself.
Workarounds are going to exist plenty, it's just a slap in the face. Especially because the Play Store is filled with malware. Apple's strict rules are horrible for developers, but at least it's not as riddled with malware.
Big gov and big corp are essentially the same thing. And while the people jump ship to be at the mercy of the "better side", the elites are sharing a cocktail in secret.
The scale still remains, however one side tilted more so than the other.
Yuuuup. The state and capitalists collude against the working class. Neither one nor the other can ever be trusted to put the interests of workers first, though they will each make empty promises to do so. Then they will privilege the ruling class every time.
"big gov" can be influenced by citizens. meanwhile, "big corp" is controlled by shareholders, the average person has zero say in how the corporate is run
This is basically the same as Apple's notarization scheme for direct app installation on iOS in the EU. I do not believe the EU has sued Apple over that yet, and they've had plenty of time to do so.
The law EU created looks like it has a loophole which allows manufacturer to prescreen side loaded apps (like what? What's the point of sideloading then?) it is what Apple exploited and Google is going the same direction.
A few months ago? Yeah, I'd be with you. Today? It's the wet dream of the current EU leads. Closed devices, where they can run spyware without risk of it being hindered by custom OS with proper permissions and process separations? So good. For them.
I understand that Apple takes issue with packages that can themselves "take packages". But historically, I don't believe that Google has. Of course, Google also hasn't done the registration thing historically, either.
Termux is already available on the Play Store, so I imagine it won't be an issue. Sideloading will still be possible, it just requires developers give Google their private information (which is fucking stupid) but you already have to do that to be on the Play Store, so I don't see why Google wouldn't verify the Termux team.
Yeah I really hope they wont ask termux packages or apps installed through termux to also be verified. Termux is on the play store but it's not the real version. Termux devs have the actual version sideloaded.
i somehow skipped the "non-" part of the headline. thanks for the info though - when i came across this a couple of months ago, i couldn't really think of any good use for it
I normally use ADB anyway, but wouldn’t surprise me if that becomes more locked down as well. For example, I believe Meta Quest requires a developer account with a credit card attached to even put it in developer mode, and I worry that kind of bullshit will become the norm.
You don't need a credit card for a dev account. You do, however, need to have a "business" attached. Luckily, that business they're asking for doesn't need to be verified, so it can be just a random string of letters.
Still bs that you have to go through all of that just to install apps you want.
iOS is infinitely more polished than Android. It's rather stable and at least the main notification system isn't that bad for privacy.
Edit: I want to inquire: what exactly is wrong about my comments. Android is a piece of shit. iOS is a piece of shit. iOS is smoother because Apple can engineer the parts more smoothly. Android lets you run software. I hate them both but I need to run Termux.
Its terrible for security haha. We were able to 0 day it a couple of times without trying all that hard. So many CVEs that are repeatable. I wil admit the UI is phenominally better (in my opinion). And the official apps (as long as you dont want to do something specific) are perfect at what they do.
Android is a bit better but you can exploit it because people dont update their phones. Google is actually VERY good at keep those up to date...but if no one updates, its kinda a wash.
Again my opinion, im not too attached to either. They both suck in their own unique ways. #1 is you have to use their tool sets which is unique instead of any other computer system. Its such a hassle to keep up with as a software developer.
ah ok. Well im not familiar with that other than push notifications, which you can set up outside of googles ecosystem....although everyone likes using firebase for some reason.
Really depends which spin of Android you have. I have a Nothing Phone 2 and the OS is arguably more polished than on my SO's iPhone 14, which frequently has bugs, lag, and crashes. You can't really generalise about Android when there are so many versions of it.
That being said I'll probably be looking into Linux phones in the next few years because I'm tired of corporations trying to control my devices.
Yeah GrapheneOS is open source bro. Probably doesn't have full compatibility with your phone if I had to guess. That's really not a like-for-like comparison to iOS.
I wasn't denying the fact that you're experiencing this issue, but since this is the first I've heard of something this bad in my 3 years of using GrapheneOS, this does appear to be a fairly unique case.
Provided you are using an otherwise well-functioning and currently supported device (and not an emulator), and that you are using a stable release installed via an official method (and there were no install issues), your best bet would be to ask for help in one of the community chats or forums: grapheneos.org/contact#communi…
You will be asked to share which device you are using though, which you did not seem comfortable doing in the post you linked to.
Unrelated, but I learned about the Android "task manager" (Running Services) from that post of yours, so thanks for sharing that.
Yeah that unfortunately seems to be the only option if you don't want to completely reset your device or remove apps one at a time to find the culprit. And there's no guarantee either of those will work anyway.
I've actually found a small number other users reporting a similar issue, though dev responses all seem to believe the issue is likely caused by apps rather than the OS. The fact that the issue is exclusive to GrapheneOS doesn't appear to have swayed them into looking into it unfortunately.
