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Daring Bits
A Native Internet Protocol for Social Media - Jack Dorsey explains what went wrong at Twitter, and how emerging social media protocols can help keep governments and corporations accountable. We are excited about the future of Nostr.
H1-B Visa applicants taking US Jobs - Turns out giving big tech an uncapped ability to bring in foreign tech workers is having a direct effect on them. Gateway Pundit, while usually a partisan rag, does a great job of breaking down a study done on the recent happenings in the space. Don’t worry, the AIs will be replacing all the coders soon. Maybe we should all learn to mine coal to power the AIs?
German Court Paves Way to Privatized Censorship - Uberspace is found liable for youtube-dl’s lawbreaking. This means that EU web hosts can no longer afford to be neutral, and will have to self-censor in order to avoid liability. This is in direct conflict with the US section 230 rules, which require platforms to be neutral to maintain liability protections (which none of them do, btw).
6 Great Internet Archive Collections To Enjoy As The Digital Library Fight Continues - Intellectual property battles strike again, taking down a service at the non-profit Internet Archive that lent e-books for users stuck at home during lockdowns. While Internet Archive plans an appeal, you can still access its other great collections of archive material. The Internet Arcade is my favorite.
Run an Open Source Virtual Conference - The Creative Freedom Summit was a virtual conference that ran on an entirely open source stack. This post from Máirín Duffy explains how you can do it too.
Samsung Workers Leak Company Secrets to ChatGPT - “Samsung workers have unwittingly leaked top secret data whilst using ChatGPT to help them with tasks. It doesn’t seem as if Samsung has any recourse to request the retrieval or deletion of the sensitive data OpenAI now holds.” I wonder how this is going to clash with the “right to be forgotten” laws worldwide?
OpenAI Bored With Diffusion - OpenAI has been working on “consistency” models, which can already do simple tasks an order of magnitude faster than diffusion models like DALL-E. Whereas a diffusion model may require hundreds or thousands of steps to complete a task, a consistency model can complete the same task in just one or two steps. The most compelling part is that they can produce consistent results between frames (get the name?), which makes for much more compelling video production. Does this mean that people will have 5 or fewer fingers again?
NVIDIA’s RTX Remix, Now Open Source - RTX Remix is a revolutionary modding platform to remaster classic DirectX 8 and 9 games, and NVIDIA has released it as open source on GitHub with a permissive MIT license.
Awesome Postgres - “A curated list of awesome PostgreSQL software, libraries, tools and resources, inspired by awesome-mysql”
Sheet Markup - A really handy in-browser markdown editor that supports embedded spreadsheets.
Supabase Resumable Uploads - Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative, and it just added resumable uploads, increasing the file size limit from 5GB to 50GB. Cool!
Baking Images with Nix for Robust Private Networks at Bowtie - Bowtie uses Nix to build network appliance images, enabling support for a variety of formats with a high degree of code reuse and an elegant upgrade process. Ensuring that network appliances are easy to run, test, update, and operate reliably is important, and underpins Bowtie’s commitment to robust simplicity.
