duckduckgo has an array of LLMs, which they take care of anonymity

do you need GPT4 specifically? If not, mistral has their large model for free available: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat

Yes, I told someone to inform themselves before making assumptions. Which, I think, is a reasonable expectation.

The rest of the comment was pointing out how archive.org acts like any other public library and therefore should not be treated differently. This does not carry hostility against the person I am replying to.

Please inform yourself. In these comments and on their website, it is covered that they do not provide books freely. Just like any other library books can be borrowed exactly as many times as they own a copy.

Just like any other library they sometimes provide a download for Adobe Digital Edition, which manages your lends on books. But as your friend with DRM stripping tools for sure can confirm: DRM is just an annoyance for legitimate customers, it forces legitimate users to use specific applications, while pirates get the freedom to choose how they interact with the not any more protected media. But this is a discussion for another thread as archive.org treats copyrighted books just like any other library.

Please go to archive.org > Books > Books to Borrow

Select any book which strikes your fancy. You will see a reading excerpt, like flicking through pages in a library. if you have a free account, you can lend it for 1h at a time.

Or look at this video https://dn720701.ca.archive.org/0/items/openlibrary-tour-2020/openlibrary.mp4

That means that if the Internet Archive and its partner libraries have only one copy of a book, then only one patron can borrow it at a time, just like other library lending.

Lending and renting stuff is not piracy! Many corporate suits want people to start believing this. but i remember going to the library and renting books, movies and games. it was not piracy back then, and it wont be now.

While technically phages are viruses, i think it is important to label them as phages.

Typically a virus does not look like a robot. The by now rather well known SARS-CoV-2, with its spherical shape is a more common depiction of a virus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus

Bacteriophage look like little robots and from the view of a bacterium - they probably are the equivalent of a terminator: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage

looks like itch.io is down too. might be a coincidence or someone trying to show off…

(/) brings you killed mice (x)

@Baleine@jlai.lu already mentioned one. And it does not really matter what the can do specifically to you. It matters what they can do and that you have no control. If you want to know what people can do with just your username look at this project: https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock. Now imagine what someone with more data can do.

Yes but No. For most people writing this kind of mail should not be a problem. However, for many different reasons it can become difficult to write such things: This mail is some kind of formal letter and alters a contract. Let’s imagine someone with a learning disability, they may be able to sign up for a online service, as they have done it many times. Writing a formal letter they may not have done many times and they cannot map past experiences the same way as a neurotypical person.

Depending on the local law this may be a reason why forced arbitration has to be opt-in: Typically the law should protect the weaker party. As the barrier for writing this letter is higher than the sign-up process, there is an argument that the chosen opt-out process of discord is targeted against some of their weakest customers.

Good question, but: Why would Discord ever expect to be in a lawsuit or arbitration with you? Most people, like you, use it to chat with people they barely know and give them no money. Still discord think it is necessary to take away legal rights from all their users.

Small businesses can individually refuse to do business with the big shopping mall -> add threads to the block list (‘defederate’ them)

The big shopping mall is not allowed to put their building at the public square -> threads is not allowed to use ActivityPub

The first statement is totally ok and a lot of instances do this. However, similar like shopping malls it can pose a challenge for small businesses to stay competitive, while categorically refusing business with the big actor. The second statement would require the towns construction committee to not give the shopping mall a license to build. However, this construction committee is a centralised power and not in the design of ActivityPub.

I do not like threads and see them as a potential threat to what we have here. Exactly because it could become harder to stay competitive while refusing them. But i don’t see much that we can actively do.

“We can’t federate” is not really an option… Sure, every instance can add threads to the blocked list. But to keep big corporations out of ‘our public square’ ActivityPub would have to be twisted into a grotesque version of itself.

It really seems like we are looking at two sides of the same coin.

The coin has already ben tossed. Let’s see on which side it will land - I certainly hope it is the one you described.

I hear you. During the reddit exodus i left without having an alternative and stumbled upon lemmy much later. So i am fine going back to not having social media. However, a social network only survives if there is enough content. And if we are honest, lemmy barely has enough content.

Ill give you an example: I like climbing and there is !climbing@lemmy.ml with roughly 2 posts a month and !climbing@sh.itjust.works with less. I am happy to see something about my hobby twice a month. But all my friends still are on reddit, because two posts a month are not enough to them.

If you click on my profile, you will find 4 posts. I am a natural lurker, like most people on the internet, i read, vote and maybe comment. These posts, i made them because i wanted to add some content to this platform. While facebook is federated, there will be much more content. We can see theirs, they can see ours. Sounds like a win-win, right? But it may also make lemmings dependent on facebook content. If there is always more than enough content to endlessly scroll, I don’t need to upload my stuff to the network. However, if facebook pulls the plug after a long time, that leaves barely any content here and lemmy is basically dead.

I would probably still be around: Angrily clicking on some link about random big corpo, once a month smiling because someone shared a picture doing the same hobby as i. But for sure there are still people on old XMPP instances, while motivated dev’s reinvented XMPP: Matrix

from https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html :

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore.

Basically keep people from using all the other platforms. Then stop supporting them. Similar like .docx never quite works in the open document editors. At least i refuse to believe that OSS devs are less skilled and motivated.

http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/26/01/2018/audiophile-rocks-down-the-rabbit-hole-once-again/

just in case someone feels like right-clicking. (CTRL+Shift+K opens the console in Firefox, but shht)

while I like the idea of Fairphone, last time i checked their flagship did not include an 3.5mm jack. This is simply not acceptable as i need it for my work. It is hard to find phones with a 3.5mm - even harder if you want to be able to repair them.