If I were in your position I'd probably use the Auto Reboot setting so at least you don't have to do it manually every day. It reboots after a specified number of hours without an unlock, so it's ideal for when you're asleep.
APKs are so goddamn huge and the OS can't swap parts of them out of memory because it's conpressed data and that would exponentially increase cache misses.
The fact of the matter is that Android is hacked on top of Linux and there's endless problems because of it. One part is that there's no task manager and system apps eat up well over half my memory which means that once I open one app, the other needs to be immediately evicted from RAM
How is the notification system better for privacy on iOS? On android you have notification groups to toggle and you can set which notifications show up on the lock screen and how much of them is visible there. The notification system is to me arguably the best designed thing on android and one of the worst on iOS
Those barely exist. When I bought my Sony 5V, it was because it was like 1 of 2 or 3 new high end models that still had both the jack and an sd card slot.
So if Android loses that you go to the other place that also NOT lets you do that? That makes sense... Get a fairphone, install Ubuntu touch and stop rolling over like a good little dog.
And their flagship costs more than the iPhone 17 Pro but has performance closer to the iPhone 11 and they still sell your data off the back end.
Android was a fine alternative to iOS for a minute… like in 2012 with the Galaxy S3 and Jellybean. Now? I don’t get it. You pay more, you get less, all because — what? Gmail was once cool?
They took your headphone jack. They took your memory card slot. They took your back button. (Anyone remember the menu button?) Now they’re taking sideloading.
What is even the point of Android? It isn’t freedom. I see it as capitulation to Big Data.
Imo, the Android experience is far better than iOS. I have no love for either Google or Apple, but I would rather use a slower older Android phone over any iPhone.
I don’t disagree but android was already clunky, with less integration across devices (for better or worse), and now you can’t even sideload. What advantages does it have left?
I'm not sure where the thought that it's clunky comes from, but the advantage to me is that I like the Android OS way more the the Apple OS. I don't care about integration across devices because I don't have more than one android device. Anytime I switch phones I login and everything loads in from my latest back up and it just works. I can connect to my computer with KDE connect or plug in with USB C if needed.
I'm not claiming it's a better functioning product, I'm just saying the Android UX > Apple UX. The pixel has the advantage of flashing something like grapheneOS which no iPhones can do. Even with locking down side loading apps, there is still more freedom on Android devices than there are on iOS.
Also, I don't like the feel of iPhones. I'm sure it's something I would get used to, but it's not my first choice.
I’ve used Android since launch and occasionally switched back and forth with iOS. One of my main complaints is in virtue of Android’s versatility, which makes it less reliable and straightforward to use — no integrated password manager, no easy wireless connection to external computers, less smooth and pleasant (and easy) to use. Honestly, I’m just lazy. I want my text messages and calls migrated to my computer automatically, screen sharing, file sharing, passwords and security codes populating instantly, and so on.
I'm the complete opposite with respect to wanting all of those apps and features built into the OS, but I understand that's what most people seem to want, which is largely why iPhones are so popular.
To me, all of that built-in stuff is bloatware that I have to remove just so I can use whichever software I want.
I'll take a bit of jank if it means I have the freedom to do what I want on my device (and choose a device with the specs that matter to me within my budget). That's why so many people are upset at this news.
The Apple ecosystem is perfectly suitable for the needs you described, and it's not something Google will be able to match due to their lack of a real competitor in the desktop OS market. Microsoft had their chance with the Windows Phone but, knowing Windows, I doubt it would ever have had the same level of polish as iOS.
You can achieve most of that via third party apps, which is where the beauty of android comes. Instead of being forced to use Google if you want the best integration or be treated as a second class citizen if you try to use a third party service, most android features can have app defaults to set, so you can use bitwarden or proton if those work better for you (and imo that makes it more versatile, not less). In terms of integrating and syncing notifications with your desktop either KDE Connect, Microsoft's companion app or Google's companion app should work, though it's not going to be automatic or as in depth as Apple's. I'm not gonna touch the smooth and easy argument as that's something you get used to over time really with these. I find iOS super clunky to use, you find android super clunky, it's about which one you got used to first.
What about it is better? Honest question, from someone who uses both.
So yeah, on Android you can do a little more with home screen customisation. It used to be a lot more — I can't believe it took Apple how many years to figure out how to place an icon to the right of or below an open space? It's closer now, they both steal from each other, but you can do a lot more. My Android phone is partly a cosplay prop: it's a real-life NookPhone, from Animal Crossing. My icons are huge, they're the ones from the game, but they open real apps, and they're in a 3x3 grid. Definitely can't do that on iOS. But I don't need that on my daily driver. And many people say — and I'm inclined to agree — that when an app is on both, it's better on iOS due to fewer hardware configurations to support.
