This ignores the first part of my response - if I, as a legitimate user, might get caught up in one of these trees, either by mistakenly approving a bot, or approving a user who approves a bot, and I risk losing my account if this happens, what is my incentive to approve anyone?

Additionally, let’s assume I’m a really dumb bot creator, and I keep all of my bots in the same tree. I don’t bother to maintain a few legitimate accounts, and I don’t bother to have random users approve some of the bots. If my entire tree gets nuked, it’s still only a few weeks until I’m back at full force.

With a very slightly smarter bot creator, you also won’t have a nice tree:

As a new user looking for an approver, how do I know I’m not requesting (or otherwise getting) approved by a bot? To appear legitimate, they would be incentivized to approve legitimate users, in addition to bots.

A reasonably intelligent bot creator would have several accounts they directly control and use legitimately (this keeps their foot in the door), would mix reaching out to random users for approval with having bots approve bots, and would approve legitimate users in addition to bots. The tree ends up as much more of a tangled graph.

This ignores the first part of my response - if I, as a legitimate user, might get caught up in one of these trees, either by mistakenly approving a bot, or approving a user who approves a bot, and I risk losing my account if this happens, what is my incentive to approve anyone?

Additionally, let’s assume I’m a really dumb bot creator, and I keep all of my bots in the same tree. I don’t bother to maintain a few legitimate accounts, and I don’t bother to have random users approve some of the bots. If my entire tree gets nuked, it’s still only a few weeks until I’m back at full force.

With a very slightly smarter bot creator, you also won’t have a nice tree:

As a new user looking for an approver, how do I know I’m not requesting (or otherwise getting) approved by a bot? To appear legitimate, they would be incentivized to approve legitimate users, in addition to bots.

A reasonably intelligent bot creator would have several accounts they directly control and use legitimately (this keeps their foot in the door), would mix reaching out to random users for approval with having bots approve bots, and would approve legitimate users in addition to bots. The tree ends up as much more of a tangled graph.

I think this would be too limiting for humans, and not effective for bots.

As a human, unless you know the person in real life, what’s the incentive to approve them, if there’s a chance you could be banned for their bad behavior?

As a bot creator, you can still achieve exponential growth - every time you create a new bot, you have a new approver, so you go from 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8. Even if, on average, you had to wait a week between approvals, in 25 weeks (less that half a year), you could have over 33 million accounts. Even if you play it safe, and don’t generate/approve the maximal accounts every week, you’d still have hundreds of thousands to millions in a matter of weeks.

If your drive is the bottleneck, this will make things worse. If you want to proceed:

You’re already using ffmpeg to get the sequence of frames, correct? You can add the -ss and -t flags to give a start time and a duration. Generate a list of offsets by dividing the length of video by the number of processes you want, and feed them through gnu parallel to your ffmpeg command.

My first thought was similar - there might be some hardware acceleration happening for the jpgs that isn’t for the other formats, resulting in a CPU bottleneck. A modern harddrive over USB3.0 should be capable of hundreds of megabits to several gigabits per second. It seems unlikely that’s your bottleneck (though you can feel free to share stats and correct the assumption if this is incorrect - if your pngs are in the 40 megabyte range, your 3.5 per second would be pretty taxing).

If you are seeing only 1 CPU core at 100%, perhaps you could split the video clip, and process multiple clips in parallel?

I think it is less a question of whether the voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson, as that is subjective and arbitrary (e.g. assume you could objectively measure the similarity, what’s the acceptable cut off - 80%? 90%?). The same is true for the uniqueness of her voice.

I think the real question will come down to intention. They clearly wanted her voice. Did they intentionally attempt to replicate it when they couldn’t have the real thing? If so, there is precedent that would suggest they could be in a little trouble here, e.g. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-story.html

This kind of reminds me of Crispin Glover, from Back to the Future. He tried to negotiate a higher pay for the second movie, so the producers hired a different actor to play the role, but deliberately made the actor up to look like Glover. In response, Glover sued the producers and won. It set a critical precedent for Hollywood, about using someone’s likeness without consent.

The article mentions they reached out to her two days before the launch - if she had said ‘OK,’ there’s no way they could have even recorded what they needed from her, let alone trained the model in time for the presentation. So they must have had a Scarlett Johansson voice ready to go. Other than training the model on movies (really not ideal for a high quality voice model), how would they have gotten the recordings they needed?

If they hired a “random” voice actress, they might not run into issues. But if at any point they had a job listing, a discussion with a talent manager, or anything else where they mentioned wanting a “Scarlett Johansson sound-alike,” they might have dug themselves a nice hole here.

Specifically regarding your question about hiring a voice actor that sounds like someone else - this is commonly done to replace people for cartoons. I don’t think it’s an issue if you are playing a character. But if you deliberately impersonate a person, there might be some trouble.

Not to justify the actions of the shooter, but ringing the doorbell before breaking in is definitely a thing. It’s a means of checking if the house is occupied - if you’re just trying to steal things, an unoccupied house is ideal, and if someone answers when you ring, it’s easy enough to make up an excuse and walk away.

A much better solution than a gun, though, is a security door (similar to a screen door, but more kick proof).

Considering that you are not using their software, was the laptop worth the premium you paid for it, vs buying from Clevo directly?

I figured the hardware and software coming from the same vendor would yield the best results, and wanted to support a company that supports right-to-repair, and Linux in general. But ultimately I found Pop!_OS buggy and had performance issues, so I’m not using their OS, and their firmware is causing issues with my SSD, so I’d like to be off of it as well (but was told "there’s no process for reverting to the proprietary firmware“ for the specific model I have). I could have bought a Clevo directly, saving hundreds of dollars, and probably had a better working machine.

