SDF Chatter

HP's long-running use of firmware updates that block third-party ink and toner cartridges is drawing scrutiny again – this time under a new global sustainability standard that explicitly forbids the practice.

The International Imaging Technology Council (Int'l ITC), a trade group for cartridge remanufacturers, says HP's latest printer firmware rollout conflicts with the requirements of the General Electronics Council's (GEC) updated Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, or EPEAT 2.0.

Source: https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2032600868005310638#m

Yeah, so basically the current prevailing schizo internet theory is that AI nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.

The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.

Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".

The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).

1. They now can identify who is human and who is AI slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons

2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults

3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is AI slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do.

It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.

It fucks over everyone else.

Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy schizo theory and I unironically believe it.

KB5077181 was released about a month ago as part of the February Patch Tuesday rollout. When the update first arrived, users reported a wide range of problems, including boot loops, login errors, and installation issues.

Microsoft has now acknowledged another problem linked to the same update. Some affected users see the message “C:\ is not accessible – Access denied” when trying to open the system drive.

In comments to NBC News, US presidents also deflates hope of deal with Tehran, saying ‘terms aren’t good enough’

Source

adding AI to everything will continue until morale improves

Israeli forces have killed a Palestinian couple and two of their children as they drove in the occupied West Bank, according to the Palestinian health authorities, with the Israeli military saying the incident is under review.

Ali Khaled Bani Odeh, 37, his 35-year-old wife Waad, and two of their children – Mohammad and Othman, aged five and seven, respectively – were shot in the head in the village of Tammun on Sunday. Two of their other children were wounded by shrapnel, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Speaking to the Reuters news agency at the hospital, Khaled, 12, one of the two surviving boys, said he heard his mother crying, his father praying, but no voice of any of his other brothers before silence prevailed after shots sprayed the car.

“We came under direct fire; we didn’t know the source. Everyone in the car was ⁠martyred, except my brother Mustafa and me,” the boy said.

He said soldiers, who ⁠pulled him out of the vehicle before beating him, shouted: “We killed dogs.”

We’re proud to present the first release of GIMP 3.2!

This marks a year of design, development, and testing from volunteers and our community.

Here are some of the many highlights to look out for:

Link Layers

You can now use Link Layers to incorporate external image as part of your compositions, easily scaling, rotating, and transforming them without losing quality or sharpness. It functions similar to the “Smart Object” concept from Photoshop. The Link Layer will automatically update if the external image is changed in another editor – for example, if you include a SVG logo as a Link Layer in GIMP, you can edit it in Inkscape and see the changes live in GIMP as well!

You can create a new Link Layer by choosing Open as Link Layer... in the File menu. You can change the image used at any time in the Layer Attributes dialog, which you can access by double-clicking the layer in the dock or by choosing Edit Layer Attributes... from the layer menu.

Vector Layers

The Path tool can now create Vector Layers, which lets you draw shapes with adjustable fill and stroke settings. The shape of the vector layer also automatically updates whenever you adjust the path, and you can non-destructively rotate, scale, and transform it too

PaintBrush improvements

The MyPaint Brush tool has been upgraded, adding 20 new brushes, including a much-requested arrow brush. It now automatically adjusts to your canvas zoom and rotation for more dynamic painting.

Better Text Editor

Our Text Editor has been the focus of several development projects to improve its usability and functionality. You can now drag the on-canvas text editor to move it out of the way when writing text. Several common shortcuts are now supported (such as Ctrl + B for bold, Ctrl + I for italics, and Shift + Ctrl + V for pasting unformatted text).

Non-Destructive Filter Updates

As well as working on new non-destructive layers (vector layers, link layers, and text layers), we’ve also been working on the non-destructive filters! You can now apply filters to channels non-destructively, in addition to layers and layer groups.

Overwrite Mode

A new Overwrite paint mode allows you to draw over existing colors without blending their transparency. It has many useful applications when working with pixel art

UX/UI improvements

This release includes a TON of small user interface and user experience improvements

New System color scheme

There is a new system color scheme for default themes. If set, it will automatically update GIMP’s theme colors to match the current OS settings.

Automatic transparency

The Crop Tool and NDE filters now automatically add transparency to a layer when necessary, rather than requiring you to remember to do it manually.

Switch between tools easily

You can now quickly switch back and forth between your 2 most recent tools with the Shift + X shortcut

Welcome Dialog improvements

The Welcome Dialog has received improvements to help streamline user workflows.

It now recognizes the Ctrl + 0, 1, 2… 9 shortcuts for opening the most recent images.

It now recognizes your shortcuts to create a new image, or open an existing one (whether the respective default Ctrl + N or Ctrl + O, or your custom shortcuts)

The Welcom Dialog no longer appears if you intentionally open GIMP with an image

Flip images with your keyboard

The Flip and Shear Tools now respond to the arrow keys, similar to the Move and Rotate Tools.

Flip Tool: You can use the Left and Right arrows to flip the image horizontally, and the Up and Down arrows to flip it vertically.

Shear Tool: You can use the Left and Right arrows to shear your image horizontally, and the Up and Down arrows to do the same vertically. Like the Move tool, you can hold down Shift to shear with a larger value.

For Script and Plug-in Developers

GIMP 3.0 brought non-destructive filters and a new GimpDrawableFilter API for script developers to create them. However, it wasn't easy to find the names and properties for the extensive list of potential filters, especially for third-party GEGL filters. A new GEGL Filter browser has been added to make it easier to find non-destructive filters to use.

New formats

GIMP 3.2 includes built-in support for even more file formats! These range from well-known formats like APNGs to obsolete archival formats such as Seattle FilmWorks photos, supporting your quest of old data retrieval. For retro game developers, we now support Sony PlayStation TIM and Sega Dreamcast PVR textures.

We also added export support for JPEG 2000 images, which is the standard for the digital cinema industry. This now matches our import support, which we’ve had since GIMP 2.8

In addition to our existing darktable and RawTherapee plug-ins, we’ve added support for using ART for editing Camera RAW images.

As a side effect of adding support for NASA‘s .hgt.zip image format, GIMP can now load compressed images from any format that we currently support.

Total Ink Coverage value

You can now see the Total Ink Coverage value for a color in the CMYK Color Selector. This is useful to know when soft-proofing your image for printing, as your printer may have an ink coverage limit to prevent over-saturation of the page.

https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.2.html#usability-improvements

This release is a true GAME CHANGER!! Nothing will ever be the same. Adobe just got punched right in the face.

You can support Gimp

• If you’re a developer, we always welcome more code contributions – we’ve even marked some reports for “Newcomers” to help you ease into the codebase.

• We’re looking for more feedback from designers to help create a better user experience.

• You may also donate to support the existing team members.

Thank you SO MUCH to developers, designers, translators, testers, donors and all members of our community 👏🏼👏🏼