Also, we have Delta, the emulator that backs everything up to, ironically, Google Drive. So I can show you this app on my iPhone. I can also AirDrop you any game I have. Long press, share, AirDrop, find your iPhone, you open it with the same app, you got it now. Super easy. But I can also uninstall the app, it removes all the files and whatnot. I can go into Files, double check all my games are gone. Saves, all of it. Then I reinstall it. Nothing... but as soon as I sign into Google Drive, it re-downloads everything. I just wish the emulator ran on the Mac, too — I'd have cross-device sync. Also, the emulator is Nintendo only, no PlayStation, no Sega, nothing like that.
And then the privacy issue. I think it's wild so few people care about their private information being sold. Then again, Facebook, TikTok, and others are huge. So I might be the outlier caring about that. But I still do.
And all those things were "taken" because they followed apple's lead who took all those things first. Losing sideload capability is yet another fallow the leader act they're doing to be like apple.
As for more expensive, disagree there. That's only the case if you go with high end sansung phones, but you can get android phones for much cheaper with still decent hardware, and it (currently) can do all the things apple does. You cant buy a cheaper apple 17 then the 2 models they give you. Also the hardware differences are so minor between Samsung and Apple, its laughable to call one "better" so your ppst really comes off like a fanboy talking about something you dont understand.
Actually, the first phone to do a lot of things was actually an Android — good and bad! The first fingerprint reader, I think may have been the Motorola Bionic? But it was like an electric razor, it had these things you roll your finger across. It was weird. Not like what we have now. Likewise, I'm pretty sure an Android phone was the first one to pull the headphone jack. It was just because Apple did it right when they brought out the AirPods that people cried foul (rightly so). Memory card? Apple never supported them (they're too slow), and Android phones famously didn't support them... I think the Nexus phones? Pixel too. I don't think any Google-branded phone had a memory card slot.
More expensive does include the foldables, and you can't say they don't count because they exist. I wouldn't count the diamond-crusted Android phones, those are super limited edition. But anyone can go buy a fold or a flip, so they have to be considered. Right now the top iPhone costs $2000 in the US. It's a 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max. Android gets higher, albeit with folds, but it does get higher, and the performance isn't any better.
As far as Samsung specifically: the chip in the Galaxy S25 is faster than the one in the iPhone 16 Pro/Max, but it also loses more power when it throttles for getting too hot. That really only means anything in high-end gaming, though. For day-to-day usage the Samsung will clock higher. It's only going to get 3-4 years of support though, if that, and they still sell your private information. You can't even use Samsung Health without agreeing to let them sell your private medical data (whatever you put in it). So no, it can't do everything an iPhone can do. It can't keep your medical information private, which is enshrined in law in many countries, but if you agree to let them sell it, that goes out the window. Why would you give that up when you don't have to?
Cost. You can get performant brand new phones for $200 that will last you 2+ years
OS-wide adblock. I cannot comprehend how iOS users live with out it. I see my GF using her phone and every other scroll of something is an ad.
Some other sailing-of-the-seas things that I'm not comfortable posting online about, but it saves me a lot of money on subscriptions from big corporations.
You got me there. I can probably get a gently used iPhone from a generation or two back and maybe get down to $300, but I dunno about $200. You're 100% right on that one, and more to the point, mid-range Android isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. One of the biggest secrets in mobile is that performance has plateaued.
You can only block ads OS-wide on Android if you're rooted. AdAway (and I suppose others like it) edit the HOSTS file which trumps DNS. DNS is what iPhone users use, and what unrooted Android users use. The problem with DNS isn't that it doesn't work — it does — it's that bad actors can tunnel around it. So Google, great example, the app I mean, has its own DNS. They have various reasons but what it boils down to is "we can tunnel around your ad blocker." They definitely do this on iOS. They probably do it on Android. But editing HOSTS can beat that. And no, I don't get ads on YouTube, either — but I do not use the app. You can, if you're on Android and you're rooted and you have a good HOSTS file. I can block YouTube ads with Safari and uBlock Origin (yeah, we got it now) but it's just DNS. I will concede that the best way to browse on a phone is Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin. Us iPhone users wish we had that. We don't. But we can get close. Really, the only ads I see are in the App Store. It's become a cesspool of shit.
I don't sail on my phone. I've tried, a few things don't work. I have computers for that. I have a good/decent emulator that works good. As far as movies, music, shows, audiobooks, I have a Plex server and my iPhone has no problem accessing that. I bet you could use an Android phone as a Plex server though. Not that I'd want to. But you probably could. Maybe. Like with root? I dunno. But anything on my iPhone (not counting Plex stuff), I can get on your Android phone. And vice-versa. I mean, not to use your Android phone as an example, that's kinda hostile, I mean if I have an iPhone in one hand and an Android phone in the other, I got no problem getting stuff from one to the other. Either way. Best if they're on the same WiFi, but I can make one a hotspot in a pinch.
google largely gave up on the pixel phones, in terms of development since pixel 5, now its just all AI invesment into to all those phones since, with slightly better features, to keep the fans happy.
