duncesplayed

Ironically neither GNU nor Linux has a clipboard (well GNU Emacs probably has like 37 of them for some reason). "Primary selection" (the other clipboard that people don't tell you about) started off on X11, which of course had to implement by XFree86, which became Xorg, and then it copied (ha ha) by other non-X-related software like gpm and toolkits like GTK when using Wayland.

Many don't know about DuckDuckGo and even more don't care.

I should say that DuckDuckGo is generally much more strongly censored and controlled than Google. This won't affect people in say, the US. But in many places around the world (like my country of South Korea), using DuckDuckGo is not realistic as a daily driver without using a VPN or making heavy use of the "!g" bang to fall back to Google (which doesn't blanket censor words). Overall it makes it less accessible.

And I know, part of the reason people use DuckDuckGo in the first place is to avoid region-aware results. But that does not change their censorship policies.

You're not wrong, but there's a kind of irony in it when you talk about ending humanity because of it. There's a lot to hate about humanity if you have humanity and have human values. There's nothing objectively wrong about being cruel or destructive or dishonest or greedy or abusive or murderous and I imagine most hypothetical alien species would look at those things and say "what's wrong with any of that?"

But because humans evolved as social creatures and our survival depended upon trusting one another, we're constantly trying to judge ourselves against values that can't actually be met. So we look at ourselves and say we're a really horrible species, but that statement only makes sense because ironically we're a really glorious species that's fabricated these completely irrational things like love and compassion and empathy and honesty and sacrifice that no other species has (though many other social species do have bits and pieces of them).

And we'll forever hate ourselves for not being able to live up to our own values.

I'm a university professor who uses whisper.cpp for video lecture transcriptions, so I'll chime in here. The thing about whisper.cpp compared to pretty well every other option is that whisper.cpp is really really really really really good. Like the accuracy is almost always completely 100% (and that's just on the 'medium' model. The 'large' model is probably even better)

There is only one problem with whisper that I've found, which is that if you use a low quantization model (I believe I'm using a 4-bit quantization model), whisper can get stuck into a "no punctuation mode" if that happens your transcription will suddenly start to look like this there will be no punctuation or capitalization it's quite annoying once it gets into this mode it can't get back out again

The way to get around that is to segment your audio. I use ffmpeg's silence detector to segment the audio whenever there's a >1 second pause in the audio (so that I don't accidentally segment in the middle of a sentence or the middle of a word). Break the audio up into roughly 10-minute segments and you should not see no-punctuation mode happening.

The other nice thing about Whisper is it'll tag fragments with confidence level and starting- and ending times. I use the confidence level so that I can quickly jump through low-confidence transcription points to see if it made a mistake (though it usually doesn't). I use the starting- and ending times to automatically generate an .srt subtitle file. Then I use ffmpeg to bake in hardsubs for the students.

So far it's been working very smoothly and quickly. Even on my crappy old GTX1060, I can get subtitles at about 2-3x real time. And with almost no manual intervention.

You're paying them money, so it's in their best interest to keep hosting.

The uploader uploads their stuff to their own Usenet provider (whom they're probably paying for). Usenet servers are frequently mirroring/syncing with each other. So very quickly after the uploader uploads, you will find their post on your Usenet provider, and you download directly from them.

If a Usenet provider someday decided not to host any more, they would be out of business (because who would use them), and so you'd switch to a different Usenet provider, where you'd find exactly the same stuff mirrored.

Usenet providers compete/distinguish themselves mostly based on:

• Cost (duh)
• Speed (duh)
• Retention. This means "how long is a post kept on our servers after it's been uploaded". Some cheaper providers might have only 30 day retention while some might have 180 day retention, etc. If you're only interested in recent posts/releases, it might not matter as much to you.
• Tooling. Most Usenet providers have a web-based interface, with varying levels of service. Can you search for a specific filename, do different types of filtering, etc. Many providers will automatically package together files that have been split up, so you only have one download, and don't have to worry about par files and unrar and all that. Some will give you thumbnail previews, or even short video previews, of videos before you download, so you can check quality and language (important!! Some people on Usenet don't even bother to label the fact that they're uploading, say, a Spanish language version of something)
• Obscure communities. Many people do still use Usenet for discussion, its original purpose. If that's you, you're going to want to check that the provider you choose is going to have alt.fan.obscure.howdy-doody-berenstain-bears-crossover-fanfic.bonk.bonk.bonk or whatever weird interest you and 3 other people in the world have. You might think since the discussion communities are so low-bandwidth every provider would just carry everything, but you might be surprised.

The WAV format never had a licence. It was a trade secret (a rather half-assed one, but whatever).

To be a "proprietary", a file format needs to either be secret (in part or in whole) or require a licence. WAV satisfies neither of those criteria. It is not proprietary.

It would be fair to say that it was proprietary up until it was reverse engineered, but that doesn't apply today. Every part of it is completely specified, openly and without any licensing or legal restrictions. It's an open format.

It's the standard for industry research, as well. And for education (e.g., textbooks) and a lot of technical documentation.

Basically any job where you may have to type math (and make it look okay), (La)TeX will be the standard. Anything other than TeX, LaTeX or Typst for typesetting math would be pure masochism.

But if your job is to actually do things applied, and your math can be limited to scribbling on a whiteboard or a notebook and never showing anyone other than maybe a coworker or two, you will probably never have a need for LaTeX.

This is the major reason why maintainers matter. Any method of software distribution that removes the maintainer is absolutely guaranteed to have malware. (Or if you don't consider 99% software on Google Play Store the App Store to be "malware", it's at the very least hostile to and exploitative of users). We need package maintainers.

Cancer and clean-shavenness aside, I disagree with much of his talk. I don't see making social media (or "anti-social media" as he calls it) illegal is the best solution.

Nobody is going to move a dotfile as a breaking change in any established software

We have oodles of counterexamples to this. GIMP did it, Blender did it, DOSBox did it, Libreoffice did it, Skype did it, Wireshark did it, ad nauseum. It's not really as big a deal as you make it to be (or a big deal at all). You have a transitional period where you look for config files in both locations, and mark the old location as obsolete.