Gabe Newell knows that any potential buyer will run Valve into the ground. Thus he already promised too long ago that he would never sell or let Valve go public.
Considering how many game studios that Microsoft just killed off in the last 3 years alone; they're never going to be worthy of buying Valve.
I pay nothing for running SearXNG locally on my machine.
Personally I think a little fiscal conservation would be wise at this point.
Costs can, and do eventually, rise. Hardware fails, and other things can happen as a surprise; and I'd rather that Beehaw not be insolvent when those things happen.
While I get the wish to do fun things to enhance the community; I think we need to be keeping an eye on things too. A few bad months where users are squeezed and unable to contribute could also severely impact Beehaw; particularly in and around monthly costs. At no point should Beehaw admins be paying out-of-pocket for things if Beehaw itself as an organization has the funds to properly pay things.
If we do genuinely have too much funding in excess; examining how we could expand Beehaw or make it better is another way you can responsibly re-invest the funds into making Beehaw better.
Additional servers/services might be neat; things like:
Of course such things could also require additional staff on hand, so I understand that you might want to entice someone to help manage these extra things first.
Unpaid internships really do need to be abolished.
As an on and off Recent Changes Patroller; I view my job simply:
Per Wikipedia's "Be Bold" guideline; I generally rollback things that I find to be not contributing...and I allow other editors to do the same..."Be Bold" back to me by challenging my decisions. 99% of people who aren't pedaling obvious Spam, Vandalism or Misinformation I will simply let be.
Less than 1% of my actions are "Be Bold" style interpretations. I usually stick to what I can reasonably know is just junk or incorrectly contributed.
So it boggles my mind that any sysops with years of experience on EnWiki are being that pedantic about Notability, Sources and "Original Research". Genuinely; I don't consider pointing a fact out about a specific map to be such research...it's a fact, and that fact can be backed by even more maps, going back in time. Roads and Highways may not be extremely exciting; but they definitely are important and DO in fact meet GN guidelines. Primary Sources themselves are fine too; genuinely you should need a damn good reason to challenge a source; be it primary or secondary.
At least a citation about how a primary source might not be found to be reliable.
It looks like as editors flee the ridiculous bureaucracy, they only make it worse to prevent more work from being created...which is counterproductive and makes people consider things like this or long-term wikibreaks. >_>
Most anti-cheat software can't do much on the client side. Really all it can do is look around at it's environment where it's allowed to look and see what's going on.
Most Cheat Software will run on a higher privilege level than the game; whether that's as an "Administrative" user or as "root" or "SYSTEM" in a context where it's running as an important driver.
In any case, the only thing the Anti-Cheat can reliably do on the client side is watch. If it's cleverly designed enough, it will simply log snippets of events and ship them off for later analysis on a server side system. This will probably be a different server than the one you're playing on, and it won't be sending that data until after the match has ended properly.
Sometimes it might not even send data unless the AC server asks it to do so; which it might frequently do as a part of it's authorization granting routine. Even when it has the data there may not be immediate processing.
Others have also mentioned that visible action may be delayed for random time periods as well; in order to prevent players from catching on to what behaviors they need to avoid to get caught, or to prevent cheats from getting more sophisticated before deeper analysis could reveal a way to patch the flaw or check to ensure cheating isn't happening.
Since cheat software can often be privileged, it also has the luxury of lying to the server. So clever ways to ensure that a lying client will be caught will probably be implemented and responses checked to ensure they fit within some reasonable bounds of sanity.
Not only is the science underlying all these findings completely non-existent, they only "guesstimate" what the water usage of what every thing that uses water is; then blindly divide that by the transaction volume per time period.
Not only is that method highly flawed; it's incorrect. Computers do more than mine crypto; and 1 transaction typically costs not even 1 tenth of a percent of most miners' overall computer resources. This is due to the fact that many miners are utilizing either a GPU or FPGA style device to power optimize and optimize the mathematics necessary to secure a transaction.
I don't agree with the assessment of the OP or the original blog article. Grayjay is Open Source software.
It is, however, NOT FREE SOFTWARE and I do know that organizations like the FSF and OSI do not consider it to be free.
The free status of this software was never misrepresented by Louis Rossman. He blatantly explains that there is a cost to this software and that the license is how he plans to enforce his means of collecting this fee on the honor system.
He also outlines how he cannot; and will not...stop anyone from forking this software and basically removing the payment bits of the code and just redistributing it under a different name. I strongly recommend someone does that...and maybe license that work under a much more unrestrictive free license that FLOSS-Only users might find more palatable.
I get that nobody wants or needs to trust Louis to keep his word. He's gotta run a business at some point...and distributing this software this way on the honor system might not pan out quite the same way he hopes it will. I do hope that at the point where he and his compatriots choose to stop maintaining the application; that they do immediately retcon this restrictive license; and re-release it under a new, free, and unrestrictive Open Source Software license.
I hope they are transparent about the reasons for this outage after they have resolved the issue(s)
AI art is factually not art theft. It is creation of art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it; except computers and AIs do not run on meat-based hardware that has an extraordinary number of features and demands that are hardwired to ensure survival of the meat-based hardware. It doesn't have our limitations; so it can create similar works in various styles very quickly.
Copyright on the other hand is, an entirely different and, a very sticky subject. By default, "All Rights Are Reserved" is something that usually is protected by these laws. These laws however, are not grounded in modern times. They are grounded in the past; before the information age truly began it's upswing.
Fair use generally encompasses all usage of information that is one or more of the following:
In most cases AI art is at least somewhat Transformative. It may be too complex for us to explain it simply; but the AI is basically a virtual brain that can, without error or certain human faults, ingest image information and make decisions based on input given to it in order to give a desired output.
Arguably; if I have license or right to view artwork; or this right is no longer reserved, but is granted to the public through the use of the World Wide Web...then the AI also has those rights. Yes. The AI has license to view, and learn from your artwork. It just so happens to be a little more efficient at learning and remembering than humans can be at times.
This does not stop you from banning AIs from viewing all of your future works. Communicating that fact with all who interact with your works is probably going to make you a pretty unpopular person. However; rightsholders do not hold or reserve the right to revoke rights that they have previously given. Once that genie is out of the bottle; it's out...unless you've got firm enough contract proof to show that someone agreed to otherwise handle the management of rights.
In some cases; that proof exists. Good luck in court. In most cases however; that proof does not exist in a manner that is solid enough to please the court. A lot of the time; we tend to exchange, transfer and reserve rights ephemerally...that is in a manner that is not strictly always 100% recognized by the law.
Gee; Perhaps we should change that; and encourage the reasonable adaptation and growth of Copyright to fairly address the challenges of the information age.
Junk science article.
All discoveries use some element(s) of the scientific method.
The entire method in and of itself isn't required to be 100% rigorously applied 100% of the time. However, the method is a starting point and does lead to discovery over time.
While it helps to apply the method to ensure clean and proper discoveries which can, hopefully, be reproduced and investigated, the fact that not all sciences or discoveries apply it rigorously is largely insignificant.