what would happen if nobody paid and everybody pirated
they wouldn’t just slowly starve to death you know. they’d start making the price more competitive and the service more user-friendly before they’d even had to pawn a single Porsche.
In all locations presumably? Do you know if it’s indistinguishable from you being at your main residence? Like are there any technical ways a service you’re connecting to could tell that you’re going through a VPN? (Just curious BTW!)
I thought we switched to libre
Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.
I commend this guy for sticking by his principles. I remember feeling shocked and let down when walking into my uni’s computer department for the first time and finding out that the main lab was the Windows lab, with the Linux lab being smaller and hidden away.
He must have tried the patience of his professors though, with his refusal to even use non-free JavaScript - for instance he wouldn’t use the Zoom video conferencing web client. Given that you don’t have to install anything on your machine and JS is heavily sandboxed, that does seem a bit too idealistic!
But hopefully he made his professors think a little and maybe they’ll even opt for true FOSS solutions in future. Like this Jitsi Meet that I’d never heard of before - I’m looking forward to trying it instead of Google Meet next chance I get.
That’s interesting. I’ve always thought the name a little weak, so you prompted me to find its origins. According to wiki:
Taler is short for the “Taxable Anonymous Libre Economic Reserves”[7][8] and alludes to the Taler coins in Germany during the Early Modern period.
That definitely looks like a backronym! Anyway, the wiki for the Taler coins says this:
The word is shortened from Joachimsthaler, the original thaler coin minted in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, from 1520.
So the original root appears to be Thal or Tal i.e. valley (just like Neanderthal/Neandertal). The Taler wiki page goes on:
[The Holy Roman Empire’s] longest-lived coin was the Reichsthaler, which contained 1⁄9 Cologne Mark of fine silver (or 25.984 g), and which was issued in various versions from 1566 to 1875.
Was Denmark part of the Holy Roman Empire? Either way, your ancestors would’ve presumably often traded with Germans using these early Thaler/Taler coins.
Yeah I’ve noticed it sometimes seems to get worse. Don’t know what phone you use, but when I use Google’s voice-to-text on Android, I often have to correct mistakes, because it tries to do it word-by-word, but sometimes what I actually intend is not clear until I’ve spoken the whole sentence - and for whatever reason, Google very rarely goes back and changes a word it’s already transcribed. For instance, if I say, “I think your speaking” it’s not yet clear if that should be a “your” or a “you’re”, and it won’t become clear until I complete the sentence/clause.
If I want to dictate a long piece of text, I will use OpenAI’s text-to-speech, which is almost flawless (it doesn’t start transcribing until you’ve finished everything you’re going to say). I appreciate some people don’t like OpenAI, but to be honest, Google isn’t much better, and likewise Apple is not a lot better than Google.
Well spelling was solved even earlier than that, with rote-learning at school in combination with the very environmentally friendly technologies known as the paddle and cane. What was wrong with that way of doing things?? Is it progress? Or were things better in the old days?
In any case, all the words in the sentence in question are spelt correctly - the problem is grammar. Correctly determining if the grammar of a sentence is correct is a much harder problem than simply checking the spelling of words against a dictionary.
I’m using voice to text like right now
AI really has come a very long way hasn’t it. It was not that long ago that you had to train the computer on your own voice and even then accuracy was annoyingly bad. Now it can transcribe speech from just about anyone at much better levels of accuracy.
Yes you got it! The person I replied to was talking about those inline grammar checkers you have in word processors, which are pretty limited in value so I wanted to show what you could do with an LLM, and how it can go beyond just correcting but also helping learning.
I did think about adding a sentence to say to imagine writing in some important official context e.g. a letter to a government agency rather than a comment on Lemmy, but decided in the end it would probably be obvious.
It’s a *lot* better these days. Here’s how you could use it to improve the English in your comment:
Can you point out and characterise the grammar mistakes in the following sentence, with tips on how the writer could avoid similar mistakes in future - “I must admit its been a while, but all these things where horrible last time i played with them.”
Sure — that sentence has a few grammar issues, each pointing to a common kind of slip. Here’s the breakdown:
Mistake: “its” is a possessive pronoun (like his, her, their), while “it’s” is the contraction of “it has”. Fix: Use “it’s” because the writer means “it has been a while”.
Tip: When in doubt, try expanding “it’s” to “it is” or “it has” and see if the sentence still makes sense. If it doesn’t, you probably want “its”.
Mistake: “where” (a location) is confused with “were” (past tense of are). Fix: Use “were” to correctly form the past tense of “to be”.
Tip: Say it aloud—“they were horrible” sounds natural, while “they where horrible” doesn’t. If it’s a verb (they were), you want “were”.
Mistake: Lowercase “i”. Fix: Always capitalize “I” when it’s a pronoun referring to oneself.
Tip: This is more about habit than logic—just train yourself to always type “I” in uppercase, even in casual writing.
Full corrected version: “I must admit it’s been a while, but all these things were horrible last time I played with them.”
I don’t think those people are responsible for pricing. The Porsche comment was a flippant way of pointing out the whole parasitic machine that sits atop the actual creatives - the actors, the set designers, the script writers, all those people that you and I do want to support. All those people are not involved in pricing decisions or exclusivity contracts, and they’re mostly paid a salary so by the time a movie or series is out, they’re already on to the next job. By refusing to subscribe to all the myriad streaming services, you are mainly putting pressure on those executives to make a more appealing product.
I think you’re right in that it’s very reminiscent of US tipping culture (I’m not in the US), in that the people at the bottom are the ones who do the real work and yet they don’t get a fair share of the profits and instead have to take on unfair risk (i.e. the risk of not being tipped).
That said, I need to confess that I’m partly playing devil’s advocate, I pay for Netflix and just the other day I paid YouTube to “buy” a digital copy of a movie - for the exact reasons you said, I want to support the creative people behind the shows & movies I enjoy. I just don’t think it’s accurate to say that there’s a moral requirement to pay for entertainment, especially given how unfair the system currently is.