I don't need a my phone to be a 'flagship'. I am not an influencer. I also wonder what loads are you running on a phone that you meet performance issues.
You can get an android with microSD and 3.5mm jack for 250€.
You can still run all the software you want. Adblockers, torrent clients, emulators, even... browsers! There will still be new android phones that won't suffer those limitations. They will also be cheaper than iphones.
Don't get me wrong android is in a bad trajectory, it's true that's Google has been enshitificating as much as it can get away with. It's still light years ahead of iOS.
If anybody cares for privacy or control of their devices, saving Android, even in alternative versions/vendors, is a much more viable option than switching to iPhone.
They literally have to be more shitty to make money. Side loading allows individuals to choose not to give their money and data to Google. Companies must grow year over year. It doesn't matter if the growth is unnecessary, imaginary line must go up. So remove standard features and then charge a premium for that feature to return, or cut pay/benefits/hours, or layoffs. Those are what's left for our corporations to grow. No new ideas. Just shit.
It had too little memory, but was clearly a step towards phone perfection. I am still bitter that Nokia hired a Microsoft loyalist who killed the Linux line ... shortly before killing the whole company.
Recent AOSP repo added lines of code to Package Installer to handle enforcing restricting whether Package Installer installs an APK file or not based on dev signatures, as well as denying installation if internet isn't available so it can't contact Google's servers for dev signature verification.
So this is enforced by Package Installer, which is already how Google enforces their ridiculous minimal SDK version requirement for installing APK packages, as well as for blocking app update with an APK package with mismatched signature or blocking downgrading an existing app with an APK package, which I already have bypassed via Xposed this way.
Besides, rooting gives YOU total control over your own device like when you have sudo on Linux, even if Google tries some new BS there will be a way to counter it when you have root
I used to root every phone, but by 2025 I've given up. Hard to unlock bootloaders, random apps (especially banking) thinking you will get hacked and stops working, the entire community around rooting and mods is like 10% of what it used to me, hardly any modern phone still gets custom roms, etc.. Recently saw some statistic about custom roms - on average, around 50 phones 5-8 years ago had support for custom roms. By 2025, that number has fallen to 4.
You said it like banking apps will be happy to work with a Linux phone lol, the banks always have their interests inherently conflict with user control anyway. And rooting and getting a custom ROM (one which exists or otherwise) are two completely different things that have nothing to do with each other, and you shouldn't support manufecturers who choose to make it difficult to unlock bootloader anyway.
By 2025, rooting still empowers you to make your own Android device however you like it to be.
Also not many people care about custom ROM these days because Android stock ROM got much better in average, so there's much less a need for creating a brand new ROM just to get basic features. Why making a brand new ROM instead of modding the pretty good one you already have now. And root empowered ROM modding tools that are developed as Magisk module or Xposed modules still have a pretty big community, there's a long list of pretty big repos with hundreds of modules each, and with how sophisticated Magisk and Lsposed have evolved it's easier than ever to write your own mods
Don't say that on XDA. Half the people there will say you don't actually need root to do what you want and the other half will demand you justify why you specifically need root before they even entertain the idea that having full privileges on your own fucking hardware is a valid desire.
XDA is dead, and you just described one of the symptoms of a forum being dead.
That said there are still a small amount of people posting detailed posts for rooting Xperia phones, for how to flash OS updates with unlocked bootloader without losing your user data, for how to bypass carrier restrictions to get international model to work with the 5G bands in the US via build.conf edit and baseband flashing, etc. There are perks of a community being small and niche, and I guess not everyone is brained washed by Samsung's propaganda they use to justify permanently locked bootloader on their phones lol
He's not wrong in a way. If ADB is overwhelmingly used and "undesirable" apps (vanced and "streaming apps") don't see any drop in support or usage, or if governments see a massive number using this to fly under the surveillance radar, they'll restrict ADB too...
Likely they'll pull what Meta did and make everyone who wants to enable "developer mode" will actually need to prove they are indeed, a developer.
Well, I'm not a dev and did that just for SideQuest access, so it's easy enough... but yeah, for those wishing (near-)total anonymity, I see what you mean...
I hope google fails as a whole in the near future and gets dissolved once and for all. Sick and tired of tech companies trying to be sources of authority, working with authoritarian governments, and dictating what you can and can't do.
I have hope. Last time they got hit with an anti monopoly lawsuit that should've forced them to sell away chrome, but unfortunately they got bailed out. Here's hoping next time they aren't so lucky
No they don't. There are viable, open source alternatives for 99% of the software/services we use. The fact that people are not aware of it is already like half of the real problem.
Google is building a walled garden, so I went with this other walled garden instead.
