Anybody else feeling really smug now about using GNOME?

No, I'm not. The GNOME project have not, from what I've seen, drawn any hard boundary on the matter.

Lacking any clear policy prohibiting AI slop in the project, it's still entirely feasible they'll let it in.

What creative transformation has that company done? It seems to me rather that the LLM is an entirely mechanical process with no creativity.

No more creative than what my ISP does when it conveys data from one machine to another.

We don't allow the ISP to claim copyright in the data that it mechanically transforms. I don't see why the company running an LLM would have any stronger claim of copyright in the output.

I’m wondering about corporate level without having on-premise resources.

You're necessarily, then, talking about paying for some other party to host resources at some other location(s). So the corporation needs to shop around for a deal for hosting web services.

Assuming the matter of hosting is taken care of, then, which service to run? In order to not be locked in to some proprietary provider, I would strongly recommend free-software community-maintained forge software. Something like Forgejo or Sourcehut.

An LLM, being a large database derived mechanically from its training data, seems to meet the definition of “derived work” as exists in most copyright legislation.

The output from an LLM, through the inference process, is also mechanically derived from that training data.

Lawmakers might try writing exceptions to please a stock market eagerly baying for hyperscaler growth. Despite that, it seems entirely viable that the copyright, held by humans on the training data fed to the LLM, continue to hold in the output derived from that input.

People saying it's “obvious the output has no copyright”, or people who act as though it's all free from any claim by the humans who wrote the works used as training data, are just showing their ignorance, it seems to me.

I've never had a good time with the install instructions. They are okay when the extremely finicky steps work, they are terrible for recovering from a mistake. It's all too easy to get your device into a worse state than you started. This is not something we can blame on the LineageOS project; most hardware manufacturers deliberately make it an awful, risky experience to change the operating system.

Having said that: All my mobile devices were on LineageOS (and earlier names for the same project years ago), and it has been far more stable, far more free from horrible user-hostile behaviours that I see people putting up with on Google-ified devices.

Bear in mind that a lot of the awful stuff is now part of the Google Play layer (the “gapps” bundle), which I strongly recommend you don't install. Installing that allows the creepy, anti-democratic surveillance and lack of user agency that you see in much of the proprietary world. Purge it with fire.

But without that, a lot of proprietary apps will not work properly. Doesn't bother me, I only ever install from F-Droid because I know they build from source, and ensure the source is free software.

(Why “were” on LineageOS? Not from anything wrong with LineageOS. Some of my devices are now on operating systems that don't support as wide a range of devices but are somewhat better suited to the purpose, like GrapheneOS.)

Yeah, Veloren has the significant advantage that they already have a source code project to join and contribute to.

Without that to point us to, I think the announcement of an empty Bazaar Initiative project is rather premature.

To be clear, articles like this are saying “China”, “Belgium”, etc. as shorthand for the national government of that country.

Not that everyone in that country must switch; only that the country-level government is declaring they will switch computers they use.

This does have a strong effect on what other organisations and individuals use, but it lags a long way and certainly doesn't directly affect everyone in the country.

With that said: Yeah the Chinese government is made up of a great many more people than European national governments. It's a big move.

I keep meaning to learn 'tmux'. But this setup (gnome-terminal, with a GNU Screen session in each tab) does everything I need. So the motivation to switch hasn't arrived.

Emacs has a very good shell mode.

It even has terminal emulation, but does pretty poorly IME at handling full-screen terminal applications.

Plenty of web clients allow the user to turn off JavaScript. Which is a good safety and security measure.

If a web site breaks without JavaScript, that's the fault of the web site designers and implementers.

I'd love to. Sadly, when I do leave JavaScript alone, too many web sites that should work fine just break.

Web applications need JavaScript.

Web sites do not; the static web technologies allow effectively any styling, and browsing any content your browser can handle, and HTML forms work fine. In any case, many people who need to access the web site can't run modern JavaScript. So it should work without that.

There may be special dynamic enhancements that require JavaScript, but the site should do its core job flawlessly, without any JavaScript.