Midjourney makes money selling access to their model. Midjourney’s model, like those of OpenAI, has no value without the training data. In fact, the model is a derivative work of all of the works that it was trained on. The training data was obtained without license to resell or create derivative works.

While I hate how much the Mouse has screwed with IP law and prevented productive reforms, I hope they refuse to settle and get a judgement that bankrupts Midjourney and establishes the precedent that AI companies have to follow the law and make licensing agreements with any creator’s works that will be used. Can’t exist as a company if that happens? Boo-fucking-hoo. It’s not society’s job to subsidize the wealthy’s desire to run a business model that depends on violating the law and causing financial harm to artists.

… You can probably just pair a Joycon 2 with the deck to get the functionality. Since the steamdeck does not feature detachable controllers in its design, an external controller is needed. Any controller that connects via Bluetooth or other wireless standard pretty much works - Bluetooth as a standard even allows a single device to use different profiles.

If the feature for “mouse mode” is implemented in the Joycon 2 hardware, there should be little effort needed to make it work with the deck. If it is a proprietary host/device driver interaction, it probably uses standard HID signals because those would take a good amount of time and money to reinvent, so, reverse engineering everything needed for the driver should be fairly quick and easy for people who deal with Linux device drivers.

Personally, I tend to just use the trackpad on the Dualsense controller as a mouse. It works, no bother.

I don’t work at OpenAI so, I’m not implementing anything that would change it. I prefer to keep practicing my critical thinking, programming, and creative skills and there is no ethical model to use so, I’ll continue not to use it, for the most part.

It’s also, I find, much more widely supported on a wider variety of hardware and with easier config automation.

That would be reasonable. The people running these things aren’t reasonable. They ignore every established mechanism to communicate a lack of consent to their activity because they don’t respect others’ agency and want everything.

I am not exactly defending this particular scheme but the source code is available under a free software license. It’s only the binaries that are under a proprietary EULA.

I’ll believe it after review and approval by the OSI. It still is philosophically in direct conflict with the Open-Source Movement by making software less accessible to end users and especially non-technical users than it is to corpos.

It’s not free and open source. And it’s contrary to the F(L)OSS movement philosophy (cost should never be a barrier for one to use technology). Conceptually, it’s nice to try to get corpos to compensate devs but that’s not what this would do. Small businesses and individuals would be impacted while corpos can work around it.

Additionally, it seems a bit ethically questionable to try to forcibly extract fees from end users when, increasingly, they’re feeling economic strain from the continued wealth hoarding and impending recession/depression.

You can indeed buy better hardware for many purposes for cheaper.

Want a gaming laptop? Or a runs Linux out of the box laptop? FW is not even close to the best value there.

Want a laptop with well-documented physical specs, including CAD drawings to make readily modifiable and upgradeable, potentially being the last laptop chassis that one needs to buy? Nothing else comes close to touching FW.

I avoid ads, so, maybe they’re inappropriately marketing as gaming laptops. I’d not call that a scam but would say that it’s ethically questionable, at best. FW is a laptop for people prioritizing long-term repairability and tinkering over everything else.

…FW16 is a great Linux machine. It also had CAD drawings available that have been allowing me to sketch out possible physical modifications. It also has a PCIe 4.0 x4 available for either the GPU they sell or any other device that I decide to make.

What specifically about Framework do you think is a scam? I’d genuinely like to know since that’s been the opposite of my experience.

That’s unfortunate. Both for throwing out all of your work and replacing it with an objectively inferior solution with poor track record of long-term sustainability.

Looks nice!

Ah. So the keycaps aren’t literal.

the small request that those contributions be in the language of the project isn’t something to fight against.

When the contributions not in C are explicitly approved by the project owner, it seems that the 30+ year maintainers shouldn’t try to blockade any progress from actually happening. Working multi-language projects isn’t that much of a nightmare, if code governance and boundaries are well-defined and enforced.

Definitely a case of “everyone sucks here”. The maintainer being a dick and sabotaging R4L without technical justification and Hector putting it on blast.

Ah. Can’t really complain too much about them wanting people who are putting load on their servers to pay for it. Ideally, that should mean that the end user is not the actual product. Good to see more options joining Inkplate.

A slight modification as I have new information: If you can justify it, the Xreal One might be worthwhile as they have added an ASIC to do away when the buggy software and dongle nonsense. Still not super open-source friendly (they’re not actively hostile either) but that seems to solve my biggest issue with the experience. They seem to have better quality optics as well.

I may end up getting a pair of those to replace my Nreal Airs that are held together with tape and CA glue (I’m unfortunately hard on my electronics).

No problem! My “dream” HMD would be birdbath optics with ~2k displays for each eye and probably some simple hardware upscaling. The glasses being “dumb” is a real perk. Doubling the pixels/° would make the experience that much better.

Previously, I’d have recommended Xreal Air but the company is allergic to open-source and doesn’t have a great track record of supporting their own software. At the moment, Viture seems a better bet, from those that I’m aware of. For screen replacement, the high pixels-per-degree of birdbath optics, like both use, are extremely advantageous and cause much less eye strain. And that’s while being far cheaper than waveguides or pancake optics.

That actually is something that I’ve been contemplating doing. I never use the built-in display - HMD glasses are just much nicer.

HFCS in everything.

Adorable rats were much needed.