You people have zero logical consistency and I've seen so many such comments on reddit. I want to pick your brain and figure out how you can roll over THAT easily for corpos.
Because one walled garden does not exist yet. Because it's possible to get around the proposed walled garden. Because there are android manufacturers that ship phones that are not going to be affected by this.
But no lets just promote the whole iOS and Android are 100% the same (not Apple and Google, those are the same) and give up on fighting those changes.
I’m all for supporting an alternative, however it’s done.
But between the google walled garden and the apple one, I slightly prefer the apple one for having marginally better privacy.
Though as a dev with dev accounts for both, I already can run whatever the hell I want on my own devices, so i admit to having no real skin in that game.
There are android phones outside Google's garden that will remain outside it's walls. Apple's walled garden vs Google's future wall garden is a false dilemma.
I was looking at a pixel fold running grapheneOS. Google is making changes that I dislike and realistically cannot avoid so why jump ship from my existing walled garden into one that’s just now starting to from, with even worse privacy and a business model totally dependent on violating as much of your privacy as possible?
The future of graphene and other third party roms is uncertain but I needed to upgrade my phone. My screen was cracked but usable but once I remove it to replace the battery I won’t be able to reinstall the single piece of glass and by that point I’m halfway to a new phone anyway.
For now, I’m okay with my air, but I know me and Apple are on not going to be together long term. I’m pulling off the cloud and breaking up dependancies one by one so, but as far as phones go, there isn’t a viable option quite yet. It’s definitely coming but it’s not here yet.
We need to break free from both Apple AND Google. Borrowing from Google to make another rom but still being dependent on them to keep your project alive and supported is no longer an option. We need a clean break away from them.
I can foresee a phone-like pocket computer running Linux that doesn’t have cellular capabilities at all. American cell phone companies weren’t crazy about supporting windows phone a many even blocked them from joining their networks. We are starting to see the same shit with Linux phones now. But most people don’t need data everywhere. There’s wifi where people like me actually use it. And so I can see a market for a voip service for phones that lets you use them like mobile landlines. For simple texts, a network of Lora packet radios would suffice and reticulum seems to be up the task of serving that need.
Costs are increasing and our dependance on these devices are changing so not every problem we have with Linux phones will need to be solved by the time that such devices get off the ground. We have options for tomorrow.
I am eyeing the Jolla C2. Gonna use GrapheneOS for as long as possible, but if all else fails I will use the shittiest Linux phone over this Google/Apple nightmare.
App that mimics wireless debugging device and allows you to access ADB functionality locally. Widely used to perform actions that are normally unavailable on non-rooted devices. Some apps rely on functionality provided by Shizuku - for example, Canta, which allows you to delete any app, including undeletable pre-installed ones.
if scammers can open a bank account with stolen identities, i'd assume google, which is entirely run by bots without any human oversight, wouldn't have a better detection
I presume they are implying that the play store review process will catch compromised apps? Not likely considering how many dodgy apps have been found on play store. It's just another controlling act.
Google is doing this to comply with EU regulations supposed to increase security. Now imagine that Google was pushing back against this instead of complying. As per usual, Lemmy would be up in arms against Google for failing to protect people's data and not complying with our laws and culture. You'd be downvoted to oblivion for asked that question and called a corporate bootlicker.
I think these rules come from German legal culture, which traditionally has a strong need to control information exchange and processing.
the way they originally phrased it, it was seemingly because of authoritarian governments like singapore wanting to exert more control (hey google, can you revoke the certificate or doxx this dev for us?) and then they realized that they could make more money if they extended this block worldwide
I'm sure the EU is not the only jurisdiction demanding this sort of thing, but I doubt Singapore has the pull needed to get Google to move.
Brussels effect. Imagine Google were to still allow unverified apps in the US. Most devs would still opt for verification so as not to lose the EU market. The proportion of malware is probably going to be higher among the few remaining unverified apps. Sooner or later, some US scam victims would sue Google for failing to protect them like it protects Europeans. Hard to refute.
The vast majority of malware isn't delivered via play store because of the existing measures and protections they have. Same reason you see very little app-store-based malware on iOS. DISCLAIMER: YES MALWARE EXISTS ON APPLE HARDWARE PLEASE DON'T SHOUT AT ME. Talking specifically about anything installed via first party stores on both platforms.
Their main issue is this: dumb people install apks from spurious website and infect their phones. The least controllable and most pervasive factor here is the intelligence and knowledge of the user which cannot be controlled for by Google. So by eliminating the ability to exploit this entirely, it will eliminate that specific vector.
It's a sledgehammer solution that naturally comes with many downsides like disrupting intelligent and knowledgeable users that just want to hack around with FOSS and such.
Google is relying on It being too expensive for malware creators to have to guide each individual user through adb installation and usage process just to get access to their phone. Most scammers only do that level of interaction to extract actual cash/gift cards from the target.
