In college, in my intro to Java class, I had a program I’d written that I was trying to show someone. Every time I ran it (in Eclipse) it crashed. It had worked earlier, but was then consistently crashing. Looked at the stacktrace, looked at the code… No issues I could spot. After quite a while of poking around, with the file reverted to its original state and still failing, I did a select all, cut, paste (into the same file), and it started working again.

The president’s “official act” would be issuing the pardon. The referenced Supreme Court decision just means it would not be a “crime” for the president to issue said pardon, not that the pardon would stand.

The president can’t intervene at the state level. From americanbar.org:

A U.S. president has broad but not unlimited powers to pardon. For example, a president cannot pardon someone for a state crime.

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.

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.

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.

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

I noted in another comment that SearXNG can’t do anything about the trackers that your browser can’t do, and solving this at the browser level is a much better solution, because it protects you everywhere, rather than just on the search engine.

Routing over Tor is similar. Yes, you can route the search from your SearXNG instance to Google (or whatever upstream engine) over Tor, and hide your identity from Google. But then you click a link, and your IP connects to the IP of whatever site the results link to, and your ISP sees that. Knowing where you land can tell your ISP a lot about what you searched for. And the site you connected to knows your IP, so they get even more information - they know every action you took on the site, and everything you viewed. If you want to protect all of that, you should just use Tor on your computer, and protect every connection.

This is the same argument for using Signal vs WhatsApp - yes, in WhatsApp the conversation may be E2E encrypted, but the metadata about who you’re chatting with, for how long, etc is all still very valuable to Meta.

To reiterate/clarify what I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not making the case that people shouldn’t use SearXNG at all, only that their privacy claims are overstated, and if your goal is privacy, all the levels of security you would apply to SearXNG should be applied at your device level: Use a browser/extension to block trackers, use Tor to protect all your traffic, etc.

It’s possible to hit issues, especially if different distros are using different major versions of desktop environments or applications, but in practice, I don’t think it’s something that really needs to be worried about.

If you were to upgrade/fresh install, and copy your home folder over, you’d have the same experience - it’s not much safer than sharing the home partition, except that you’re (hopefully) doing that less. You could still easily go from distro A using version 2 of something, to distro B using version 3, and then decide you don’t like it and try to roll back to distro A. If in the process your config was upgraded in place (as opposed to a new, versioned config being made*), you could have problems rolling back.

With configs, you can usually just delete them (or, less destructively, rename them, in case you decide you want them back), and let the application make a new default one for you. With other files (e.g. databases), you might be in more trouble. But a good application will tell you before doing an upgrade like that, and give you a chance to backup the original before upgrading in place. When asked, it’s probably a good idea to take a backup (and not just for this distro hoping case).

*For any developers reading this, this is the correct way to upgrade a config. Don’t be destructive. Don’t upgrade in place. Make a copy, upgrade the copy, and include a version in the file name. You can always tell the user, so they can remove the file if they want, but let them make the choice. If you can’t (e.g. the database scenario, which could be large), tell the user before doing anything, so they can choose whether or not to backup.

You mean with config files stored in your home directory? Or something else?

When you install, whatever you install, partition your drive so that /home is it’s own partition. Then if/when you reinstall, distrohop, whatever, you don’t have to worry about copying over your data. Just use the same /home partition, and format the others. You can actually use this to try multiple distros at the same time - you can install them in different partitions, but have every install use the same /home partition. This is a nice way to test new distros without blowing away your stable install.

Now, for my distro recommendation - Ubuntu gets a lot of hate, but honestly, after 15+ years of Linux, and having tried Mint, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, and many others, I always end up back on Ubuntu. It’s easy, it’s stable, and it stays out of my way.

The defaults are good, but you can customize as much as you want, and they offer a minimal install (as of 23.10, it is the default) which comes with very few applications, so you can start clean and choose all the applications you want.

Unless you are excited to tinker, I’d really recommend starting simple. Personality, I just want the OS to facilitate my other activities, and I otherwise want to forget about it. Ubuntu is pretty good for that.

They are explicitly trying to move away from Google, and are looking for a new option because their current solution is forcing them to turn off ad-blocking. Sounds to me like they are looking for a private option. Plus, given the forum in which we are having the discussion (Lemmy), even if OP is not specifically concerned with privacy, it seems likely other users are.

As for cookies, searxng can’t do any more than your browser (possibly with extensions) can do, and relying on your browser here is a much better solution, because it protects you on all sites, rather than just on your chosen search engine.

“Trash mountain” results is a whole separate issue - you can certainly tune the results to your liking. But literally the second sentence of their GitHub headline is touting no tracking or profiling, so it seems worth bringing attention to the limitations, and that’s all I’m trying to do here.