Afinity Publisher is a good, affordable and a solid replacement for InDesign, at the price of MS Publisher.

We switched away from Creative Suite during one of the many “Adobe overstepping” debacles and haven’t looked back. Publisher 2 has felt like a drop in replacement for most documents/posters/newsletters/flyers etc.

I’m suggesting Afinity publisher because if you’re using ms publisher you don’t have qualms with closed source software and probably value some of the workflow niceties that come with commercially supported software.

Hoping this question is in good faith.

I think that depends on what we mean by “pay.”

My take:

If our lives are better/easier/safer/happier than the lives of those who grew out of wrongs committed by those of our own heritage / lineage, then yes, I believe we should endeavour to make their lives better.

Whether that’s financial reparations, return of property / land, sharing of resources, etc. should be up to communities to work together to decide.

Put another way, if my good fortune rests on the misfortune of others - even in the past - my personal take is that I am compelled to help where I can.

Sometimes that’s a simple as voting for the thing that benefits me less than others or me not at all because it aids those who need it most.

So yeah, we should “pay” but “pay” can mean so many things.

That’s just me.

So maybe we’re kinda staring at two sides of the same coin. Because yeah, you’re not misrepresentin my point.

But wait there’s a deeper point I’ve been trying to make.

You’re right that I am also saying it’s all bullshit - even when it’s “right”. And the fact we’d consider artificially generated, completely made up text libellous indicates to me that we (as a larger society) have failed to understand how these tools work. If anyone takes what they say to be factual they are mistaken.

If our feelings are hurt because a “make shit up machine” makes shit up… well we’re holding the phone wrong.

My point is that we’ve been led to believe they are something more concrete, more exact, more stable, much more factual than they are — and that is worth challenging and holding these companies to account for. i hope cases like these are a forcing function for that.

That’s it. Hopefully my PoV is clearer (not saying it’s right).

Ok hear me out: the output is all made up. In that context everything is acceptable as it’s just a reflection of the whole of the inputs.

Again, I think this stems from a misunderstanding of these systems. They’re not like a search engine (though, again, the companies would like you to believe that).

We can find the output offensive, off putting, gross , etc. but there is no real right and wrong with LLMs the way they are now. There is only statistical probability that a) we’ll understand the output and b) it approximates some currently held truth.

Put another way; LLMs convincingly imitate language - and therefore also convincing imitate facts. But it’s all facsimile.

Really?

I read your reply as saying the output is (can be) libellous - which it cannot be because it is not based on a dataset which resolves to anything absolute.

Maybe we’re just missing each other - struggling to parse each others’ output. ;)

Surely you jest because it’s so clearly not if you understand how LLMs work (at the core it’s a statistic model - and therefore all approximation to a varying degree).

But great can come out of this case if it gets far enough.

Imagine the ilk of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, XAI, etc. being forced to admit that an LLM can’t actually do anything but generate approximations of language. That these models (again LLMs in particular) produce approximations of language that are so good they’re often indistinguishable from the versions our brains approximate.

But at the core they cannot produce facts because the way they are made includes artificially injected randomness layered on-top of mathematically encoded values that merely get expressed as tiny pieces of language (tokens) - ones that happen to be close to each other in a massively multidimensional vector space.

TLDR - they’d be forced to admit the emperor has no clothes and that’s a win for everyone (except maybe this one guy).

Also it’s worth noting I use LLMs for work almost daily and have studied them quite a bit. I’m not a hater on the tech. Only the capitalists trying to force it down everyone’s throat in such a way that we blindly adopt it for everything.

It’s all hallucinations.

Some (many) just happen to be very close to factual.

It’s sad to see that the marketing of these tools has been so effective that few realize how they work and what they do.

Emotionally.

https://archive.ph/osq2e

Except it’s accidentally stabilizing it. Source am a progressive Canadian living in a (normally) regressive Province. Not like Alberta regressive but still surrounded by Oligarchs.

For the most part Garuda has a GUI for everything. It’s Arch on easy mode and it’s most excellent for new and seasoned users alike.

I tried it only because I wanted to give Linux gaming a try and I struggled to get any other distribution to work with my graphics card - I liked it so much I switched to it permanently for my work desktop as well.

While there are many reasons to dislike (or outright avoid) Apple - if you purchase music from them, it’s DRM-free and useable anywhere.

I believe they were one of the first official channels to do this.

Still, hadn’t heard of Quobuz and will check them out!

You’ve described Ghost. Subscriptions for content are a first class citizen.

It’s primary a writing platform with built-in monetization options and the ability to self host. We switched to it from Substack. It’s been fantastic to use and operate. Super slick.

But that’s exactly my point - we here in this bubble prefer Jellyfin - but it’s not ready for mass adoption. Even plex is a drop in the bucket.

In 20 years I’ve been contacted directly once for a specific bug in an Apple application.

I send feedback a couple of times a year.

I see Jellyfin suggested as an alternative to Plex here. I hope it is one day.

At the moment it’s nowhere close.

I’ve been running Jellyfin side-by-side Plex for two years and it’s still not a viable replacement for anyone but me. Parents, my partner, none of the possible solutions for them come anywhere near close to the usability of Plex and its ecosystem of apps for various devices.

That will likely change because plex is getting worse every day and folks can contribute their own solutions to the playback issues. With plex it’s more noise, more useless features. So one gets better (Jellyfin) and one gets worse (Plex).

But at the moment it really isn’t close for most folks who are familiar with the slickness of commercial apps.

Even from the administrative side, Jellyfin takes massively more system resources and it doesn’t reliably work with all my files.

Again, Jellyfin will get there it’s just not a drop in replacement for most folks yet.

And for context I started my DIY streaming / hosting life with a first gen Apple TV (pretty much a Mac mini with component video outs) that eventually got XBMC and then Boxee installed on it. I even have the forksaken Boxee box.

I’m not defending them because it’s a shit move, but they clearly understand the most valuable feature is not their ad-ridden free content but rather the original value prop of the service to make it easy to share personal media with small groups of friends.

We use NGINX’s 444 on every LLM crawler we see.

Caddy has a similar “close connection” option called “abort” as part of the static response.

HAProxy has the “silent-drop” option which also closes the TCP connection silently.

I’ve found crawling attempts end more quickly using this option - especially attacks - but my sample size is relatively small.

Edit: we do this because too often we’ve seen them ignore robots.txt. They believe all data is theirs. I do not.

Regen isn’t on all the time, but the regen gearing causes very high drag. It’s a side effect of how the motor is designed. In order to cruise as if it could freewheel with no drag, the motor controller has to feed it a low amount of power when not pedalling. About 20W-30W depending on the speed.

But the motor is also much larger than most e-bike motors (1200W continuous with a much higher peak) - additionally the battery is double the size of most e-bike batteries (also ~1200W/hr).

So in addition to the drag - lots of extra weight.