Would not recommend System76. I’ve had many issues with my machine (primarily software, related to their buggy custom firmware, and Pop!_OS, until I ditched that for stock Ubuntu). Their support has been terrible - rather similar to OP’s, actually. I’ve had the laptop for about 2.5 years, and I’m checking practically daily for something to replace it.

For what it’s worth, I just bought a TCL 55S450F (55 inch 4K HDR FireTV) specifically because it does not ever need an internet connection to function (expressly stated in the manual). It is currently on Amazon for $268 (they have other sizes at other prices). It’s a great TV, considering the price. The only real drawback for me is the remote is Bluetooth, rather than infrared (less compatible with universal remotes).

Note that for full dumb TV effect, you’ll want to go into the settings and tell it to resume the last input, rather than going to the home screen when you turn it on (without connecting it to the Internet, the home screen is basically just a big banner telling you it’s not connected, and when you dismiss that, it just allows you to access inputs and manage settings).

You are falling into a common trap. LLMs do not have understanding - asking it to do things like convert dates and put them on a number line may yield correct results sometimes, but since the LLM does not understand what it’s doing, it may “hallucinate” dates that look correct, but don’t actually align with the source.

You might get lucky. Based on https://support.system76.com/articles/system-firmware/, it doesn’t seem to be all models. Note however that the list is out-of-date; my galp5 is not listed, but does not work. Fortunately, I found this out doing a RAM check, and not a firmware upgrade.

My usb-c ports can be a little touchy, too. The SD card slot is also really bad - the card has to be positioned perfectly to slide in, or it jams. I’m also upset that the usb-c port can only be used for charging after a full boot. It cannot be used to perform firmware updates, or even to do a ram test. This means day-to-day, usb-c can be used, but I have to keep track of the barrel charger, just in case. This, of course, was not specified on the product details page (nor, I think, that only one of the two usb-c ports could be used for charging - it’s possible I overlooked that, but still frustrating on an expensive laptop that lists usb-c charging as a feature).

I currently have a System76 laptop, and sincerely regret my purchase. When I purchased it, the Framework was not out yet - I wanted to support a company that supports right-to-repair, and figured since they controlled the hardware, firmware, and software (Pop!_OS), it would be a good, stable experience. It has not been, and support has generally been poor. I know other people have had better experiences than I have, but personally, I won’t be buying from them again.

I haven’t personally used Purism, but former co-workers spoke really poorly of them. They were trying to buy a big batch for work, and said the build quality was awful. Additionally: https://youtu.be/wKegmu0V75s

Thanks! I just cross posted it.

Thanks! I am in the US. I’ve never heard of RH, but I’ll definitely check them out.

The battery life and speakers will certainly be model dependent. The quality of the machine I received and the lackluster support, given the price I paid, are what I find most frustrating. The computer would be fine for ~$600, but I paid over $1000. I paid a premium expecting System76 to hold themselves to a high standard, and so far, they’ve let me down in multiple ways.

I do recognize with a different model, the experience could be 180°, but if buying from them is a roll-of-the-dice, for me personally, that’s enough to buy from someone else next time.

I would not recommend them. I bought a Galago Pro in 2020, and it’s been a huge disappointment. Pop!_OS was very buggy, and their support was not helpful. I ultimately installed Ubuntu, and it’s now significantly more stable, but I’m left asking the question “why did I pay a premium for a clevo, when I’m not getting anything out of the custom software or support?”

Even with Ubuntu, it’s not a good laptop. The speakers are worse than my phone, a fully charged battery will die completely in less than a day when the laptop is suspended, it runs unbelievably hot. As a developer who depends on this machine for daily work, it’s been intensely frustrating.

This is not true. The GPL does not force anyone to give up their code, unless they distribute it. From the “Definitions” section:

A “covered work” means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program.

And

To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.

And from the “Basic Permissions” section:

You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force. You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.

Conveying under any other circumstances is permitted solely under the conditions stated below. Sublicensing is not allowed; section 10 makes it unnecessary.

Under the terms of the GPL, the owner can revoke your access for any violation of the license, and at their discretion, they can make that revocation permanent. The GPL does not guarantee equal treatment - an author can punish one person harshly, and another not at all. It still comes down to the author. Yes, there is a small barrier in that you have to find a violation, but if you look hard enough, you can probably find a violation - especially in large projects using libraries distributed under multiple different licenses.

the FUTO license can revoke the license just because Rossmann says so. It is a mechanism to keep Rossmann the owner of everything that spawns from the code of the app and being the only one who can make money from it. If Rossmann doesn’t like someone who wants to redistributes the app, he can immediately revoke their license.

Quoting from my comment here:

They’re just trying to prevent a company from making money off the free labor of the authors. It’s the same issue that has plagued other projects, such as Elastic Search, which ultimately led it to change licenses. And it’s why MariaDB created the BSL, which they and other companies have adopted (very similar terms here - source free to use for non-commercial purposes).

If the hangup is specifically that they can change the terms, or revoke rights altogether, the other licenses also allow for that - that’s how these projects are changing licenses at all, and it happens quite a bit. I have personally contributed to projects that were GPL, and then went Apache.

only one who can make money from it

This is not true. You can make and sell plugins, you could offer support, you could sell your services as a code auditor/security expert… anything other than selling the code you didn’t write. On top of that, in practice, this isn’t different from anything else - most contributors to open source projects don’t profit from them, unless they work for the organization that owns the project. When the non-owners do profit, it’s usually big companies and results in the license changes I’ve described above.