I am personally and directly affected by their decision in many negative ways, but I'm not so dense as to not understand why they're doing it.
/corpodronespeak
EDIT: bots help Xitter maintain inflated usage figures which justify people's jobs, share prices, etc. Bots are a feature, not a bug.
Because it can be invalidated. That's the difference.
It's absolutely not foolproof, but nothing is. Most actions corps take for this stuff only slows down the spread. Hackers and bad actors innovate way faster than companies can keep up with. So companies cast a wide net with their solutions. And the cycle continues.
with the new system, you must go online to check if the license for that app is still valid or revoked. But the current system works almost the same: if there's an internet connection play protect checks the signature against an online malware db and prevents installation.
From a couple years ago, google has the power to remotely install/uninstall any apk on your phone without your consent
The overwhelming majority of Android users don't even know where to start to install software outside of the Play Store. If they're even aware that it's possible.
Corporate needs to have somebody to sue in case of a policy violation. Very especially those debloated apps that float around the web - they need to ensure they have a physical person to pin the blame to in court.
It was like having your cake and eating it, and somehow its stock (much less tweaked) UI is less clunky than whatever TF Apple has done to my discount 16. Maybe it’s because I was using Android in between, but still…
Is this even legal in the EU? The majority of phones in the EU are Android phones so this effectively gives Google control over what apps can be installed to the majority of phones. I thought the Digital Markets Act was designed to prevent exactly this.
It'll be a battle and then they'll get knocked and so on and so forth until we get these lazy cunts out of politics and break up the fuckin tech companies.
Google will become the exact same as apple, third party stores are technically "allowed", but requires Google's official stamp (digital signature), it's same with Apple. Its probably legal since Apple is already like this.
A corporation like Epic Games will be left alone since they can afford lawyers. An open source volunteer dev making a Youtube alternative client will get their certificates revoked under dubious "ToS Violation" claims and they won't have money to sue.
I think some recent EU proposals that make Google responsible for ensuring users can't install malicious apps is what has caused this to happen though. I could be wrong but I think I remember hearing about that.
This is essentially Google moving to do what I always thought was Apple's malicious compliance on the DMA, but which European courts seem to have accepted as just fine. I'm pretty miffed at Google for sinking to Apple's level on this.
tbh part of the rough experience for me may be down to the hardware. the ubports version of the pinephone i have is quite low power. 2GB memory and a little ARM Cortex-A53
Linux running on the desktop in 2025 is helped immensely by everything being web based. So long as you have a browser you are fine for a lot of general computing.
The phone space is ruled by apps. The phone makers and the companies developing apps prefer it this way.
Getting a banking app, or Uber or Facebook Messenger to work on a Linux phone is going to be a massive pain in the ass (ignoring the rest of the OS which is definitely not even close to useable for the general public).
I would love a Linux phone but we are so far away.
Plain AOSP is already pretty brutal. An alternate OS is practically a non-starter. Phones aren't just web browsers and SMS.
Tap-to-pay
Including transit fares
Bank apps
RCS messaging
MFA and security apps
Work profiles
Streaming media that's not 480p
Not to mention that the camera is going to suuuuuuuuck.
Forking or improving AOSP is more viable but none of the more mainstream ROMs want to piss off Google. That's why most LineageOS forums forbid talking about defeating Play Integrity.
Also no GPU driver, because even if the manufacturer does actually provide it, some nerd within the community will block it for not being "free software" enough and that "for light 2D applications, CPU blitter is more than enough".
On a mobile device? It's more likely that only OSS drivers work and the binary blob driver only worked with a pre-Pandemic aged kernel. Or it needed a very specific userspace library that doesn't work with a minimal libc.
"Free software enough" usually means "has a snowball's chance of actually working".
Installing the third party stores would be way harder than it is right now if they do that though. No way the devs of e.g. f-droid are getting a verification on an app that bypasses Google's new 'safety measures'
That's only if the apps distributed are unverified. Mind, the EU already requires app stores to document the identities of devs, but there are loopholes for Small enterprises. In 2027, manufacturers need to document the identities of their suppliers. There are still exceptions for non-profit open source projects, but that's not what Google is. Surely, no one here wants Google to avoid regulations by investing in open source.
I believe F-Droid signs the packages it distributes so that creates a painful choke point. Revoke F-Droid's key and it will break all of F-Droid instantaneously. The only exception for F-Droid's signing is if the build is reproducible, which is a high bar for a lot of projects, and then F-Droid will use the upstream signature.
I expect phones in the EU are going to become a lot more locked down in the next 14 months, like Samsung is already showing. But also think that Google will try its best to make developing for Android easy to get into.
Google has stopped releasing parts of android as open source and it releases some as a code dump without the modification history to make harder to use. Android forks are going to struggle to keep up.
