Disney would never allow someone like Revan or Kreia to exist in canon movies. Especially Kreia.

That being said, TV shows (like Andor) are seemingly writing their way there. Hence the Rakata reference.

That’s what I’m saying!

It may be fun to make fun of the US, and justified. But I think it’s a distraction from what’s happening in your own back yard.

Don’t be us. Please.

That’s a pretty good result. I often can’t even find Windows features via search anymore. Or stuff like their App Store gets opened and just… hangs, on a brand new install.

It’s incredible how Democrat sentiment is so bad in the face of this. Millions poured into consultants, and they can’t figure it out?

Their vocabulary should be two words:

• Epstein.

• Trumpcare.

That’s it.

That’s all they need to say to win.

If they’re feeling frisky, sprinkle in a “huh, you know, maybe a few near-trillionaire buddies of the president shouldn’t rob you with AI?”

They were literally handed a actual pedo cabal and a direct existential crisis even hardcore Republicans are feeling anxiety over, on a silver platter. And somehow they’re messing that up?

I’m dysfunctional as hell, and even I couldn’t mess that up.

Propaganda is a hell of a drug.

If I were you, I’d take a hard look at rising right wing extremism across the EU, and spread the word. Before it happens to you, too.

Several. System76 (the cosmic dev) is a major one, literally making the distro just for their laptops.

They’re mostly white boxes though. I don’t any and manufacture their own hardware (except Framework possibly???)

Is it always a new laptop/computer?

I’d be suspicious of Mint on anything brand new (and hence only recently fixed in a lot of packages).

It’s not just you.

Zooming in, I feel like the “camera jpeg” lost sharpness to recompression.

It’s kind of insane that cameras either dump raw data, or do all this magic only to throw so much away to an ancient image codec that loses even more when recompressed.

Newer ones can save a HEIF or a “lossy RAW” in some circumstances (which is an infinite improvement), but still; I eagerly await the day cameras can save a JPEG-XL all by themself, and that I can post them on the Fediverse.

Modern mirrorless cameras do this too. For example, this is what my Canon kit lens looks like with/without digital barrel distortion correction:

Not my photos. From: https://dustinabbott.net/2024/05/canon-rf-s-18-45mm-f4-5-6-3-is-stm-review/

And https://dustinabbott.net/2024/04/canon-rf-24-50mm-f4-5-6-3-is-stm-review/

My own unprocessed RAWs are pretty wild. But (IMO) it’s a reasonable compromise to make lenses cheaper and better, outside of some ridiculous examples like the 24-50.

It’s not a joke, heh. After some update in the last month or two, my monitor won’t wake up unless I power cycle the monitor.

I mean. I love Linux. But low maintenance it is not.

See: https://openmodeldb.info/docs/faq

The GUIs are basically just as plug-and-play as Topaz.

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For upscaling, check out chaiNNer: https://github.com/chaiNNer-org/chaiNNer

And openmodeldb: https://openmodeldb.info/

It’s quite possible your PC can do it with Vulkan just fine, and if not, you can rent something online pretty cheap.

Also, for video processing, if you know any Python check out vapoursynth.

This highlights the problem: the primary obstacle to a lot of software enshittification is accessibility, and discoverability.

Once something like Topaz or Premiere gets SEO, it starves all the other cool efforts out there as they get buried under spam.

What people want often exists. They just don’t know it, or it’s too technically demanding to set up and no one is “in the middle” packaging enthusiast experiments to be accessible.

I don’t know how to solve this either. The open internet is getting worse, niches are moving to Discord, and it feels like people are losing patience to really dig for cool stuff. Heck, I see some open source efforts spin up, with thousands of man hours dumped in, without even a cursory check to see what they want already exists and is looking for contributors.

Gits are backed up and migrated quick, so I’m not as worried about that I suppose.

+100

Ubuntu is still on Twitter. You don’t want Ubuntu to quit before you do, do you?

If someone starts trying to make money off modified images via Grok, then that becomes a much easier case to win.

They can use it to farm engagement. Is that the same thing?

And yeah, that’s the icky part. This is a dream for spammers and “cheap SEO” types who don’t really care about copyright law in this context.

Sigh

Still. I don’t want to be on an internet where Chrome is basically the only develoment target, and for most sites to work properly you have to be on Google’s browser. Safari’s mere existance forces at least some generalization, but that disappears if Google pushes most of those users to Chrome anyway.

That’s the internet where Google has even more total control.

They should be worried. It’s pretty clear Mozilla’s leadership has “AI fever” that every CEO seems to be going mad with.

Still though, people need to take a breath. This isn’t Microsoft. And Mozilla’s “local first” approach is not bowing to Big Tech and the AI conmen like everyone else is (though the reality is that hardware isn’t ready for stuff outside of lightweight tasks).

That’s kind of a blessing in disguise; otherwise basically all web traffic would be Chrome.

Apparenty this is softening some: https://www.techspot.com/news/108965-japan-gives-apple-december-deadline-drop-ios-browser.html

And Safari is quite performant on iOS.

Maybe I’m too cynical, but I wouldn’t mind if that continues, just so there’s some chunk of traffic that isn’t Chrome and that web development doesn’t turn into a complete monoculture. A smidge of Firefox and Safari alone isn’t enough for that.

(EDIT: My assumption is that if Apple allows Chrome on iOS, you can bet they are going to funnel basically everyone into it).