Not sure if this is what you’re talking about but RIP the coolest media that never got to production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

INB4 trust fund babies and gormless capitalists go and ream every last fucking cent from the brand destroying it in the process before moving on to the next thing.

Woah, I know they are targeting this for packaging but I hope that this holds up well for uses in 3D printing.

PLA is already the go-to 3D printing filament for a lot of people and making it actually compostable at home and not “bio-degradable asterix, in an industrial compost” could go a long way to alleviating the waste from failed prints, skirts, brims, support material, etc…

I mean offsetting complex shapes in one go.

Just randomly throwing together an example:

I don’t even mind the UI that much,

Agree to disagree.

From what I remember something as common as offsetting lines in a sketch required switching away from the sketch workbench into the draft workbench and exiting the sketch editor altogether.

FreeCAD feels like it’s where Blender was before version 2.8. The core functionality is there but the UI feels almost user hostile.

Voice typing long messages is IMO faster than using a phone keyboard, even with gesture typing.

Pure “prompt → image” with nothing in between I absolutely agree. It’s lazy and ripe for abuse by copyright trolls. That being said there’s a lot more in the world of AI assisted art than what most people are aware of.

Determining where the legal lines will be drawn is going to be a monumental task but I think there’s value in allowing authors to retain copyright on AI assisted works. I also can’t see the free open source models not going the way of restricting training data to public domain works like Adobe did with Firefly if that becomes a legal issue.

My pie in the sky hope is that copyright somehow becomes less stringent after all of this.

Don’t get me wrong I want protections for creators and support reasonable copyright (life of the author +25 years with the possibility of a 15 year extension) but letting a company lord over an IP for damn near a century isn’t ideal for anyone.

Republicans also pushed back against the Democratic talking point that it was a major tax break, with Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson arguing: “It’s disingenuous to say it was the biggest tax cut ever. It was a wealth transfer to certain groups.”

I guess republicans only have problems with that when those “certain groups” are disadvantaged folk instead of the already wealthy.

Importantly, posts hosted and visible on Meta’s server will be subject to Facebook’s content moderation rules, which means those policies will likely have a sweeping impact across the Fediverse.

Is it just me or does that sound like anything on instances hosted outside of meta’s own that can be merely seen from theirs? I’m all for moderation, the stricter moderation against hate-speech is part of why I joined Beehaw. But if I’m reading that right (I hope I’m not), then it seems like they plan to call the shots on other instances as if they have any say in what everyone else does right out of the gate.

Maybe what’s meant here is simply defederation of entire instances and banning of problematic users like any other instance does, ok. But it could also mean pressuring admins to enforce Meta’s TOS on a case-by-case basis which feels like the start of EEE tactics.

I would be ok with allowing federation until they (inevitably) cause problems.

• Push Ad spam: Defederated
• Allow hate groups and blatant disinformation to spread: Defederated
• Try strong-arming changes to the fediverse?: Believe it or not - Defederated

Or anywhere outside of their own continent for that matter.

This is a list of all the open source software I have come across and use frequently to semi frequently. There will likely be some overlap with stuff everyone has already posted.

Photography and Image manipulation

• Darktable → RAW photo processing
• GIMP→ Photoshop alternative
• Krita → Digital painting (have only used it a bit, but I hear it’s good)
• Inkscape → Vector Graphics
• Automatic1111 → Diffusion model AI toolkit (mostly Stable Diffusion but also has extensions for other diffusion based models like OpenAI’s Shap-E)

3D modeling and Printing

• Blender → 3D Modeling, sculpting, 2D animation, compositing all rolled together (simply one of the best examples of FOSS)
• Meshroom → Photogrammetry
• PrusaSlicer → 3D printing slicer based on Slic3r

Video editing and Processing

• Kdenlive → Genuinely good video editor
• FFMPEG → Command line media toolkit (very complex but also works on android through Termux)
• Instant NeRF → Neural Radiance Fields, think photoscan to a 3D representation (not meant to make 3D meshes unfortunately)

Misc

• Calibre → E-book management
• Serge → Self hosted Local LLM’s made a bit easier to deal with
• Firefox → Web browser

FOSS I’m excited for

• DragGAN → Manipulate images by intuitively dragging, more on this here and here (official code being released this month but there are already projects based on the paper with working examples)
• CoDi → “Composable Diffusion” Any2Any conversion Txt2Vid, Vid2Audio, Audio+Txt2Img, whatever
• Neuralangelo → Promises to be NeRF’s for 3D models (don’t know if it will be FOSS but I’m hopeful)

IMO It’s relative

My current laptop (edit: used for for studio apps, 3D modeling and rendering, and AI stuff) draws 240W but I’d say it’s an improvement over the 500W+ I would be drawing from a desktop that would have been in it’s place. The performance isn’t that competitive with desktop parts but the Perf/Watt definitely better.

Most people are just going to be using their phones and tablets to browse the web and watch videos anyway, with the odd Ultrabook here and there which are still pretty good in a Perf/Watt sense.

Jevons paradox does come to mind though.