I wonder if any and everyone who has ever contributed code under whichever open license was used could sue the tits off google, not as a class, but thousands upon thousands of individual lawsuits, for breach of terms of said licence/contract.
I'm just skimming through the license on my phone and they include LGPL, apache, BSD, Mozilla public license, eclipse public license, w3c, MIT, apple, and GNu.
IANAPOLL (The extra POL is for patent or licensing) so I don't know the intricacies of each type.
Honestly at this point they actually likely need to be EVEN MORE strict to deal with how bad the app store is and how many scam apps are floating around.
My grand father has been given like 30 scam apks to install via email that we're just crypto ransomware basically, and he's had to reformat his phone at least 10 times this year from installing scam shit from the playstore it self too.
Both the playstore AND scammers are target android like crazy
There's basically no way to crack down on it short of what they are doing and frankly it's still not enough.
Anyone who thinks this is just Google being evil is massive fucking out of touch with the reality of what elderly and less it savvy people have to deal with. It fucking SUCKS.
And I fucking hate these changes too, but even I cant say it's enough. There's too many fucking shit bag assholes ruining all the good things.
They should just display more warning's or safeguards, they don't have to remove it completely. There's several apps that I use that google would never let register. 🙁
This is the final push I needed to switch to GrapheneOS. Thanks Google! Now, if only I didn't have to give Google money for the Pixel so I can install GrapheneOS.
Sorry for the downvote, but I see this take repeated here on Lemmy so often and it just makes no sense. This will not kill the FOSS app "ecosystem". Nothing whatsoever changes for FOSS ROMs like LineageOS or GrapheneOS. And as long as there are FOSS operating systems, apps will be developed for them. If anything, this could drive mainstream adoption of free/libre Android forward, re-invigorating the scene through public outcry.
And to the people who propose fully jumping ship from Android to "Linux phones" because of Google's recent changes, you would only make the app support matter worse. As someone who daily drives both a phone with LineageOS and one with postmarketOS (mainline-ish Linux), mobile app support is endlessly worse on Linux than the fallout from Google's developer registration could ever be. That is not to say that Linux phones will not eventually get to a point of reasonable maturity, but it is way too early and frankly utterly irrational to bury AOSP Android or needlessly hate on it.
They won't fuck this up YET. If AppManager doesn't currently use ADB to install APKs, it can be made to. So can any F-Droid or Aurora Store client.
However, I'd say that the odds that Google will stop at this certificate demand and will not eventually try to paywall ADB somehow are currently 0% in my estimation.
It's high time someone created an independent fork of Android. Very soon, custom ROMs won't be enough.
How long until they patch out getting developer mode working on you phone without a registration, requiring you to pay for it and also take a "short" AI generated crash course in app development and monetization?
If it's easy to patch this out, I wonder if there will be manufacturers that will choose to do so for their official ROMs. It would be extra value for the brand, imho. A reason to choose, say, Samsung, over a Pixel phone, if Samsung were to patch this restriction out, for example. After all, they also have the Galaxy Store which is also offering apps that I doubt they'll want Google to regulate.
I didn't read the terms but I think this is against Google terms of services, so sure you can patch this out but as a company you would suffer legal actions or would be forced to remove Google services from your devices.
Samsung will just ask Samsung Store devs to be registered
Literally TODAY someone I know installed an application called "PDF viewer for android" that had a green adobe icon and it started wrecking absolute havoc on their phone with pop ads and redirects to scam support sites.
I guess in a way that's what it offers, just that instead of an algorithm it's human curated. Mastodon is a lot about boosts, so following someone doesn't mean just following them, but also being subjected to whatever they boost (unless you silence their boosts of course). So if you're interested in pottery and you follow a pottery starter pack, chances are that feed will end up a curated channel of pottery content.
The great thing is that it has quality control and cannot be abused the same way algorithmic feeds always end up being. The funky thing is, of course, that you also end up being exposed to everything else those people are interested in. But I think that's part of what makes Mastodon feels so nice.
I see what you mean, but it's never worked as well for me as a simple, well designed algorithm or even bsluesky feeds, or, incidentally, lemmy communities.
I wish there was something like this for tags. So: display only posts that contain tag X, but sort them with some algorithm. Ideally: steered by number of likes and date of adding. May be even the same that is used by Lemmy.
That's what I want, it could be implemented like bluesky feeds, where you choose the tags and words you want included, and then choose what kind of ordering you want!
Congratulations, you've been included in the "Assholes" pack.
If you wish to be removed from the pack, you must write a letter explaining why we should remove you and mail it to the address listed below with an attached blood sample in a crystal vial packaged in a refrigerated container with proper padding fit for shipping.
Mastodon Inc, 228 East 45th Street Suite 9E New York, New York 10017
::: spoiler Spoiler Disclaimer: this is a joke not intended to convey anything. :::
Bluesky pioneered a brilliant solution to this “empty feed problem” in 2024, with the introduction of “Starter Packs”, a feature that allows users to curate and share their own collections of recommended accounts.
