Honestly, I think the theatrical releases are better and some of the stuff left on the cutting room floor belonged there (looking at you, weird mouth of Sauron).

Get at me when they release the Tom Bombadil/Scouring of the Shire cut though.

Aside from driving being an activity that, in my opinion, will require something approaching AGI, there are other issues to consider. Self driving cars will be completely unable to make difficult decisions reliably. How, for example, do they deal with a robbery where you just have someone stand in front of the car to immobilize it and then have the folks inside the car at your mercy? I have to imagine that either you're producing pedestrian murder machines or serving up passengers on a silver platter.

Well, on substack, that community of writers includes nazis who are able to monetize their hate through that platform. So, if that's what you're looking for...

Nonprofit versions of vital social tech. If I had the money sitting around, I'd love to start a nonprofit dating site/app. I met my wife on OKC in 2011 before it got bought up and enshittified. It was great and wasn't geared toward just keeping you engaged (they're soooooo bad now!). You'd probably have to gatekeep it with a small fee to disincentive bots, but with a relatively small investment, you could create something really useful for folks without preying on anyone's desperation.

Signal would be a good model for this sort of thing.

Edit: typos

I'm going to say first off that this is kind of depressing. That said, after my initial knee-jerk reaction of "fuck you, Duolingo," it occurs to me that is might be a better outcome than them pulling out of Russia altogether.

Providing Russian citizens easy access to language learning provides them access to non-Russian media and non-Russian discourse on queer issues.

In my own experience, learning a language as an adult has taken place in ~3 stages: 1. learn from instructional material exclusively, 2. consume foreign language material with native-language support/tools, 3. learn more of the language via context. If having an app available to folks in an oppressive country helps them get through stage 1 and into 2/3, it gives them a chance to escape the hateful discourse of the regime... In theory.

On the other hand, maybe it's just capitalists being capitalists.

It's a hoodie.

Is there a good reason I don't know about to prefer this over Aegis?

The only option that fits your budget today I can think of would be picking up one of the old xeon combos off of AliExpress. I spent like $100 on a MB+CPU+64GB DDR4 combo with a 2880 v4 I think. 14c/28t at any rate. You can probably grab a case/power supply/video card used for under $50 on eBay.

Please note that I'm not saying that this is a good option; it took a lot of fiddling for me to get mine running smoothly. But if you've got more time and patience than money, it might work for you.

Seriously, what's with all the Mozilla hate on Lemmy? People bitch about almost everything they do. Sometimes it feels like, because it's non-profit/open-source, people have this idealized vision of a monastery full of impoverished, but zealous, single-minded monks working feverishly and never deviating from a very tiny mission.

Cards on the table, I remain an AI skeptic, but I also recognize that it's not going anywhere anytime soon. I vastly prefer to see folks like Mozilla branching out into the space a little than to have them ignore it entirely and cede the space to corporate interests/advertisers.

Obligatory XKCD for the folks who keep citing the 1st Amendment 🙄:

If you want to be a hatful person online or in person, there's nothing stopping you from starting your own little online utopia- VPSs are pretty cheap, after all. You'll quickly find, however, that you probably attract a large number of assholes and, in all likelihood, either find yourself moderating content or shutting down just like every other "free speech" bastion.

Which is fine. I'm a firm believer in free speech. If bigots want to have a place to talk to one another, that's their prerogative and their right. What they don't have is a right to force others to host or listen to their bullshit, which appears to be what they want.

Content-based moderation is neither new nor pernicious, folks. So long as those doing it don't hold a monopoly on the use of force, you remain free to vote with your feet, wallet, eyeballs, and ears.

In addition to all of the open source options that have been offered, Davinci Resolve runs well on Linux and has all of the above features (and many, many more). It's also a buy once keep forever situation rather than a subscription since they make their real money on hardware. OSS it isn't, but it's incredibly powerful, has an extensive free (as in beer) edition and beats the hell out of paying a monthly fee.