I imagine both Libre and Free are open-sourced and easily modifiable? I haven’t looked into it, but if it’s anything like Rhino there should be a standard way of writing custom plugins that should close the gap on some of those - at least the object naming would be easy.

I’ll look into them though, thanks! BIM software is such a pain in the ass to work with and one of the most expensive design software I know of, I think open sourced projects would be amazing for BIM if they took off like FreeCAD did

I work as an architectural designer but I’ve never really been allowed to use anything other than Revit for BIM workflows. Our consultants basically only use Revit or Autodesk products, so our hands are kind of tied for projects where we need to collaborate.

My boss uses Vectorworks for our small projects that don’t need BIM, I might suggest we switch to Libre or FreeCAD so that we all have access without needed another VW license. Do you enjoy using LibreCAD?

Person A: Expresses a liberal perspective “Watch as this person calls me a Lib” Person B: “… yes, that is common liberal perspective” Person A: “Called it”

The more we electrify our cars, the less feasible this is.

Decoding and sending messages to mechanical systems over the CANBUS is one thing (still difficult, but possible), but taking control over system software is another. In the us, consumers are supposed to have the right to repair their personal vehicles, but a lot of that law was established back when you could do work on a vehicle without having access to digitally protected copyright. We might have a right to repair, but that’s starting to clash against their copyrights over their IP and software controls.

And that’s not even getting into their eagerness to utilize subscription models - would a court side with a consumer if they decided they wanted to circumvent DRM controls over subscription-controlled car features (a car that they own outright)? It’s unclear to me that right to repair or consumer protections have been written in a way to accommodate those conflicts… Especially when cars are subject to far higher safety regulations than computers - a manufacturer could argue that they need to prevent consumers from tampering with their software systems for their own safety.

If you still own a ‘dumb’ car without one of these systems, it’s really not a bad idea to hold onto them for as long as possible. You can always upgrade them if you want to - some people have even replaced ICE transmissions with electric ones. But once you own one of these cars with software-controlled systems, it’s far harder to strip them out. Especially once they start requiring cellular connection to operate or function (or require connections to privately-owned satellite constellations…)

Yea, given how new it is i probably wouldn’t trust it for something that important. But in-theory it’s meant to handle that type of embedded system

From what I’m hearing: yes

Downloaders can be prosecuted.

They wouldn’t go after the users, just the domains and the host servers. Similar to shutting down TPB or other tracker site, they’d go after the site host. True enough, there wouldn’t necessarily be risk to users of those sites, but if they escalated things enough (like if an authoritarian got elected and was so motivated…) they could start taking more severe punitive action. Who knows, they could amend the regulation to go after the users if they wanted - it’s a dangerous precedent either way. Especially when the intent is to ‘protect children’, there’s no limit to how far they might take it in the future.

Blocked servers are inaccessible to adults, too, which raises freedom of information issues.

I’m not familiar with Australian law but I don’t think this really applies. Most countries with internet censorship laws don’t have any guaranteed right to uncensored information. At least in the US, they don’t have ‘censorship’ per se, but they do sometimes ‘block’ an offending site by seizing domains/servers/equipment, and they can force search engines de-list them if the offense is severe enough. If the server is beyond their reach, they can prosecute or sanction the person hosting the site to pressure them into compliance. I can imagine a social media site who refuses to age verify and that hosts pornographic content (cough cough lemmy cough cough) be pursued like a CSAM site.

Large scale piracy is illegal pretty much everywhere, meaning that the industry can go after the operators and get the servers offline. Not so here.

That doesn’t mean they can’t throw their weight around and bully self-hosters/small-time hobbyists and scare them into compliance. Any western country enacting a law like this could pressure their western trade partners to comply with enforcement efforts. And anyway it isn’t necessarily about the practicality of enforcing the law, so much as giving prosecutors a long leash to make a lot of noise and scare small-time hobbyists out of hosting non compliant sites. Most people can’t afford the headache, even if it isn’t enforceable where they live.

It gets banned/blocked, or sued for noncompliance for allowing Australian users without age verification. They’ll play whack a mole for decades, just like they have been for P2P file sharing.

Like a lot of post-911 legislation, it’s anti-privacy surveillance disguised as a way to ‘protect the children’. It’s absolute shit and we should absolutely be taking measures to anonymize our open source social media platforms further.

There’s no editorial process, anyone can post anything (within the TOS).

