dctrud @dctrud@mastodon.randomroad.social

Easy one today, after failing yesterday.

#Heardle #149

🔊🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

https://spotify.com/heardle

Oncor are fast. Just over an hour to get the power back on, despite their first attempt failing with ominous bangs and flashes at the end of the street.

They've always been pretty quick to fix the outages we've had over a decade in 2 places.

Pop goes a transformer. Off goes the power. How warm will the house get before it's back?

What else can go wrong this week?

Would not be surprised if the two advertising screens in this doctor's consult room are showing personalized drug ads based on patient data in the future.

As it is, I apparently need to get some ED medicine that, from what I gather from the images, is good for carrots? And I also need to ask my doctor about the HPV vaccine and becoming pregnant.

In case this comes across as me being an MS apologist...

This is an area in software that means much to me, and I've thought about in depth, a lot.

I did a PhD in ML in the 2000s, just prior to the deep learning explosion. I write open source for a living.

I choose not to use GitHub personally. I actually use sourcehut, though I don't agree with most of the stuff the CEO writes.

I also donate to Conservancy...

Life is a complicated mess of beliefs and practicality ;-)

My personal point of view is somewhere near this one...

https://lists.copyleft.org/pipermail/ai-assist/2022-February/000001.html

I don't think #copilot will fall foul of fair use laws. I don't think things will be healthy for *non-corporate* AI training if it does.

I also don't think it's moral/ethical to have created a proprietary model from FOSS input, that is sold like this.

The early minutes of the Software Freedom Conservancy's committee to discuss the #copilot issue are emblematic of the scope of the issue, and the poor positioning of FOSS groups to address the biggest problems effectively.

Plus the fact that...

"One committee member suggested that perhaps it's just a
weird side-effect and/or a licensing bug that Emacs' license allows the user
to write proprietary software with it."

...doesn't leave me with much hope on what comes out of it.

Having read and thought about a lot of the #copilot takes out there, I can't see anything happening except...

1) Free software orgs myopically focusing on licenses. Using copyright maximalism & new license terms in a failed attempt to neuter fair use arguments.

2) Yet more fragmentation of FOSS over yet more licenses.

3) Nobody really making headway on attacking the serious moral and societal issues inherent in copilot style AI models, within the reach of only $$$$$ corps.

Ruining a chance of a single guess... By having a second of silence 🙄 got it in 2.

Also the share button still doesn't work for me on Android Firefox.

I feel like at 110F the weather service icon should have a much angrier sun in it.

Lots of brit favoring things of late! Got it in 2.

Share button not working on my phone now, on this Spotify version though.

I get there's a lot of nuance in these kinds of topics, SFC do a lot of good work, and MS has done much wrong... But a bit more humble self-awareness about how many FOSS developers MS is serving valuable things to vs them would be good to see.

Also...some recognition that jumping straight to law and stuff like trademark enforcement is a very, very USA centric approach.

See also 'dont use GitHub because of ICE contracts' but 'don't be exploring putting bad guy restriction clauses in licenses'.

Most open source projects are small, and do not have the resources or knowledge of Conservancy / GNOME foundation / KDE e.V. / Apache etc. backing them.

How many maintainers want to or can pursue trademark fights? I bet many *would* welcome app store policy.

This post, and some aspects of the GitHub stuff, seems indicative of SFC seemingly continuing a turn toward being FSF-lite, while strongly hinting they are representative of most FOSS developers.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/

Appear to be missing vast chunks of threads I'm involved in, which I can see on the public web ui of other instances.

Anyo e have any hints of what to look into? Not seeing anything untoward in my various server logs. Not any more failing jobs than usual. Doubt my tiny and boring instance has been defederated widely, either.

#mastoadmin

It was an $11 billion windfall generators / gas suppliers got in the 2021 winter storm... (to be paid over time by taxpayers and electricity customers). We are now short of power and have been seeing $4000 MWH marginal wholesale rates again.

How exactly then, Texas lawmakers, would it be far too expensive to force building standby power or significant overcapacity for temp extreme & low wind days?

More to the point *who* is it expensive for? Just those profiteering?

being British is an advantage on this one again 🙂

#Heardle #136

🔉🟥🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️

https://www.heardle.app

Well there we go... If you're in Texas like us, hope you don't see rolling blackouts tomorrow.

"Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is issuing a Conservation Appeal, asking Texans and Texas businesses to voluntarily conserve electricity, Monday, July 11 between 2-8 p.m. ERCOT also issued a Watch for a projected reserve capacity shortage from 2-8 p.m. At this time, no system-wide outages are expected."

Just checking this lump still lives before I wrap it up for shipping, to lands afar.

Have plenty of bubble wrap... Need to find the right size box 🤔