Bluesky pioneered, eh? I distinctly remember using a feature called "circles" on Google+ back in 2011. It allowed people to create arbitrary "circles" of people, share them and have others bulk-follow/unfollow the people from a circle. It worked incredibly well and Google+ became a lively social network even with its small userbase at the time.
I really don't understand the point of packs when Mastodon has hashtag follows. Mastodon is already winning in terms of discovery here and in fact I still don't use Bluesky because its impossible to discover content there.
On Bluesky you get a pack of people but in linear timelines the power spammers just take over and then you have to do all that personal curation anyway but it's often even a worse starting point than just blank slate. With hashtag following I just subscribe to #fediverse and discover new content and creators organically.
Instead I'd like to see Mastodon commit more to organic discovery rather than consolidation of power users by expanding post classification system like using AI classification that attaches topic hashtags to posts etc to help users discover content they actually want to see not follow personalities.
Two years on, complicit governments back a US plan to safeguard Jewish supremacy and mute global outrage, while Israel revives Nazi torture methods to force Palestinian surrender
That's how the US likes it: the very same story with Ukraine; all "peace" suggestions were just a capitulation for Ukraine and congratulations to Russia.
The Trump administration has pushed Republican leaders to redraw House district maps before the midterm elections next year. His party already holds 10 of North Carolina’s 14 congressional seats.
Makes it really critical for Democratic-leaning stated to counter the national gerrymandering effort by Republicans, both by passing Prop. 50 in California and launching similar measures in other states
EU governments have agreed to limit the travel of Russian diplomats within the bloc, in response to a surge in sabotage attempts that intelligence agencies say are often led by spies operating under diplomatic cover.
Moscow-sponsored intelligence operatives have been blamed for escalating provocations against Nato states — from arson and cyber attacks to infrastructure sabotage and drone incursions — in what EU security services call a co-ordinated campaign to destabilise Kyiv’s European allies.
The proposed rules will force Russian diplomats posted in EU capitals to inform other governments of their travel plans before crossing beyond the border of their host country.
The initiative, championed by the Czech Republic, is part of a fresh set of sanctions being drawn up by Brussels in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The package requires unanimous support to be adopted. Hungary, the last country opposed to the measure, has dropped its veto, two people briefed on the negotiations said.
[...]
EU intelligence agencies say that Russian spies, posing as diplomats, often run assets or operations beyond their host countries, in order to better elude counter-espionage surveillance.
“They are posted to one place — but work in another,” said a senior EU diplomat, citing intelligence reports. “The host country intelligence services know what they are up to but, if they cross the border, it can be harder for that country to keep tabs on them.”
[...]
’’There is no ‘Schengen for Russia,’ so it makes no sense that a Russian diplomat accredited in Spain can come to Prague whenever he likes,’’ he told the FT. ‘‘We should apply strict reciprocity to the issuance of short-stay, diplomatic visas under the Vienna Convention.”
In 2014 the Czech Republic suffered one of Russia’s worst sabotage attacks on EU soil when explosions at an ammunition warehouse in Vrbětice killed two people. Prague attributed the attack to agents from Russia’s foreign intelligence agency GRU.
it also doesn't help that white nationalists are opportunistically misdirecting the rightful hatred towards Israel to push real antisemitism and hatred towards marginalized groups (since antisemites claim that marginalized groups are propped up or promoted by the jews to destroy white civilization)
Herzlians repeatedly oversimplify the Orthodox Jewish opposition to Zionism as a mere question of timing: if the Moshiach arrived, then Orthodox Jews would support Zionism. In reality, the occupation violates numerous Judaic rules: its very founding in 1948 involved the theft of land as well as the slaughter of innocents.
A few weeks ago I was rereading Isaiah, and while I am well aware that it could not possibly have been referring to events in the distant future, it could hardly be more relevant today. Isaiah 3:
G-d enters the courtroom. He takes his place at the bench to judge his people. G-d calls for order in the court, hauls the leaders of his people into the dock: “You’ve played havoc with this country. Your houses are stuffed with what you’ve stolen from the poor. What is this anyway? Stomping on my people, grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt?”
Doom to you who buy up all the houses and grab all the land for yourselves— Evicting the old owners, posting no trespassing signs, Taking over the country, leaving everyone homeless and landless. I overheard G-d-of-the-Angel-Armies say: “Those mighty houses will end up empty. Those extravagant estates will be deserted. A ten-acre vineyard will produce a pint of wine, a fifty-pound sack of seed, a quart of grain.”
Jerusalem on Its Last Legs -7The Master, God-of-the-Angel-Armies,is emptying Jerusalem and JudahOf all the basic necessities,plain bread and water to begin with.He’s withdrawing police and prot
IanTwenty
in reply to wisdomchicken • • •