jcolag

joined 1 year ago
[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 month ago

I can't vouch for anything about it, since I've never done more than look and bookmark the page, but Vidzy at least exists and has an instance that plays one short video...

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 month ago

I'd say to ignore the platform licensing and just make sure that the license appears in the media itself (which it should, anyway, in case anybody finds it randomly) and marked in descriptions.

YouTube seems interesting, because there's so much garbage listed as CC-BY that almost certainly doesn't have any legitimate permission for it, and I've never found actual Creative Commons content through that route, so that probably informs my "just ignore it" thinking...

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 months ago

The Indie Web website up there actually has protocols to do most of what people do for social media, in exactly that structure. It's enough of a pain to set up that I don't see it becoming normal, but the amount that I've set up for my website at least works...

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 3 months ago

Likewise, feel free to reach out if you need a hand. I don't always have time, but I do my share of weird programming.

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Always good to see more effort to surface these things. A couple of possible enhancements come to mind.

  • Pepper & Carrot probably belongs under comics, and/or comics belongs as a subset of fiction.
  • It'd be great to filter by license, maybe similar to what Openverse (which you already have listed) does. I know that Creative Commons doesn't see a problem with incompatible licenses, but I feel like people in the space have strong feelings about how "free/libre" it is to say that something can't be used commercially (whatever that means) or can't be altered.
  • If you want a pile of fiction of various sorts, at the risk of self-promoting, I spotlight (and ideally have discussions around) Free Culture works on Saturdays. https://john.colagioia.net/blog/tag/bookclub/ (And a bunch of the links actually lead to collections.)
  • Another pile, you'll need to figure out how to sift through on your own (I haven't had the time to figure out how to parse it), but Chris "Sanglorian" Sakkas posted the (I imagine) final backup of his Free and Open Works wiki, sort of your predecessor project. (Edit: I stupidly forgot the link https://archive.org/details/freeand-open-works-20200811084450)
  • Too much manual labor, I realize, especially as the list expands, but ideally, it'd be nice to have some idea of what lives at the other end of a link beyond the format. The videos especially could plausibly be anything...

Thanks for getting this rolling!

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 5 months ago

I only just learned about this, so haven't signed up or checked out the communities and therefore won't endorse it, but Codidact just came across my desk. https://codidact.com/

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 6 months ago

The only dedicated site that I know of is the Iranian Tasnim News, though Global Voices has some writers in the general area, too.

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 9 months ago

Sure, we could point to thousands of years of really smart people trying and utterly failing to build mathematical models for innovation and thought, but it also does make a certain amount of sense that, if you pile up enough transistors and wish really hard, that your investment will Frosty the Snowman itself into being your friend, right...?

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I keep saying "no" to this sort of thing, for a variety of reasons.

  1. "You can use this code for anything you want as long as you don't work in a field that I don't like" is pretty much the opposite of the spirit of the GPL.
  2. The enormous companies slurping up all content available on the Internet do not care about copyright. The GPL already forbids adapting and redistributing code without licensing under the GPL, and they're not doing that. So another clause that says "hey, if you're training an AI, leave me out" is wasted text that nobody is going to read.
  3. Making "AI" an issue instead of "big corporate abuse" means that academics and hobbyists can't legally train a language model on your code, even if they would otherwise comply with the license.
  4. The FSF has never cared about anything unless Stallman personally cared about it on his personal computer, and they've recently proven that he matters to them more than the community, so we probably shouldn't ever expect a new GPL.
  5. The GPL has so many problems (because it's been based on one person's personal focuses) that they don't care about or isolate in random silos (like the AGPL, as if the web is still a fringe thing) that AI barely seems relevant.

I mean, I get it. The language-model people are exhausting, and their disinterest in copyright law is unpleasant. But asking an organization that doesn't care to add restrictions to a license that the companies don't read isn't going to solve the problem.

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In addition to YaCy and the varieties of Searx (both of which perform better for me than any of the commercial search engines), it's not even out of the question to do this yourself, if you're willing to start with the most recent Common Crawl dump and do some spidering in between releases. I don't recommend it, unless you want to learn for yourself why search engines often give such miserable results, but it's possible.

However, that's the issue, here. Can you self-host a search engine? Sure, if you want to maintain the storage to back it. That depends on how deep your pockets go...

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Probably, though I don't know their architecture well enough to say. The discussion that I saw referred specifically to PDF.js, which I believe is what the browsers use, though.

[–] jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's not as clean a solution as they'd like it to be, but for another option, Jellyfin hosts media including books. When I say "not as clean," I mean that you can stream video and music from the server, but it has you download books to read on another device. Last I heard, they were looking to integrate at least a PDF viewer into the interface, though.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org to c/foss_gaming@lemmy.world
 

I could use some input. For context, I write a blog where, among other things, I run a "book club" for Free Culture fiction, figuring that the least that I can do is spread the word about interesting projects that can use some help. I'm always looking for new things to cover on Saturdays, but games (that make sense in context) especially seem elusive, so I'd like to see if anybody has any possibilities that I hadn't considered.

So far, I've gotten to Forgotten, Endgame: Singularity, Nothing to Hide, The House, A Dark Room, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Space Company, Learn to Code RPG, Dead Ascend, Level 13, One Hour One Life, Counterfeit Monkey, The Command Line Murders, SQL Murder Mystery, Colossal Cave Adventure, Death off the Cuff, and kiki the nano bot. Hopefully, I didn't miss anybody. A couple also sit in my queue waiting for a free day when I can make sure that I can run them and confirm licenses.

What I'm specifically looking for are games that (a) exist somewhere that a person can find them, even if that means (occasionally) spending some money, (b) has a license compatible with CC-BY-SA, at least for the storytelling aspects and (ideally) art assets, which generally excludes the GPL, but I make an occasional exception for exceptional cases, (c) ideally not related to a prior game by forking or overlapping authors (though still mention them, because I'll come back to those when I run out of new things), and (d) has some kind of narrative that goes beyond the literal main character overcoming obstacles. I'm somewhat lax on my definition of "narrative," where I'll accept world-building as long as it's evident in-game and not in an unlicensed design document.

Thanks in advance!

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