You’d have settings for when to stop seeding, e.g. 1:1 ratio minimum, duration of the track xN, etc with a reasonable default. Suggestions welcomed.

I would recommend against a new player when existing scriptable ones like vlc and mpv already exist.

Instead what I would do is a plugin for either, eventually repackaged as its own player (if somehow installing the script itself is too much for some) for which the script would

• include a very small torrent client
• point that client to the torrent (which AFAICT is still not public, so for now a reconfigurable URL)
• include a search function that when it fails, proposes to search within the trimmed cleaned torrent metadata then does the torrent download then plays.

Because they literally wrote the book on lock-in https://fabien.benetou.fr/ReadingNotes/InformationRules and they tried with all their might to stop free software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists so beside the money and power they have been strategically at it for decades. Dependency is deep in the product.

Please feel free to help right now. You can still move to the EU if you want to but if you take for example NLNet they fund open source work for anybody anywhere in the World, you “just” have to propose something that is new and needed with a focus on the Internet.

Send an email to people you care about with your new email, they reply or not it’s OK you still have their email address anyway, no big deal.

Source : I’ve migrated away from GMail.

It’s a VERY specific tool that needs

• a lot, like World scale, amount of data and that has repetitively been done WITHOUT permissions from authors of that data
• huge amount of data must be processed and this is done in enormous datacenters that consume radically MORE than traditional ones without GPUs
• energy and cooling for those very specific new datacenters that then becomes unavailable to the local community, energy produced that is often rushed and typically more polluting

So I think it is fundamental to distinguish

• “AI” as a theoretical researcher field, public research focusing on processing CERN data, weather forecast, genomics, medicine, etc that is indeed a tool that might produce results that helps us all

versus

• commercialized for-profit “AI” with GenAI and LLMs as blackboxes mostly used for spam, scan, low quality code, etc.

When one amalgamates one with the other, knowingly or not, they do the marketing for the later.

Funny I have the opposite experience.

I use KDE Plasma, Firefox, konsole, etc and sometimes, no idea when and why, I just pick a file then drop it somewhere else, including ON the terminal… and it works?! Like it brings the full path for that file and then I can compose with CLI tools, amazing!

I’m quite used to the terminal so I rarely use drag&drop (mv, cp, scp, rsync, etc just work) but when I do I’m actually often positively surprise that totally different software made with different interaction paradigms (e.g. GUI vs CLI) do work well together. Overall I think https://specifications.freedesktop.org/ is quite impressive.

To clarify I listed here behaviors that I believe is common. I’m NOT listing behaviors that somebody privacy conscious is. That same person could around the neighborhood with a hoodie, glasses, hygiene mask just the same way.

What I was trying to highlight wasn’t extreme behavior, one way or another, but rather typical ones.

Yes, I didn’t say this was OK. What I’m saying rather is trying to highlight the lack of novelty.

See my earlier answers. I’m not justifying any of that infrastructure or behavior, only trying to highlight that this information, namely that OP is walking around the neighborhood, where and when, is already available to numerous of the actors including :

• neighbors, just visually seeing him with their eyes
• mobile operator via their 5G/4G towers
• mobile OS via their positioning data
• WiFi hotspots
• ISP via WiFi hotspots
• any app with geolocation tracking and any of their commercial partners purchasing that information
• connected devices via BT scanning potentially sending back data to their manufacturer, assuming most are connected
• governments with abilities to get information from ISP, mobile operators, mobile OS maintainers

So… the question IMHO is : is there are NEW data with or without the camera network? I’d argue marginally more.

Sadly not the only one https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go

Well I get why you stick to a hardware device you like… but honestly that’s 15 years old. You can get something better and cheaper delivered to your door tomorrow.

I personally went down a similar path while discovering https://www.rockbox.org/ was still a thing, looking for old iPod or Archos I could refurbish, checking 2nd hand market, etc. As much as it pains me to say, unless you are a collector it’s not “worth” it. You can get something ridiculously smaller, with more memory, more features, etc for the price of a meal.

IMHO it’s better to get rid of Windows by purchasing new hardware that is genuinely interroperable by supporting standards.

Ideally you’d check something like https://www.hanselman.com/blog/how-to-update-the-firmware-on-your-zune-without-microsoft-dammit but it might be more work than you want to put it. Maybe your local HackerSpace could help though.

My point finally is that freedom is quite important and feeling trapped daily is not worth ~$50.

Related article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go on how such glasses are actually used, sadly.

Good to know, any VPS provider that scaffold for YUNOhost then that you’d recommend?

Nothing you (nor I) know of but that doesn’t mean it’s the case. I can’t evaluate but https://www.openimagedenoise.org/ is publishing by Intel and in 2026 so maybe it’s good.

Right, then I can’t help you.

To clarify for others though as I guess I wasn’t clear based on the downvotes : I’m not suggesting a single piece of software is a viable alternative to Lightroom. Rather I’m saying Lightroom itself is a collection of algorithms dedicated to photo editing wrapped in a UX one is familiar with. On the other hand ImageMagick (just to pick one I know relatively well) is a set of command line tools for image editing. It’s mostly used as a backend with other tools as interface. I imagine there are plenty of alternatives to ImageMagick too, probably some that can include arXiv STOA algorithms for photo editing, maybe some even with a GUI but my point again is to reconsider the workflow to understand how the tools one rely on actual work.

So to hopefully express myself better this time, ImageMagick + Gimp + Krita + some script in a Github repository based on an arXiv publication + I don’t know what + … all together or in part might be better for some people but no I don’t know an all-in-one open source alternative that cover ALL needs without them being expressed first.

Ugh, hopefully they fix this. Or maybe then don’t and the whole glasses get banned, I’m fine with that.

That being said, as I mentioned in my other answer building such glasses is pretty trivial. Sure it might not look as inconspicuous as the Meta ones (or at least popular… which might lead to people better identifying them in fact) but recording covertly is indeed now trivial.

It’s wrong though and AFAIK in the EU at least it’s illegal without consent, you can’t publish the recording so the technical implementation is not really the problem, it’s the usage.

If at any point it seemed like I justified the usage of such glasses for covert filming let me clarify : no, it’s wrong, regardless of how technically feasible it now is, without or without Meta.

In fine it is about the threat model, always.

That being said I never said “I have nothing to hide” nor do I believe we as a society should accept the permanent surveillance of civilians. In fact I do believe the opposite and that the chilling effect, as highlighted here by OP, does have a toll on everyone.

Neat, did you write a short blogpost about it? I’d be curious to learn about the pitfalls, if any, and good things onboarding for somebody without prior experience went.

I’m particularly interested to see if my own open source project (VR for pedagogy) should stick to what I know well (e.g. Docker/podman) but isn’t very practical for newcomers, to something more inclusive like YUNOhost.

Edit: eh… ssh to a remote server? Damn sure that’s correct but I wouldn’t expect somebody with no self hosting experience to manage that https://doc.yunohost.org/en/admin/get_started/install_on/remote_server did I miss a step?

Sure, I’ve even made my own with a RPi0 and 3D printed frames at home https://twitter-archive.benetou.fr/utopiah/status/1449023602079240194/ so my point isn’t that Meta is fine (it definitely is bad) or that finding workarounds isn’t easy, solely that they seem to legitimately try to prevent circumvention measures despite picking bad designs, like removing a flashing red LED lights like ALL cameras did until now.