It was never alive to begin with. The Metaverse exists as nothing more than a buzzword made popular by Zuckerberg/Meta. There are no technologies, standards, devices or software driving it. Nobody even agrees on what features it should have.
And on top of that, old pre-buzzword stuff like SecondLife or PlaystationHome are still closer to a “Metaverse” than any of the more recent buzzword filled attempts.
Have you ever actually tried it? I only did the trial run, but from my experience it pretty much delivers. Results are at a similar level to Google with a lot of junk removed and it was quite fast on top. Nothing else I tried came close. Neither Bing, Yandex nor Brave (all other alternatives are based on Bing), all have substantial holes in what they index or how current it is.
That said, I still wouldn’t pay for it. At the end of the day it is just another search engine, a good one at that, but it doesn’t really do anything fundamentally new. Google can find all the same sites.
which goes a long way to scaling back on the reliance of google donations.
$3 million is about 0.67% of the money they get from Google and that money isn’t even going into Firefox development.
Brave ain’t exactly perfect, but at least they aren’t sucking at the tit of Google’s Search monopoly.
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies.
Firefox is little more than just a Chrome clone itself, financed by Google no less. It doesn’t do anything to set itself apport. If they cared about an open Internet they should have put some effort into building it (support RSS, Torrent, IPFS, etc.). If Firefox dies tomorrow, nothing much would change as the rest of the Internet already didn’t care. It might however make room for a browser that actually cares about privacy and an open Internet, instead of just using those words for marketing purpose while still having telemetry by default.
You can. Distributing copies is illegal, not downloading them. That’s why torrents are bad and streaming sites are fine. (Some exceptions might apply depending on your country).
Almost every image website deletes EXIF metadata.
Everything has been fake since the invention of photography. The degree varies, but images have never been used in mass media to document the truth in any way shape or form, and especially not on the click-driven Internet and doubly so on Google Images. Even if an image comes right from the camera, you still have heavy bias in the selection process of what images get shown to begin with and which remain hidden.
If you are looking for truth in photography, you are about a 150 years too late.
Is there any platform or medium where I can buy locally stored and DRM-free software?
Steam, but you’ll have to manually search around the forums to see which games does it and which doesn’t. It’s not exactly a well advertised feature, but integration of Steamworks copy protection is optional. Most of the games that are DRM-free on GOG are DRM-free on Steam too.
If the content is not stored locally and DRM free, then you don’t own it.
Have fun managing tens of TB of backups. I have given up on that quite a while ago, DRM-free is just not a practical for the amount of digital content you collect over the years. It’s a nice to have thing that comes in really handy sometimes (e.g. watching movies on unsupported device like VR headsets), but it’s not a solution for digital ownership. In some ways it’s actually worse, as you can’t practically resell DRM-free copies, as you don’t have a proof of ownership. You’ll also miss out on updates for new technologies (codecs, OS versions, etc.).
This needs a legislative solution or some NFT-like thing that gives you a certificate like “You own this, feel free to pirate if we go out of business”(digital signed by company).
Time to write some bug reports. ~/.cache is supposed to be disposable.
Not really. Recommendation algorithms are great for discovering related information and new stuff. They even beat search at its own game, as search is often limited to plain text, while the algorithms take the broader context into account. The problem is that you have no control over the recommendations, no transparency how they work, no way to switch or disable them and no way to explore the deeper knowledge hidden in them. It’s all just a magical black box for more engagement and more ads.
A recommendation algorithms that somehow manages to be open and transparent would be a very big step towards fixing the Web. Lemmy and Co. are too busy replicating failed technology from 30 years ago instead of actually fixing the underlying problems.
Bing Image Creator if you just want to create some images quick (free, Microsoft account required). It’s using DALLE3 behind the scenes, so it’s pretty much state-of-the-art, but rather limited in terms of features otherwise and rather heavy on the censorship.
If you wanna generate something local on your PC with more flexibility, Automatic1111 along with one of the models from CivitAI, needs a reasonably modern graphics card and enough VRAM (8GB+) to be enjoyable and installation can be a bit fiddly (check Youtube & Co. for tutorials). But once past that you can create some pretty wild stuff.
Problem here is that “Open source platform” is a meaningless term. Open Source is a type of license that regulates how to redistribute source code. None of those principles apply to services and platforms, which are about data and control. If the Uber app would be Open Source, but still had to connect to the Uber server and play by its rules, nothing would change. Meanwhile if it played by its own rules, what rules would that be? There are no established rules for an “open” service platform, especially not when it comes to platform that have review and reputation systems build in.
Simply put, it’s really not clear how you can be “open” yet at the same time provide any level of protection against fraud and abuse.
Aren’t there NSFW filters after the generation? Bing Image Creator for example will frequently generate images with a borderline-NSFW[1] prompts, but only show you a subset of the four it generated, not all. Some prompts will also be rejected before any generation takes place at all. But I don’t see how this would help you getting through the filter that happens after the generation.
[1] “borderline-NSFW” really just means anything involving woman or violence, the filter on that thing can be extremely prude and often times a bit nonsensical (e.g. “woman in bikini” is blocked, “woman in 1950 bikini” that’s ok).
Warning! You will never be in a relationship with this model.
It’s AI generated, there is a good chance of them selling relationship-as-a-service in the near future. In a way, your chances with an AI model are way bigger than with a real one.
How do they ensure the same looking person is generated each time?
You can generate consistent faces simply by using random non-existent names. Which in turn you can use to train a custom LORA with Dreambooth (needs about 20 images) or use ROOP (a single one can be enough). And of course you can just mix and match it as you please, mix multiple real faces together into a new one, use dedicated face generators like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and so on.
This barely even takes effort anymore, e.g. quick ROOP FaceSwap with the photo from the article, which doesn’t look quite the same due to only a single input image, gets better with more, but that’s just shows how easy it is to generate a new face, which will than be consistent with itself.
The hard part is getting an interesting pose, expression and haircut into this, as well as sponsored products and stuff. Generating realistic images with AI is pretty easy, but getting variation into them so they don’t end up all looking the same can get tricky.
Edit: Five more minutes of effort and it starts to look a little closer.
Horses were never “employed”.
They did a job and got paid for it (in food and housing). Sounds like employment to me. You can call it slavery if you prefer. But that doesn’t change the fact that there were jobs that used to be done by a horse, that is done by a machine now. Meanwhile the resulting increase in productivity and market growth didn’t create new jobs for horses, they were simply no longer needed in the job market. Machines where used for all the new jobs that appeared right from the start. The horsepower the horse provided could be provided easier and cheaper by a machine.
What jobs are left for the human once AI can replace their brainpower? Blue collar jobs might be safe for a while longer until robotics catches up. But a job that is mostly shifting information around, be it spreadsheets, phone calls or art, all of that is slowly getting into reach of being done by AI.
Peak Firefox was back in 2010/2011, almost 14 years ago, it has been steadily dropping market share ever since. This is not a new problem by any stretch.