A lot of people use it for personal vlogs and such. It might be easier to ask how it’s meaningfully different from something like tiktok that makes it not social media.

If i could do this without my wife noticing, I’d be golden.

Unfortunately, she took to lurking some reddit communities right as I was exiting

I wonder if anybody here has tried some of the other failed reddit alternatives like Voat for a long enough time to be able to speak on how lemmy has fared relative to them.

I tried a few during other reddit exoduses, and they all felt… bad. Lemmy is the first one I’ve managed to actually stay on comfortably without being tempted back to reddit.

I used to think the same thing, but I did an effort post about this about a year ago (here’s the link)

The article you linked to says something similar to my own understanding: basically, DRM circumvention for personal use is officially not allowed under DMCA and could absolutely be used against you in court, though the likelihood is low. The exceptions the author mentions are pretty nebulous, and the Library of Congress actually addresses the most common cases in their discussions and publication and affirms that they are not allowed.

I don’t personally agree with their interpretation, but I think more people ought to know that it’s officially not legal to circumvent DRM for personal use.

If Amazon started charging for smart-home solutions, they’d essentially be making the case for FOSS solutions like home assistant.

Granted, there will always be a contingent of people who are unwilling to learn how to self-manage that tech, but there are certainly enough people who are willing that they should think twice about heading down that path.

I think everyone ought to strip their media of drm, but you should know that personal use does not qualify as fair use under US law

I can see why people are quick to think this but I don’t see any compelling evidence this is the case, and as others have pointed out it would be impractical for them to do so.

More likely they use it for consumer lock-in and to collect data through its api endpoints. Collecting media activity and smart home device information is valuable enough on its own, before even approaching the value of collecting recorded audio.

They can already intuit consumer habits/word of mouth exposure from other associated data with your online activity. After locking down all my other privacy, the ads I get are far less relevant to me, even though I have a number of smart listening devices in my home

As someone who is routinely accused of being a bad actor, I have to say I find this speculation to be somewhat paranoid.

I think people generally overestimate the commonality of their own perspective.

Is Switzerland podunk now?

Right now, the model in most communities is banning people with unpopular political opinions or who are uncivil. Anyone else can come in and do whatever they like, even if a big majority of the community has decided they’re doing more harm than good.

You don’t need a social credit tracking system to auto-ban users if there’s a big majority of the community that recognizes the user as problematic: you could manually ban them, or use a ban voting system, or use the bot to flag users that are potentially problematic to assist on manual-ban determinations, or hand out automated warnings… Especially if you’re only looking at 1-2% of problematic users, is that really so many that you can’t review them independently?

Users behave differently in different communities… Preemptively banning someone for activity in another community is already problematic because it assumes they’d behave in the same way in the other, but now it’s for activity that is ill-defined and aggregated over many hundreds or thousands of comments. There’s a reason why each community has their rules clearly spelled out in the side, it’s because they each have different expectations and users need those expectations spelled out if they have any chance of following them.

I’m sure your ranking system is genius and perfectly tuned to the type of user you find the most problematic - your data analysis genius is noted. The problem with automated ranking systems isn’t that they’re bad at what they claim to be doing, it’s that they’re undemocratic and dehumanizing and provide little recourse for error, and when applied at large scales those problems become amplified and systemic.

You seem to be convinced ahead of time that this system is going to censor opposing views, ignoring everything I’ve done to address the concern and indicate that it is a valid concern.

That isn’t my concern with your implementation, it’s that it limits the ability to defend opposing views when they occur. Consensus views don’t need to be defended against aggressive opposition, because they’re already presumed to be true; a dissenting view will nearly always be met with hostile opposition (especially when it regards a charged political topic), and by penalizing defenses of those positions you allow consensus views remain unopposed. I don’t particularly care to defend my own record, but since you provided them it’s worth pointing out that all of the penalized examples you listed of my user were in response to hostile opposition and character accusations. The positively ranked comments were within the consensus view (like you said), so of course they rank positively. I’m also tickled that one of them was a comment critiquing exactly the kind of arbitrary moderation policies like the one you’re defending now.

f you see it censoring any opposing views, please let me know, because I don’t want it to do that either.

Even if I wasn’t on the ban list and could see it I wouldn’t have any interest in critiquing its ban choices because that isn’t the problem I have with it.

I already said I don’t take issue with any one decision, I care about the macro social implications.

You’re free to provide examples, but like I said it’s not the specific moderation choices that are the problem, it’s using public sentiment as a core part of that determination.